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The article discusses the strategies adopted by schools to manage scholastic daily paper of pupils who have migrated from Bosnia to Turin, Italy. It analyzes some aspects of the pupils' behavior and the way in which they perceive and live in the scholastic atmosphere. The analysis attributes the scholastic failure of these pupils to cultural factors and presumed cognitive deficit. A school has a double role, including an educational function of the formation of citizens and to prepare students for the working life. Both these aspects send back to the integration concept and presuppose the school as a total immersion space where there is a positive integration of children to structure a small society beyond the fundamental condition for learning.

The paper deals with labour organization within call centres in Italy. In particular, by considering the ongoing significant social, political and economic changes, the impact of the financial crisis, the restructuring process of industries as well as the great diffusion of enterprises within the service sector, it becomes particularly interesting to look at insight organizational processes and labour practices within call centres. The paper aims to contribute to the sociological debate on labour within this new form of organization and on its impact on the so called knowledge economy. Using data from a recent research carried out on over 1700 Italian private and public call centres located in four areas of the country, we explore the main features such as the role and characteristics of the workers, working conditions, human resource strategies, employment relations, organizational environment, drawing also attention to the impact of different contexts on labour organization an practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines housing quality as a dimension of urban liveability. In the first part of the paper the act of inhabiting is defined as a complex social practice. In the second part a definition of housing quality is given, made up of five dimensions: physical quality of the dwelling, dwelling size, neighbourhood quality, security of tenure and affordability. In the third part of the paper four indices of housing quality are defined, using data from Eu-Silc. Each index is then analysed with reference to Italy. The analysis shows that housing quality in Italy is generally good, but at the same time some problems are highlighted, mainly within highly urbanized areas. Lower housing quality within the urban areas can be explained by the shift towards post-fordism. The profound social and economic transformations related to this process have given rise to a "new housing question", characterised by the combination of old and new forms of housing deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on free access and open collaboration among peers, Wikipedia represents a source of information for media, web contents and even for academic literature. Its popularity rises up many hypothesis and questions about its present organization and future development. The quality of information is one of the main concerns: how would a common based peer production environment guarantee at the same time the openness of its organization and a good level of accreditation? Which aspects of the project have more influence on quality? The paper investigates the quality's assessment processes in the Vetrina section (Featured Articles) of it.wiki (Italian Wikipedia) in order to define its social rules, policies and principles. Thanks to a qualitative analysis carried out through in-depth interviews and through a period of ethnographic observation, the paper also compares empirical results with theoretical hypothesis related to Wikipedia's quality accreditation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that the decline of the paradigm - and of the policies derived from it - of local development in Italy, far from being irreversible, is rather left in a state of unresolved tension. The reasons for this decline depend mainly on two questions: the first relates to the difficulties of the Italian economy in the last twenty years; the second relates to the re-emerging historical development gap between the northern and southern regions of Italy. It is symptomatic, however, that while in the internal political debate the attention dedicated to this subject is decreasing, the relevance placed on local development in the European Planning and in the Structural Fund 2007-2013 has remained as central as it was before. Moreover, many signs make it clear that this paradigm is present in the public discourse and in the scientific interest. The conclusion reached in the paper is that in the near future the relationship between macro and micro or policies will change issuing in a new model of governance, in which both central and local institutions will be called to play a crucial role in the processes of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws attention on the current situation of voluntary organizations in Calabria. In details, it is based on data from a research carried out on 553 organizations situated in this southern Italian region. The analysis is mainly based on the needs of social groups, on their characteristic features, their relations with Institutions and with other voluntary organizations as they appear from the survey. The main findings concern the specific nature of no-profit organizations such as their self-reference basis centred on service activities as opposed to the «politic» dimension. The trend towards bureaucratization is not combined with a professionalization of services. Furthermore, is clear the fragmentation of the associative sector; it does not seem to be a coherent picture but pieces of organizations that do not have defined paths. Finally, it emerges the weak and particularistic nature of relationships that organizations have with local institutions as well as with other no-profit organizations. Starting from this considerations we argue that it is necessary a more analytic approach based on the study of single organizations' biographies in order to better understand their origins, their choices, their believes and mainly their views about the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is a contribution to the debate on the evaluation of the scientific production in the Italian sociology. Starting from an analytical section devoted to the problematic application of the concept of paradigm in sociology as a scientific discipline, the author discusses some negative consequences of its constant pre-paradigmatic status, together with a lack of selection criteria based on quality at national level: no shared consent on evaluation criteria, parochialism, scanty application of standard peer review procedures, no application at all of ISI. These negative consequences have weakened the relative position of sociology against other competing social sciences, especially economics and political science, and have worsened its average scientific level because of a too quick increase of domestic academic positions in recent years. Some proposals are put forward in order to foster international publications and to increase the quality of sociological production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most striking features of the economic development in the past three decades is the decline in the share of national income that accrues to labour in all advanced economies (China included), but especially in Europe and Japan. This evolution has been most marked in Italy, possibly worsened by a stagnation of real wages and a progressive reduction of total factor and worker productivity, as compared with EU countries. In the last years productivity gains in Italy were indeed negative. The main purpose of this paper is to identify the main sources of variation of these phenomena, with a focus on Italy. The most important causes of the reduction of labour income share are the information and communications technology (ICT), the globalisation processes (labour globalisation, trade, off shoring and immigration), and labour policies brought about by national governments. An IMF study (2007) estimated that the causal role of ICT on the reduction of labour share in advanced countries was the most important, followed by globalisation and labour national policies. The negative impact of government policies on labour share was evident in many European continental countries, but not in Anglo-Saxon ones. Using published and unpublished data from this study some inter-countries and inter-sectorial differences are assessed and some features of the Italian situation specified. Labour in Italy, especially wage labour, was and is burdened by some long lasting heritages: persisting deficits of the pension system, dating from the l960s onwards (annually some 4% of GNP); an historical tradition of low adult literacy and numeracy (recently reported by Ials studies); a barely effective and efficient secondary school, unable to modify that historical tradition (Oecd and Pisa studies). For many reasons, Italian governments were and are unable to effectively answer these problems. First, for their institutional weakness; second, because of the power of distributional coalitions (unions, professional lobbies), able to influence the legislative process and to assure peculiar benefits and privileges to their members; third for the lack of long term policies. The aggregate results of these processes not only are a deeper decline of the income labour share, as compared with other advanced countries, but also a progressive deterioration of associated life in many Italian regions. The future of labour in Italy is finally undermined by a progressive intergenerational iniquity, also shared — to tell the truth — by other European countries. The percentage of poor is now greater in younger age cohorts (0-18) as in the oldest ones (65 +). This result was fed by a series of government decisions and laws. Recently, the reduction of the pension age underwritten by Italian government and the unions in July 2007. In the next decades this process could damage the formation of the human capital and therefore the future of work in Italy. As in the old Greek myth of Zeus and Krónos, younger generations should be supported and promoted, while the appetites of older ones limited and regulated - at least by a far-sighted political leadership. Some proposals designed to attain this objective are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study the evaluation criteria used by individuals to rank occupations according to their social desirability. We use qualitative and quantitative data from the recent national study «The social evaluation of occupations in Italy». The process of evaluating occupations has a multidimensional nature. Interviewees adopt not only traditional criteria but also a series of new elements peculiar to the current Italian social and economic system. They also introduce some issues, such as the gender of the person who performs an occupation, the type of contract and the place of employment. The hierarchies behind the evaluation criteria seem to be shared by the majority of the interviewees and they also seem to be relatively constant over time. The emphasis given to each criterion, or to the underlying social construct, tends to vary in a structured way amongst interviewees. Considerations on the use of the stratification scales and on the relative methodological implications are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the new version of the social desirability scale of occupations for Italy, a reputational scale whose first version was built by de Lillo and Schizzerotto (1985) following Goldthorpe and Hope (1974). First we discuss the main reasons that led the research team to undertake this task. Prestige scales are known indeed to be fairly stable across time and space; however Italian society has undergone profound changes over the last 20 years, and the stability of (the perception of) the occupational stratification needed to be proved. The research design is pretty similar to the one used in 1985; however the interviewees sample is much numerous (N = 1958) and the occupations graded amount to 686. Each occupation received around 60 evaluations; occupations have been grouped into 110 categories, which form the scale. We present the criteria which underlie the scale categories, and discuss the main features of the ranking resulting from giving them a score derived from respondents' ratings. As a research tool, we provide the conversion rules between ISCO88 and our scale, showing that even when all the relevant information for translating the ISCO88 codes into the scores of our scale (sector of activity, self employment, etc.) is not available the conversion between the two classification tools is of a good quality. The main research hypotheses tested here is that the ratings - and so the scale - do not differ according to subgroup variations among respondents, i.e. that gender, age, education, place of residence and occupation do not influence in a systematic way respondents' ratings. The hypothesis is confirmed, however with two exceptions. First, some occupations have been graded in a systematically different way in the different areas of the country (north west, north east, centre, south, islands), though place of residence in itself does not have an influence on the scale as a whole. Second, the highly educated rated better those occupations which require high education - though this effect is a minor one. More insight will be gained from future analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of the Sicilian electoral reforms that introduced, in the Nineties, the election of mayor. In particular, the paper examines the effects of the reforms on the instability and fragmentation of the municipal councils and local party sistems in the Sicilian city councils (comuni) with more than 20,000 inhabitants. Moreover, it also examines the inter-party mobility of the municipal councillors - but only in the nine main towns of district (provincia). Last, the analysis of the change in Sicilian local politics must consider two strategic factors. The first one, takes into account deep factors as the historical and cultural features of the Sicilian political system. The second one, instead, takes into account the transformations of the post-modern politics and their interaction with more structural features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the body of local elected councillors in Tuscany from 1990 to 2004 and their turnover. Considering the wide institutional and political transformations deriving from the Bill 1993/81 (introducing the election of mayors), the paper examines its impact on traditional political careers. In particular it describes the dynamic changes the participation of women and young people had on the institutional life of local communities in Italy and in Tuscany. Using data from a database set up by the author, it is possible to investigate the role of unsuccessful candidates as well as the role of elected councillors. Furthermore, the understanding of young people's share in local government may be enlarged using a specific survey targeted at young councillors of local authorities, members. of the executive board (assessori) and mayors in Tuscany. The main results of the survey - presented in the paper - address the following problems: the relationship between young local elected councillors and political parties; the supporting factors of their election or them being appointed (as members of the executive board); the main agencies of political socialization they consider important; the way young politicians succeed in balancing their political and institutional commitments with other kinds of political commitments (being the latter an institutional one or not); the satisfaction they express on their political experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts with reconstructing the political and local government processes that have taken place in Cosenza in the last 15 years. Its purpose is to analyse the main features and the processes of change in the political personnel of Calabria and Southern Italy. The first part of the paper looks at the structural elements of the political personnel in Calabria (e.g. the role of peripheral location; the impact a process of modernisation without industrialisation has on the relation between politics and economy; political patronage and the politicisation of primary relations). The second part presents an analysis of the specific forms taken by political action within contexts that posses the above mentioned structural elements (e.g. the subordination of the political parties to specific and particular interests; the processes of exchange between political and electoral. contexts linked to networks and strategies based on the management of public spending; neopatrimonial trends). The last part identifies a profile of this political personnel using the criteria on which is based its professionalization: development and competences, recruitment, family links, oligarchic trends, duration, status, life stiles, enrichment). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A challenge democracy is affecting concerns the ability to respond to citizens' needs through decisions and public policies closer to their preferences. The most obvious effect is increasing attitudes of criticism, disappointment and disaffection with democracy, that have characterized and still persist in the Italian political culture. After discussing the concept of dissatisfaction the article will be focused a relevant case in point, the Italian parliamentary democracy, by employing a comparative analysis of attitudes towards democracy, in particular trust in political institutions and satisfaction with the functioning of democracy. Successively, the paper will attempt to understand the different meaning of dissatisfaction emerging during the so called first republic in comparison with the following period, second republic, with a short reconstruction of the trend in dissatisfaction from '70s to the last couple of decades. Finally we examine the behavioral consequences of dissatisfaction in order to put forward a number of new propositions to be discussed further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to analyze electoral participation in Italy against the decline in turnout in elections during the Second Republic. Each election yields a variable proportion of citizens not taking part in the vote. In order to measure this phenomenon accurately, we first need to define the non-voter turnout by considering abstention, null and blank votes considered as components of electoral not participation. Successively we show the geographical distribution of uninvolved people underlying the dualism North and South and the differences between first-order and second-order elections in the level of turnout. In the final part of the article we claim that abstention is really only one dimension of a more general process of instability in voting behavior. We identify electoral volatility, partisan identification and vote to protest parties as further evidence in order to state a specific syndrome of declining legitimacy for main actors in democracy loosing the grip with electorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Merit, desert, satisfaction of basic needs, equality of results are the criteria mainly used to distribute resources and opportunities for workers - as wages, pensions, career, qualifications, training, job tenure and other benefits. Other criteria used for this purpose - mostly in defense of entitlements - are seniority, educational credentials and professional skills. These criteria are justified by more or less consistent set of arguments, called legitimation formulas or ideologies according to the context of analysis. In public rhetoric evoked in distributional conflicts it is difficult not to find some reference to these types of authorization of resource distribution. The relationship between' seniority and social stratification was so far little explored by sociological research. The criterion of seniority, from the standpoint of a neo-weberian theory of class, is a strategy of exclusion that benefits members of the cohorts of older workers, placed in the system of guarantees. Purpose of the survey AGING, whose first results are presented in this issue of "Quaderni di sociologia", is to examine the positive and normative believes on the main distributive criteria of a national sample of workers (n = 2502). Workers were interviewed by CATI in spring 2011. This paper describes the construction phases of the survey AGING, from the definition of the main terms of the problem until the construction of a structured questionnaire. The text of the questionnaire is attached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to study the relation between citizens' perception of social incivilities and fear of crime. In the first part I review several theories and hypotheses within the ecological perspective, especially focusing on the incivilities and the "broken windows" theories. In the second part, I present several ways to operationalize and measure the concepts of incivilities and fear of crime, discussing their advantages and shortcomings. In the third part, I analyse data from the Italian Survey on Citizens' Safety (Istat, Indagine sulla sicurezza dei cittadini). The analysis demonstrates that there is a positive relation between the observation of incivilities and fear of crime. Regression models show that people who often see incivilities in their own residence area are more likely to feel unsafe when they are walking alone in the streets in the night and they perceive their area as more unsafe, all else being equal. This relation is stronger in metropolitan areas than in small and medium size communities. On the contrary, the perception of incivilities decreases the probability of going out in the night only among women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law no. 328 passed by parliament in 2000 provided an opportunity to overcome the different approaches that typify Italian social policy as applied by the various local authorities. In fact, for the first time a policy system was set out in which central government assumed a primary role. However, the impact of the reform reflects the pre-existing lack of homogeneity. The paper shows that the local contexts continue to produce differing models for the programming, organisation and supply of services. Furthermore, within the present constitutional setup, central-government cannot take on the regulative function needed to build a policy system that may guarantee a homogeneity in terms of rights and the provision of services. Law no. 328 has not, therefore, given rise to particularly innovative institutional processes and, very probably, the plurality of local approaches will continue to characterise this sector. In particular, depending on the role played by the regions, social policies could help further embed those existing management models that reflect regional boundaries, converging towards the practices in use in the health field. Alternatively, if this is not the case, this diversity could even involve the sub regional level of the social-healthcare districts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reform of Part V of its constitution in 2001 saw the entry of Italy into a federalist era. Is it possible to imagine the start of this process of change as credible without there having been any modification to the territorial distribution of local powers? Naturally no, and so federalism is at risk of self destruction as a result of the new tensions between different areas. The federal plan, in fact, has been constructed on a municipal arrangement which today still remains outmoded, and it is in that basic contradiction that the main difficulties lie today. The paper shows that we have entered an age of federalism without having resolved the problems that arose with the unification of the country. We therefore risk finding ourselves again in an ever smaller and more isolated world, organised around a multiplicity of powers of veto that will transform the country into a place where there is a perpetual negotiation of public decisions. To introduce greater efficiency and democracy we would in fact have to reorganise local authorities, starting with for example, a reduction of the approximately six thousand municipalities that have less than five thousand inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the recent Italian edition of John Goldthorpe's On Sociology from the point of view of the current discussion on the epistemological status of the social sciences. The topic is particularly relevant in Italy, where a strong tradition of scientific sociology never truly developed. Goldthorpe's position is described, and it is argued it is likely to have a strong impact on the Italian debate, given the relatively weak support scientific sociology traditionally receives in Italian academia. The majority of Italian sociologists are not familiar with quantitative methods and rigorous reasoning: Goldthorpe's influence could push at least a part of them towards a more scientific approach. Then Goldthorpe's theoretical foundations are discussed, with particular reference to rational action theory. It is argued that Goldhtorpe support for rational action theory and methodological individualism has at least three roots: a negative one, an analytical one, and a substantive one. The latter is the one that may prove weaker, from both a substantive and a sociology of science point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to offer a critical review of most of the empirical researches on political class and local government published in Italy. In particular, the author examines some empirical researches based on the three different approaches (sociographic, pattern of action by the political personnel, network analysis) universally accepted as the most appropriate for, studying this subject. The characteristics of the main actors in the Italian political system have been unchanged until the beginning of '90s. It is in that period that two bills were passed in order to change (it could be said a sort of reengineering) the structural settings of local authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on topics including Chinese entrepreneurship in Italy and the issue of social integration, the presence of Chinese business enterprise in Lombardy and Trentino in Italy, and Chinese organized crime in Italy.

The article presents abstracts on international migration which include the citizenship of immigrant children in Italy, consequences of social relations' reorganization and ethnical identity of foreigners in Italy.

The aim of this article is to offer a contribution to a theoretically-oriented poverty investigation, starting from the idea that it is necessary to give a greater impulse to the definition of a theoretical reference-frame. Therefore, we first propose a brief discussion of the main approaches, based respectively on poverty persistence hypothesis, life course hypothesis, individualization thesis, and social stratification theory. After defining poverty as the lack of balance between re- sources and needs (both translated into monetary terms), we have then explored the impact of education and geographical area on conditions of poverty, in the light of the contributions of the above four approaches. The methodological strategy is founded on the Event History Analysis, while the data set comes from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) and covers the 1994-2001 period. The results show, among other things, that: 1) high/medium education exerts a strong impact (on poverty reduction) only in the first year, while in the successive years the negative effects of low education prevail; 2) in the same way as for education, living in the North/Center of Italy strongly contributes to getting out of poverty soon (in the first year), while in the Mezzogiorno the reaction is weak even in the first year and diminishes more and more. On the whole, the analysis indicates that in the next future investigations based on specific social groups will be more fruitful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is focused on Italian female teen magazines, and analyzes how some of these magazines represent adolescent girls, also trying to understand how young Italian readers make sense of them. The methodology is based on a frame analysis of a sampling of five Italian teen magazines (July 2008 to January 2009) followed by a series of fifteen focus group sessions with girls aged twelve to sixteen. Results show how the content of these magazines enters deeply into the "soul" of their teenaged readers, even if they merely skim them casually. Furthermore, the findings suggest that these magazines must be considered serious cultural objects since they are read more by those girls who have other - even high - forms of cultural consumption than by girls with poor cultural consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Italy, as in most western countries, a growing number of people have started consuming not only according with their personal taste or following economical criteria. Critical consumption stresses the importance of ethical and public criteria as a core value for consumer's choices. This article focuses on integrative function of consumption. We will show that there are various categories of critical consumers which usually buy fair, sustainable and ethical products. Someone is more sensible to style and fashion of ethical shopping; others consumers look for a better coherence between their values and their everyday life; others ascribe to critical consumption a transformative and political meaning. Grounding our analysis on some classical theories on consumption and elites, we will discuss the main features of the last group of consumers, showing how it can be considered a sort of elite able to bridges emerging values and political roles in the institutional sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an overview of Italian social mobilizations focusing on issues that pertain to information, communication and knowledge: an emerging and yet under-researched area of social actors' engagement that relates to developments in the transnational context, while showing peculiar characteristics. The authors propose a comprehensive reading of such reality, focusing on the nexus between the content of mobilizations ("communication rights" broadly understood) and the processes through which they express and organize them- selves, including their use of communication technologies and their presence in the Web sphere. In particular a network approach is adopted, combining the analysis of social networks among activists and organizations, and issue networks that those organizations contribute to structure on the Web. Issues pertaining to identify formation, informal networking and conflictuat/cooperative orientation are addressed in order to outline relevant features and possible trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance of research evaluation in the knowledge society goes far beyond the measure of performances of researchers and their organisations. It matters a key factor of economy and society, seen by many scholars as a global public good: knowledge. As a consequence, research evaluation has relevant economical and social effects. However, the two most diffused techniques, i.e. peer review and bibliometrics, raise risks of perverse effects, particularly for sociological research, due to its peculiarities on which, moreover, still lacks a vast agreement. Some suggestions are put forward: a deeper insight into both these techniques, a strengthen of the publicity in both procedures and judgements, a careful monitoring of both publication and evaluation outputs, and also an appropriate attention to the third mission of universities and scientific institutions. All in all, research evaluation needs presently a vigorous impulse of research on its own methodological assumptions and actual applications. It comes out, therefore, the demand of a strong impulse to sociology of science that, in Italy, is far less developed then abroad. In particular, it seems opportune to encourage a sociology of sociology in order to regain the hoped authoritativeness of our discipline. In the coming knowledge-society all that becomes a pressing question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, Italian sociology has shown considerable resistance to the use of bibliometric indicators for the purpose of performance evaluation and career progression. And yet, empirical evidence suggests that such indicators somehow capture differences between academic ranks even in a professional community like the Italian one, that has often been charged for indifference to scientific performance in its evaluation procedures. The analysis of different types of data sources such as Social Science Citation Index, Sociological Abstracts and Scholar Google for faculty members in Sociology at Trento University shows strong correlations between all indicators. An analysis of professors at allranks in the disciplinary subsector General Sociology, and of full professors in all sociological subsectors, based on the h-index derived from Scholar Google data only, also shows remarkable consistency in its outcomes. It is concluded that, while one should by no means refer only or even primarily to bibliometric criteria, they would still provide a useful reference point for decisions on appointments and promotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The determination of an individual's employment status is a troublesome question. Aim of this essay is to draw a clearer distinction between employees and self-employed. An increasing development of 'a typical' self-employment (ie people held to be self-employed, when the reality is that they are economically dependent workers: 'semi-subordinate' workers or quasi-employees, 'employer-co-ordinated' freelance workers) has brought about a number of proposals, suggesting either to extend parts of the protective regulations applicable to employees to this category of workers, or to establish a new set of protection measures covering all people working for another person, not just those employed under a contract of employment. All these proposals are called into question by the author. Basing on the case of call-center workers, he also questions the usefulness of the criteria most taken into account by the courts in order to determine whether a person is employed as an employee: 'heterodirection', ie the degree of control exercised by the employer over the employee, and the absence of discretion over the working schedule on the part of the worker. In the last part of his essay, the author proposes a different approach to the traditional notion of dependent employment, setting a great value on the Italian Constitutional Court's jurisprudence according to which the worker's subordination in a strict sense is characterized by something more specific than 'heterodirection' or economic dependence: what the Constitutional Court (and the author) underlines is that employees are in a condition of 'double non-ownership', since they have no control both over the production organization and the value of what they produce. Therefore, if really non-genuine self-employed should be subsumed under the category of dependent employment, economically weak self-employment could be granted a certain level of social protection (e.g., social security benefits, such as schemes covering old-age benefits, child allowances and costs of long-term nursing, disability, illness, risk of losses of income), but it should be nevertheless considered as self-employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study investigates changes occurred in the Italian social stratification in the last twenty years. It is based on stratification studies that consider individual occupations as the main aspect of the immaterial and material resource allocation and, more precisely, the studies that order occupations along a continuum by their social desiderability. At this aim we compare the de Lillo-Schizzerotto Scale (1985) with a new edition of the same scale, realized in 2005 by an inter-university research equipe; doing this, we focused on scores and ranking of the occupational categories in the two scales. Metric and ordinal association measures between the two Scales do not show significant changes in the structure of perceived desiderability of occupations in the Italian labour market. Therefore, in this point of view, twenty years later results confirm the stability of the social inequality system in our country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research draws on a unique chance of comparison across time: the case of Turin (Italy) 1979-2003. In both years time use surveys have been carried out, each including children aged 7-13. The conditions of the urban young population can be seen as a mirror of the social change in a city moving from a still mainly industrial economy to a post-industrial one. As a consequence, today children live in different family context with more educated parents, more female employment and more divorce rate. Some results about trends in children's patterns of time use are quite striking: TV watching for example one of the most debated forms of leisure despite popular fears, did not increased at all; social life instead, measured as time spent with friends (a more reliable measure than «time spent in social activities» which are not always unambiguously defined) dramatically decreased by 50%. This is likely to be linked with the growing institutionalisation of children in 2003. Today young people spend more time than in the past in institutionalised context such as school and extracurricular activities (sport training, music lessons etc.): time spent at school rose by 31% and time spent doing sports (including training courses above all) increased by 77% on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on social protests in Italy against pollution caused due to technological innovations. Issues related to assisted fecundation, thermo valorization for the disposal of waste and pharmaceutical experiments on animals are highlighted. Social action against electromagnetic pollution produced by antenna of cell phones is discussed. Protests by citizen groups in Italy against the installations of these antennas are also highlighted. A case study related to electromagnetic pollution in the city of Padua, Italy is presented.

The article focuses on environmental concerns in Italy due to rapid technological innovations. Issues related to waste management and environmental impact of electromagnetic radiations are discussed. Some important aspects of deliberation in the technological area are examined . The influence that science exercises on politics is criticized. Issues related to the problems of technological deliberations are highlighted. The costs and benefits of technological innovations and research are evaluated.

The article comments on the role of women in the social transformation process of the work life in Italy. The Small Copernican Revolution gave way to the feminist movement in the Italian society. Women emerged as the new responsible and reliable workforce. Women were employed in work that did not require much specialization and efforts. The globalization further increased their independence and social visibility.

The article examines the social condition of immigrants, searching for jobs in Italy. Immigrants have to face many challenges while searching for a permanent job. The regulations laid by the Italian government are considered very harsh for immigrants in Italy. Foreigners either have to accept unprivileged job conditions or the risk of time specific qualified jobs. Immigrants with low qualifications are also looked with suspicion.

The article discusses the difficulties faced by youth in Italy in choosing science as a career. This study points out to a fact that how often a subject is selected not because of the lack of interest in the subject but as a joint decision taken with the family whose knowledge in turn is based on the job market trends. This problem is not just being faced by Italy, but in the U.S. too, a similar problem is being faced. The cultural gap between science and the society has created a dissatisfaction among youth, in realization of widening gap between scientific research and its application. The authors suggest that the need of the hour is to bridge the gap between what is taught in mathematics, physics and chemistry and its real world application.

The article analyzes the factors responsible for the decline in the pursuance of science as a subject of study in Italy. Researcher John Michael Ziman and his colleagues, together with the Science Policy Support Group, conducted a study in November 1990 to analyze this phenomenon. They found out that there are three negative phenomena which surround European Science academics, such as lack of funds, difference in teaching and research methods, and the useless increase of specializations. There has been an increased trend in the selection of non-scientific courses in the Italian Universities in the last 4-5 years.

The article presents a critical analysis of the development of digital interactive television services in Italy. In the 1990s, the Italian television broadcasting system has seen a period characterized by unequal development, which has forcefully introduced different time and modality zones for its diverse components to come into action, for example, network, technology, market, regularization, and social uses. The introduction of new digital interactive television services in Italy have brought about a revolution in the television broadcasting industry. The recognition of the actual offer of interactive TV seems in the first place, about confirming the models of development and configuration already outlined in the first phase of experimentation and orientations on the selection of additional contents and on interaction in the form of surveys and games.

The article discusses the issue of interethnic conflicts and strategies of identities and acquisition of the rights in Italy. The multiethnic cohabitation is a social phenomenon that gives place to interactions between analyzable subjects of ethnicity, various multiple analytical instruments. Some other models exist that, in their originality, seem to better pick dynamics of the actions completed from groups of coming from actors from different cultural worlds. The author presents several suggestions after discussing the ethnic issues of Italy. In multiethnic, rich contexts of stimuli for deepening empiricists and readings of real situations observed in past with other analytical instruments. The author refers to cases of the Mexican in California in the 1970s, the vow of the Pakistanis in England in the 1980s in order to discuss the issue of multiethnic conflicts. Even though with implications not necessarily analogous, in Italy people will encounter to sporadic and spontaneous conflicts very soon less and less. Italians must get prepared, if not to prevent them, at least to face them. The author suggests that first of all Italians must train themselves to the knowledge and the exercise about the citizenship rights, but we do not forget to instruct also our native to the respect of the values of the democracy.

The article focuses on the issue of organized crime or Mafias in Italy. The Mafias are diffused in the world and are criminal phenomena that introduce an organizational character. Main questions associated with Mafias are whether it is possible to speak about an only organizational model of mafia matrix or whether various Mafias introduce different organizations between them structurally. The article attempt to answer such questions and to illustrate the organizations, often unstable in the time and equipped of borders of two concrete mafia formations of Italian Mafia and Japanese Mafia, Yakuza. To answer these questions, the article presents reasons in terms of organizational action, organizational action contexts in which cooperation relationships are managed and interlaced, and of conflict between actors it equips. After the comparison of Mafias of Japan and Italy it has been observed that the Yakuza extended as an important dimension financial institution and succeeded to become part in international traffics. Moreover, the design of the financial investments of the Yakuza seems unitary with that of Italian Mafias. Two Mafias give test of the maintenance of localization which spaces them--even if in shapes, with intensity and changes in the time--irreducible to the global scapes.