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The article analyses, from a unions’ perspective, how overwork performed re- motely contributes to hybridising employees’ status. More precisely, the paper studies how unions perceive remote overwork and examines the extent to which they find that this phenomenon blurs the boundaries between subordinated work and self-employment, lowers social protection, and challenges traditional forms of representation. The analysis is based on empirical data involving union officials and shop stewards of the quaternary sector in Milan. It was collected using a mixed-method approach that included a survey, eighteen interviews, and two participatory meetings. First, research participants stressed that overwork performed remotely undermines established social rights resulting from previous union achievements, such as the right to sick leave and breaks during the working day, while it also questions the remuneration of working time. Second, the article highlights the mechanisms identified by unions that contribute to working overtime when being remote, stressing that several of these factors correspond to characteristics of self-employment. Lastly, the paper analyses the extent to which remote overwork challenges unions, which not only see the deterioration of hard-won social rights but also find it difficult to create consensus and defend employees’ contrasting interests.

In this paper we aim to investigate how family members, and young sons and daughters in particular, do family and actively take part in doing family through space and the body. By viewing family relations from a culturalist perspective, we aim to shed light on how these embodied family practices form, operate and change, from a spatial perspective. In more depth, we are interested in exploring how family boundaries change depending on the spatial proximity or distance among family members, configurations in which the (im)materiality of body and embodied family practices are significant. The paper is based on two empirical studies regarding young Italians - one on a group still living in the family home with their parent(s) and the other on a group of Italians living abroad. Our analysis, based on biographical narrative interviews with 40 young Italian men and women (aged 22 to 30), shows that while family boundaries are continuously being actively reshaped by (real and virtual) spatial interactions among family members, proximity and distance work quite similarly when it comes to doing family, especially considering the implications of, and reactions to, the parental gaze (Morgan 2011b).

Il p-value, strumento adottato da Sir Ronald Fisher per fare inferenza, oggi è molto utilizzato, anche se alcuni sostengono che l’alternativa al p-value sia il Bayes factor, strumento adottato da Sir Harold Jeffreys. La contrapposizione tra p-value e Bayes factor è ancora argomento di discussione pur essendo trascorsi quasi cento anni dall’origine della disputa. Sul p-value si susseguono prese di posizione e si organizzano convegni per individuare possibili procedure alternative. Il Bayes factor è tenuto in secondo piano anche se è sempre più spesso utilizzato in letteratura, soprattutto in ambito psicologico. Alcuni autori hanno cercato di conciliare p-value con Bayes factor adottando posizioni diverse. Due prospettive sembrano di particolare interesse, costruire il Bayes factor in funzione del p-value o, seguendo le proposte di Matthews e Held, valutare la credibilità del p-value tramite il ricorso a strumenti bayesiani. Nel presente lavoro si discutono queste due proposte ponendo particolare riguardo alla credibilità per la quale viene suggerita una misura., The p-value, namely a tool put forth by Sir Ronald Fisher to make statistical inference, is currently used in the applications. Some statisticians argue that the alternative to the p-value is the Bayes factor, i.e., a tool proposed by Sir Harold Jeffreys. The contrast between the p-value and the Bayes factor is still a matter of discussion, even though almost 100 years have passed since the origin of the dispute. As to the debate on the p-value, position papers have been written and conferences have been organized to identify possible alternative procedures. The Bayes factor is kept in shadow even if it has become more used in the literature, especially in the psychological field. Some authors tried to reconcile the p-value with the Bayes factor. It has been proposed to view the Bayes factor as a function of the p-value or, following the proposals of Matthews and Held, to assess the credibility of the p-value itself through the use of Bayesian tools. In this paper, we review these two positions with particular regard to the analysis credibility, for which a measure is put forward.

The number of multicultural and ethnic festivals held in immigration countries has greatly increased in recent decades. There are multiple, complex reasons for this, ranging from it being an innovative economic strategy used by many formerly Fordist cities in the West to «creatively» renew their urban identity - by staging so-called mega-events designed to promote tourism - to policies of safeguarding cultural difference in order to build non-conflictual «multicultural societies». In recent years, various disciplines have begun to investigate the growing spread of multicultural festivals: above all tourism sciences, human geography and management. Yet sociology, and the sociology of intercultural relations in particular, has not yet devoted much attention to the rise and characteristics of such events, despite the fact that multicultural festivals can be viewed as public rituals and cultural institutions, where culture is produced and circulated, also in terms of representations of ethno-cultural diversity. My paper aims to highlight the need to examine so-called multicultural events from the intercultural relations perspective. My point is that the study of these festivals may represent a fruitful opportunity to shed light on contemporary intercultural dynamics, going beyond the simplistic vision of such events as a form of cultural commodification and reproduction of «ethnic» authenticity. My paper focuses on the generative effects of multicultural festivals, going beyond the staged celebration of cultural diversity and inviting readers to look at the social actors involved (in the role of organizers, performers and visitors) and their social practices before, during and after the events themselves.

In the last twenty years there has been a series of criticisms of the use of Fisher's significance tests and of the Neyman and Pearson test theory. In particular, the p-value that has become a powerful decision tool in affirming the presence of an effect has been criticized. The supremacy of the p-value is mainly due to the attribution of meanings and powers that it does not have, both for its operational simplicity and for the complicity of much of the literature. The paper considers the major criticisms of significance coming from methodological and applied researchers (such as statisticians, psychologists, neurologists and clinicians) and also coming from internationally recognized journals. Naturally, the literature is not limited to criticism and gradually proposes alternative methods to deal with the problems of hypothesis testing; one of these is the Bayesian method that is recently proposed not as an alternative but in sharing with the p-value and other inferential tools. It is precisely this aspect that is explored in the paper, since it is considered not only interesting in itself, but also a possible bridge between the classical and the Bayesian inference school. The paper also includes a stringent methodological appendix, which may help in understanding some definitions and examples.

The paper explains why the latest Italian provisions on foreigners are unconstitutional. The new entry and residence restrictions violate both fundamental rights and the system of law sources; on the other hand, they fail in guaranteeing security as well as in providing effective rules for immigration. Firstly, constitutional, international and European guarantees on the legal status of foreigners seem to be intrinsically weak in the short term. On one hand, excluding foreigners from the electorate stresses the democratic principle and may endanger also the personalist principle; that could foster the adoption of rules which restrict those guarantees, just aiming to reassure those voters who perceive immigration as a treat to their own security. On the other hand, according to the Constitutional Court security itself is a value that the legislator must take into account in regulating immigration outside the field of fundamental rights of foreigners, albeit with many limits, and such legislator's choices on entry and residence must respect the only limit of not being manifestly unreasonable. However, the very meaning of the Law is at stake when unlawful, inconsistent or ineffective rules, adopted by an unconstitutional or exceptional use of certain sources of law, follow one another: those rules aim to regulate migration, even if migration is an ordinary phenomenon with objective characteristics that must be taken in account by lawmakers and that aren't avoidable even if border controls and the right of asylum are both outsourced. The paper focuses on the inability of European countries to adopt in EU a common and effective regulation of migration: in the absence of such common regulation, each country responds with the illusion of restore his borders and his full sovereignty, to the extent of barring his ports, disposing refusals of entry and even at the point that Parliament legitimate illegal physical oppression of personal freedom made by government authorities.

In this paper, we reflect on artistic languages and education from a new materialism perspective. First, we examine how adopting a new materialist stance allows scholars and practitioners of education to view the performing arts in education as performative practices: an ongoing intra-activity of human and non-human elements. Read performing arts through this lens can become resources for re-thinking and enacting educational practice as ‘affirmative’, and the subject as an embedded and embodied subjectivity. Second, we further explore these concepts based on an example of how art has materially come into action at the ‘C. Beccaria’ Youth Detention Center in Milan. We illustrate how the theatre laboratory and the opening of a door have transformed the delivery of education within the institution: the young detainees are given the opportunity to immerse themselves in a system of signs and meanings that are different to those of prison life, and which, materialized and translated into the here and now of everyday life, make it feasible for them to enact new ways of taking part in the world. In sum, we show how theatre work as a performative practice lays the ground for ‘challenging’ the notion of re-education and developing a broader concept of prison as a place of culture and social inclusion.

This paper focuses on local networks of agents operating to counteract education dropouts. We use the opportunity of data collection organized for monitoring a national project named REACT to investigate how inter-organisational partnerships might counteract education poverty. We describe the structure and features of operational and institutional networks in eight socio-economically deprived neighbourhoods located in four Italian cities. Examining the evolution of networks over time (before and after the intervention), we ask whether the active promotion of networks increases their role and effectiveness. We observe that both operative and institutional networks involved agents from different social domains; an encouraging result that states the need for composite skills and resources to deal with school dropouts. In addition, all entities involved in these networks played similar roles with no hierarchy; therefore, the networks showed a lack of governance leading to weak embeddedness. The REACT project seemed to be successful in enabling networking; in all urban neighbourhoods, the presence of private-sector organizations in networks increased and they became denser. Nonetheless, no cohesion among entities was created, and embeddedness is still lacking. Overall, our results suggest a lack of governance in local networks fighting school dropouts and call for future attention to this area when promoting education communities.

In crisis situations like the Covid-19 pandemic, human behaviour plays a vital role. Understanding how people behave, why, and what might change their behaviour is thus crucial for governments and public health authorities. Such understanding can be enhanced through the use of behavioural science. This paper reviews some examples of the actual use of behavioural science to inform the Covid-19 pandemic policy response. Most (but not all) are drawn from the Irish pandemic response, reflecting the authors’ direct involvement in behavioural research for policy in this country and also Ireland’s systematic application of behavioural science during the pandemic. The review describes how different methods from behavioural science were deployed and discusses their merits and potential limitations. It summarises some lessons learned in two years of the pandemic, with the goal of improving the use of behavioural science in future crisis situations.

While research on determinants and consequences of environmental attitudes and pro-environmental behaviours is quite broad, limited research efforts have been spent on the investigation of the discrepancy between the two: i.e. perceiving as environmentalist while not partaking substantially to specific environmental actions. For this reason, understanding how time perception shapes the misalignments, the so called “Value-Action gap”, is the objective of the paper. We analyse both individual (related to job motivation) and social determinants (related to the imitation of pro-environmental behaviours). While the former group refers to the way time is actually perceived, by using variables depicting the way work pressure is felt, the latter group acknowledges the possibility that a social norm is embodied into people and, being imitable, it can help acting in accordance with social environmental attitudes. The empirical analysis exploits the World Bank 3rd Wave of the World Values Survey, covering the years 1995–1998 on 34 countries, and it confirms that time perception and imitation both contribute to the decrease of VAG, although to a different extent.

The history of Italian regionalism (1971-2021) has shown the problems of affirming an authentic regional political direction, really different from the national one. This paper aims to analyze the developments of regionalism towards a reasonable affirmation of the regional political direction.

This article provides a systematic review of 165 housing policies issued by Italian Regions between 2008 and 2018. Three main trends are outlined and discussed in this paper: changes in the governance of institutions involved in social and public housing provision, introduction of new regulations in the management of public housing, and development of new social housing supply as a result of public-private partnerships. This article presents a new geography of local housing systems and highlights how policies seek to mitigate the effects of increasing residualization in public housing while broadening the scope of social housing to include a wider audience of eligible households.

Survey non-response is a relevant but under-researched topic in a pandemic setting, which merits investigation for the unexpected consequences it can produce on the reliability of the survey results. In this paper we investigate non-response error, using data collected at the turn of the pandemic on a known sample of 5,605 individuals first involved in the Italian Lives panel (ITA.LI) and then invited to join an ad hoc survey on the health crisis (ITA.LI COVID-19). We compare respondents and non-respondents to ITA.LI COVID-19, using the multivariate logistic regression technique to estimate variations in the probability of taking part in the survey attributable to specific characteristics of the sample members. Our results highlight that highly-educated people, those who live alone, and people living in municipalities experiencing a higher growth of mortality rates after the pandemic outbreak are more likely to take part in the survey, while full-time workers are still less likely to participate. Based on these results, we formulate general recommendations on how to minimise non-response error when sampling frame data are available, both at the survey design stage and at the data management stage.

In this paper we analyse the effect of constitutional structures over policy outcomes. In particular, we exploit the heterogeneity in parliamentary systems deriving from the presence and the use of the confidence vote to investigate whether stable and unstable parliamentary systems behave differently in terms of the policies they implement. This finer partition of parliamentary systems allows us to identify effects that are more robust than the ones previously discussed in the literature. We show that the difference between presidential and parliamentary systems documented in previous works is driven by a difference between presidential and stable parliamentary systems. We suggest that possible transmission channels are legislative cohesion and (the absence of) selection.

La vivacità della recente ricerca sociologica focalizzata sulla vita quotidiana (sia come ambito empirico sia come prospettiva teorica) solleva la questione delle modalità di costruzione del nesso parte/tutto associate a diverse prospettive d’indagine. L’articolo propone un approccio di ricerca sull’interazione situata in contesti urbani che consente di superare tre limiti analitici ricorrenti nel modo in cui tale nesso prende forma all’interno di numerose pratiche di ricerca. Sia i limiti evidenziati sia la proposta formulata sono introdotti discutendo il materiale empirico raccolto dal 2012 al 2014 nell’area di via Padova a Milano, in particolare analizzando tre casi d’interazioni situate tipicamente urbane: lo scambio quotidiano fra passanti sul marciapiede, la partecipazione ad una festosa “parata multietnica” e le devastazioni occorse durante un’improvvisata manifestazione di protesta. La diversità dei casi scelti e delle tecniche di ricerca adottate per il loro studio illustra la specificità teorica della prospettiva proposta, basata sull’analisi del rapporto tra stili d’interazione e scene in cui sono praticati. I benefici associati all’approccio illustrato sono discussi con riferimento alla sua possibile estensione ad altri ambiti d’indagine e rispetto alla sua applicazione sia a singoli studi di caso sia ad “inventari di casi” tra loro eterogenei ma riferiti allo stesso contesto locale., The recent growth of sociological attention towards everyday life (both as empirical domain and theoretical perspective) raises the issue of how different research approaches build the link between the «part» they study and the «whole» to which it refers to. The paper proposes a research perspective on situated urban interactions which allows the overcoming of three analytical limits recurring in how the link «part/whole» is recurrently built in a variety of research practices. Both the limits and the proposal developed to address them are introduced discussing the empirical evidences collected between 2012 and 2014 in the area of Via Padova, in Milan. In particular, three cases of typically urban interactions are addressed: the everyday exchanges among passing strangers on the sidewalk, the participation to a festive «multiethnic parade» and the devastations occurred during an improvised street demonstration. The variety of the chosen cases and of the techniques adopted for studying them allow to illustrate the theoretical peculiarity of the proposed perspective, based on the analysis of the relationship between the interaction styles and the scenes in which they are practiced. The benefits associated to the proposed perspective are discussed with respect to its possible extension in the analysis of other empirical domains (than those addressed in the paper) and in relation to its application to both single case-studies and to heterogeneous inventories of cases referring to the same local context.

The aim of this article is to highlight the specific role, functions and activities of social work in the context of emergencies, proposing a synthesis of the main theoretical concepts useful to guide practice. In particular, this paper shows how interventions carried out in emergency services in cases of personal crisis and social work practice in the context of disasters can be oriented by similar theoretical and methodological assumptions, useful to overcome a residual approach to interventions in case of emergency.

The paper investigates the narrative presented by Italian institutions and mass media on the pandemic as well as the effects of this narrative on public opinion. In democratic systems, the pandemic has represented and still represents a challenge for the world of media and information. The narrative around the pandemic has monopolized media for months and the systems of institutional, journalistic and scientific communication have used unusual methods and tones. Furthermore, the right of citizens to receive accurate information on the pandemic has exacerbated the tension between the principle of free speech and the tendency to intervene on content posted online. Against this background, the article traces some significant events in the evolution of the pandemic, considers vices and virtues of Italian mass media and public communication systems, and verifies the effects on public opinion of the observed new methods and tones of communication. The current crisis is also an opportunity to study the health of the Italian information system and the resistance of freedom of speech during the emergency.

The openness/growth nexus is an issue that has intrigued many scholars from different disciplines, like international economics, economic geography, regional economics, international business, for a very long time. While the theoretical implications are quite clear, the empirical evidence is mixed and scarce, especially at sub-national level. Indeed, openness is not observable at regional level; therefore, it is difficult to identify a comprehensive and reliable set of quantitative variables measuring the different dimensions of the phenomenon. Despite this objective difficulty, much has been done, and today we have a more comprehensive view of the nature of the phenomenon, as well as its trends and territorial impacts. This paper summarizes the theoretical milestones, i.e. the principles universally accepted by the literature, and the most recent empirical trends at territorial level, with especial emphasis on the contribution of Italian Regional Scientists.

One of the most relevant contributions given by Amedeo G. Conte to the investigation of normative phenomena is his theory of the validity of norms. But what is the real object of a theory of the validity of norms? And what is a norm? This paper revisits the developments of Conte's theory of validity and highlights the pragmatical and ontological turn that led Conte to introduce the concept of deontic state-of-affairs and to abandon a strictly linguistic conception of normative phenomena.

The paper presents some findings of an ethnographic research concerning Air Traffic Control Officers (ATCO) working in four Italian Aerodrome Control Towers (TWR) and Area Control Centres (ACC). Specifically, drawing on the theoretical model of workplace studies, the attention is mainly focused on situated working practices. In particular, we deepen the analysis of two key themes within the literature on centers of coordination: technologies as material practice and structures of participation. In addition we suggest other relevant issues able to improve the knowledge of working practices in these contexts: the use of discretion and, specifically, the exercise of the so-called best judgment and the ‘creative’ use of technological artifacts.

Early school leaving, despite being quite common in Italy, has not been studied much. There is a lack of data and quantitative research concerning its pattern over time and its relation to social stratificaztion and inequility. The paper contributes to this topic using the first two waves of teh ILFI data (1997,1999) which contain detailed information on both educational and occupational careers of a representative sample of Italians. This makes it posssible to decribe the pattersn over time of early schoool leaving in Italy for each level of schooling. The main aim of hte paper is, however, to integrate early leaving in the typical research questions concerning the association between social class of origin, education and occupational attainment. The genral problem is : what happens if education is measured taking early leaving into account ? More in detail two research questions are asked : (a) does the association between class of origin and education found measuring education according ot the highest title achieved still hold when early leaving is considered ? in other words: is school leaving classs biased ? (b) does the picture of the transition from school to work change when early leaving is taken into account ? how do early leavers perform in the labour market with respect to both those who do not even start and those sho complete a given educational level ?

The paper aims at evaluating the impact of export promotion policies at the regional level in Italy. We estimate a difference-in-differences model with firm-level fixed-effects to analyze the effect of matching grants for participation in international trade fairs in Lombardy, the most important Italian region in economic terms. Results show that the vouchers are able to improve firms’ export performance by affecting the intensive margin of small-sized and more internationalized firms

n this paper, I investigate a morphological construction expressing the evaluative meaning of contempt in Italian. The words formed by means of this construction contain the string mal(e)-, linked to the adverb male 'badly', plus a base that can be an adjective, a verb or a participle (e.g. malsano 'insane', maltrattare 'to ill-treat', malvivente 'criminal', lit. 'badly living', or malnato 'miscreated'). Based on diachronic data ranging from Old to Contemporary Italian, I examine the evolution of this partially lexically specified construction focusing on its functional and distributional properties, within the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010). The analysis reveals that mal(e)- displays a prefix-like behavior and conveys a pejorative or a negative value, depending on the meaning of the base word and the context. I argue that it can be considered as an evaluative prefix and that mal(e)- construction is at the present stage closer to derivation than compounding.

The paper aims at evaluating the impact of export promotion policies at the regional level in Italy. We estimate a difference-in-differences model with firm-level fixed-effects to analyze the effect of matching grants for participation in international trade fairs in Lombardy, the most important Italian region in economic terms. Results show that the vouchers are able to improve firms’ export performance by affecting the intensive margin of small-sized and more internationalized firms

The limits of utilitarian approach have led to the search for different notions of welfare. This paper aims to provide a multi-dimensional measurement for evaluating the social well-being of Italian Regions. It starts with a critical overview of the most promising analytical routes going beyond utilitarian theories: Sen's capabilities approach and Dasgupta's quality of life framework. The measurement of well-being for Italian Regions proposed in this paper is based on the latter. Although it is argued that this approach might be less sophisticated than the one proposed by Sen, it seems in fact to be more appropriate to evaluate alternative economic policies. The construction of this measurement is defined according to the goals of European Union policies and based on a set of indicators that are both constituents and determinants of well-being. Such measurement is used to point out the Borda ranking of Italian Regions well-being. This is followed by a discussion of the correlation between the ranking itself and the indicators chosen. The conclusion offers the main remarks arising from data elaboration

In publicly traded companies, highly dilutive rights issues create market anomalies throughout the whole offer period, especially with respect to rights' prices, which quote considerably below their fair value. These anomalies could cause severe losses to non-subscribing shareholders, inducing them to take part in the operation even if financial perspectives of the company would have suggested otherwise (= enforced subscription mechanism). In order to strike a proper balance between enabling companies to raise new capital while simultaneously protecting investors, company law provides an array of regulatory strategies; the aim of this paper is to analyze the function and the contents of managers' liability to investors (art. 2395 Italian Civil Code) as a constraint to managers' discretionary power in seting the economic and regulatory conditions of share issuances.

In recent years, the bioethical and biolegal debate has paid increasing attention to the use of drugs and of biomedical technologies not for therapeutic purposes but to enhance healthy individuals: to modify and/or augment existing psycho-physical characteristics, or to create new ones. A relevant part of the debate has been dedicated to human enhancement for moral purposes. After referring to the main arguments of proponents of human enhancement, the introduction underlines that the papers of Laura Palazzani, Silvia Salardi and Federico Pizzetti propose a useful analysis both to correctly frame the phenomenon from a theoretical viewpoint and to consider its wider implications for individual lives and for the model of society that the diffusion of bioenhancement may contribute to shaping

The paper contributes to the political economy of cities and territories investigating a fraction of the urban élite in the Municipality of Milan. It investigates the profile and the relational structure of the network of the local public companies’ board members, considering a time span of twenty years. To do so, the contribution explores: whether and to what extent there is a prevalence of politicians against managers in the boards; whether and to what extent these members form a cohesive local élite; and whether and to what extent a change in the political belonging of the Municipal Council affects the structure of power. Results show that boards of local public companies are mainly composed by middle-aged, educated men, a relatively homogeneous and compact social group, although not particularly dense. Politicians represent only one third of the board members, while the remaining members are managers and professionals issued by the civil society. The analysis of the network structure allowed us to identify a “core élite” made of politicians who are in the most powerful positions in structural terms, and who mainly work in the transport mobility sector, pushing the development of the city in that direction. Finally, the diachronic analysis highlighted that the advent of the left-wing government, after fifteen years of right-wing government, affected the cohesion of the past networks resulting in a major fragmentation of the network structure.

This paper investigates the role of social capital in determining the size and the direction of FDI-induced spillovers on the economic growth of EU regions. The idea is that the nature and the quality of foreign companies’ relationships with local firms depend on the endowment of social capital of that location. A «wrong» social capital may make these relationships difficult, thus limiting the capacity of the host economy to benefit of FDI-induced spillovers conducive to growth. We considered informal institutions in terms of generalized trust, associational activity, and cultural closeness and we found that spillovers effects do not arise when generalized trust is «self-referential», active participation to associational activities is low, and the society is characterised by cultural closeness towards foreigners. Moreover, we found that positive FDI-induced spillovers are associated with EU-originating foreign firms and FDI in services only. From a policy perspective, this implies that the origin of foreign investors as well as the sectoral composition of FDI inflows should be carefully considered. Furthermore, investments in education may help regions to benefit more from the foreign presence because human capital and social capital tend to be complementary.

This introduction discusses the linkages between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and the local communities hosting foreign subsidiaries or affiliates. It points out what we can say with relative confidence on the contribution of FDI to the development and growth processes of EU regions, and what we cannot say because of the lack of sound empirical evidence. It offers a way forward for understanding the issues that still need extra-analyses, while documenting how the papers included in this special issue contribute to this debate.

This paper provides a critical evaluation of some recent attempts - strictly connected to each other - to interpret Brentano's theory of inner consciousness in self-representational terms, as well as to explain Brentano's thesis of intentionality of mind as «phenomenal intentionality». The author points out how both the attempts, concerning the relationship between intentionality and consciousness, involve not only relevant difficulties about the correct interpretation of Brentano's texts, but also theoretical problems relating to the philosophy of Brentano, because they expose Brentano's theory of mind and consciousness to pointless criticisms, namely subjectivism and idealism. The author argues finally that it is inaccurate to attribute to Brentano such a philosophical position about consciousness, once one has interpreted his work in the light of his main source: Aristotle and his theory of perception and cognition.

The paper analyses the Improving Plans of the experimental project 'Evaluation & Improving' by the INVALSI's feedback. Schools built their Improving Plans starting from the External Evaluators' suggestions but with full independency on their plans' decisions. The results highlight that almost all schools follow the External Evaluators' advices. About half of the schools chose to work on educational processes and less than 5% on student results; schools prefer to repeat well known models regarding educational processes, to the detriment of results. Furthermore schools highlight difficulties on planning activities, times and resources' feasibility and on evaluation method in the Improving Plans. Finally it is confirmed that external evaluators' composition has to be mixed. The external feedback seems to be one of the most important instruments in order to start improving paths in schools.

Motivated by the need to understand voting behaviour under different electoral rules, Laslier et al. (Eur Union Polit, 16(4):601–615, 2015) have conducted an online experiment, the EuroVotePlus experiment, focusing on the effects of the different rules adopted to elect members of the European parliament on voters’ behaviour. The experiment took place in several European countries in the 3 weeks before the 2014 elections for the European Parliament. This paper focuses on the Italian data. Firstly, we show that the behaviour of Italian respondents is consistent with the empirical findings at the European level. Then, we exploit the change from open list to closed list elections implemented in Italy in 1993 to investigate whether and how preferences over institutions are affected by experience. We find that respondents who voted using the open list system in Italy are more likely to prefer closed list systems, and that the effect is stronger the higher the number of open list elections the respondents have faced

Seventy years after Ashley Montagu's battle for abolition of the concept of «race», some European countries have abolished the concept from their legal norms, whereas in others proposals have been submitted for its legal abolition. The paper analyzes these proposals from the analytical-linguistic perspective. The aim is to clarify whether this operation is «mere» terminological or can be framed within the boundaries of a more incisive «question of word», doomed to performatively shape reality according to specific values.

The Semantic Misattribution Procedure (SMP; Imhoff et al., 2011) is a tool for the measurement of implicit associations. Although it is relatively new, the SMP has been proven as an effective method, combining adequate psychometrics properties with simplicity of construction and administration. This paper is the result of an in depth analysis of previous studies carried out using the SMP. The entire procedure, fields of application, psychometric properties and underlying cognitive processes, as well as suggestion for its optimal construction, are described in this essay.

The paper highlights the important contribution of Eugenio Lecaldano's book Senza Dio (Without God) to the overcoming of the «defensive» approach to atheism. Lecaldano's work favour indeed the perspective that focuses both on the strength of arguments used by unbelievers at the theoretical level and on the positive impacts on individuals and society as a whole when atheism is practised in private and public life by an increasing number of people. To approach atheism from this «constructive» angle is a fruitful way to overcome cultural resistances, which hinder the full implementation of a secular society able to protect all identities and guarantee a peaceful coexistence as well as the survival of the human species.

Although the regulation of religious organizations, churches, and religious practices is not directly within EU jurisdiction, free movement of persons - the very same pillar upon which the European experiment rests - makes European citizenship and religion inevitably intertwined. The individual circulating freely in the EU is, in fact, both a European citizen and the bearer of a "religious" identity. This paper investigates this sensitive combination and intersection of identities that challenges the traditional concept of European citizenship per se.

The paper reports the outcome of an educational experience conducted in preschool setting in order to improve children's orientation to prosocial behavior. The prosocial orientation story-completion task is presented

Il contributo si colloca entro la cornice teorica della robotica educativa e mira ad illustrare le implicazioni psicologiche di un progetto svolto in due classi seconde di una scuola primaria di Milano, con particolare riguardo all’esperienza di un bambino con diagnosi di ritardo mentale medio-grave. In base all’analisi di videoregistrazioni e di interviste a insegnanti e genitori si mostra come le attività di robotica educativa possano stimolare positivamente alcuni aspetti psicologici legati all’apprendimento e alle relazioni sociali, discutendo criticamente limiti e punti di forza dell’esperienza., Within the theoretical framework of the educational robotics, the present paper aims at illustrating the psychological aspects of a project carried out in two second grade classes of a primary school in Milan, with particular regard to the experience of a child with severe mental disability. Based on interviews of teachers and parents and on the analysis of videotapes, the psychological implications regarding learning processes and social relationships will be presented and critically discussed with reference to limitations and points of strength of the experience.

«For sated people no future blooms»: this is Weber's warning at the end of his text Russia's Transition to Pseudo-Constitutionalism. His fear was the coming of the last men, who «live on bread alone» and are unable to dedicate their life to ethical powers. This paper will focus on the concept of Sättigung in Max Weber's works, providing a reconstruction of the occurrences of this semantics, which plays, in my opinion, a significant role in Weber's reflection but nevertheless has been to date underestimated by the Weberian exegesis. In this way it will be possible to outline a different and more complete interpretation of Weber's thought and, moreover, to find exactly in the semantics of satiation/saturation a conceptual tool that could be useful for a diagnosis of contemporary world and contemporary politics

Braitenberg's essay "Vehicles. Experiments in synthetic psychology" has had a tremendous impact on the development of contemporary robotics. This paper reviews some of the questions raised in the book - mainly concerning the mechanistic explanation of biological behavior - which have most influenced robotics, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. The citations made in the literature will be taken as a guideline for this survey: this will help reconstruct the ways in which Braitenberg's book has been assimilated in the collective imagination of contemporary robotics.

La semantica della comunicazione in rete è differente da quella della carta stampata e tale differenza emerge anche nella somministrazione di web survey. In psicologia sociale, e in generale in tutte le discipline sociali, poche sono le rassegne e gli studi metodologici offerti al ricercatore sull’utilizzo di specifici strumenti informatici. Questa rassegna presenta una panoramica degli attuali strumenti offerti dal mercato software –commerciale e open source– per la creazione di una sessione di raccolta dati tramite la rete. Vengono inoltre proposte considerazioni circa il campionamento via web e le problematiche legate all’accessibilità di una web survey creata ad hoc tramite linguaggi di programmazione, The semantics of the communication in Internet is different from the one on printed paper, and this difference also persists in the administration of web surveys. In social psychology, and more generally in all the social science disciplines, there are few reviews and methodological studies available to a researcher describing the use of specific computer programs. This work presents an overview of the current tools and software offered by both the commercial market and the open source community for collecting data online. Furthermore, considerations are described about sampling issues and web accessibility of a web survey created ad hoc with programming languages.

Following an approach to the study of ritual devoted to Durkheim, Goffman and ethnometodology, this paper deals with questions about the practices of collective memory in the liturgical context of 27 January, the Shoah Remembrance Day, known as Giornata della Memoria in Italy. More specifically, the analysis concerns the annual official and institutional form of public ritual celebrated in Milan since 2001, a ceremony that is studied in terms of discursive practices and as ritual that implicates "Others". Assuming the social and political situation defined by members and their narrative practices as the main focus of analysis, the article gives an ethnographic account of the eclipse or failure of this ceremony and, speaking in phenomenological terms, of what can be called the "re-membering problem": the discursive and practical activities by whic actors succed or fail to stay and act togheter as member of a supposed common, collective and cosmopolitan memory. In conclusion, some situated and political interpretations of the failure and its implications are proposed.

How do infants start learning the syntax of the language they are exposed to? In this paper, we examine a plausible mechanism for the acquisition of the relative order of heads and complements We hypothesize that a version of the iambic-trochaic law determines the physical realization of main prominence within phonological phrases that contain more than one word: if it is realized mainly through pitch and intensity, it is in a phonological phrase that is stress-initial and has a complement-head structure, otherwise it is in a phonological phrase that is stress-final and has a head-complement structure. We show this to be the case both interlinguistically ( French and Turkish), and intralinguistically (German, where both orders of head and complement are found). Our finding allows us to consider a psychologically plausible mechanism for the acquisition of the relative order of heads and complements, one of the basic parameters of syntax

This paper deals with a theory of hypothetical thinking developed by Evans (2007), concerning dual processes in reasoning and judgment. The theory map on the distinction between processes described as heuristics (fast, parallel, implicit, high capacity) and analytic (slow, sequential, explicit, low capacity). Some new experimental data about probabilistic thinking and the results obtained through two classical tasks of hypothetical reasoning are discussed from the point of view of lateral transfer (Singley and Anderson). If people are able to extract the invariant and abstract structure from different versions of the same reasoning task, they are supposed to think at S2 level. If it is not possible to transfer the solution, then it is plausible that the solution itself has been reached thanks to S1. Finally, the dual theory of hypothetical thinking is discussed from the broad point of view of the different methods and issues concerning rationality and problem solving

This paper presents a narrative tool aimed at investigatig the experience of emotions in adolescence.

How do infants start learning the syntax of the language they are exposed to? In this paper, we examine a plausible mechanism for the acquisition of the relative order of heads and complements We hypothesize that a version of the iambic-trochaic law determines the physical realization of main prominence within phonological phrases that contain more than one word: if it is realized mainly through pitch and intensity, it is in a phonological phrase that is stress-initial and has a complement-head structure, otherwise it is in a phonological phrase that is stress-final and has a head-complement structure. We show this to be the case both interlinguistically ( French and Turkish), and intralinguistically (German, where both orders of head and complement are found). Our finding allows us to consider a psychologically plausible mechanism for the acquisition of the relative order of heads and complements, one of the basic parameters of syntax

This paper deals with a theory of hypothetical thinking developed by Evans (2007), concerning dual processes in reasoning and judgment. The theory map on the distinction between processes described as heuristics (fast, parallel, implicit, high capacity) and analytic (slow, sequential, explicit, low capacity). Some new experimental data about probabilistic thinking and the results obtained through two classical tasks of hypothetical reasoning are discussed from the point of view of lateral transfer (Singley and Anderson). If people are able to extract the invariant and abstract structure from different versions of the same reasoning task, they are supposed to think at S2 level. If it is not possible to transfer the solution, then it is plausible that the solution itself has been reached thanks to S1. Finally, the dual theory of hypothetical thinking is discussed from the broad point of view of the different methods and issues concerning rationality and problem solving

Previous research on Italian higher education showed that social origin affected students’ academic progression and results in the 20th century. In this paper we examine the role of student employment – i.e. working during university – in the reproduction of social inequality in academic outcomes. In the first part, we review previous research results in the US, UK and Italy and discuss several competing hypotheses. In the second part, we use data from the Italian Longitudinal Household Survey (ILFI) to study a) the relation between student employment and academic outcomes; b) the relation between social origin and student employment, and c) the mediating effect of student employment in the relation between social origin and academic outcomes. Bivariate analysis and multinomial logistic regression models show that full-time students are more likely to graduate on time than working-students, but only high-intensity work has a detrimental effect on dropping out. Social origin affects the probability of being a high-intensity worker, but not the likelihood of being a low-intensity worker. Finally, results from a non-linear decomposition analysis suggest that the overall role of student employment in the reproduction of inequality in higher education is low, while the most important variable is the type of high-school attended (especially lyceum vs non-academic).

Questo articolo affronta il tema dell'ambivalenza di fiducia e valuta il suo impatto sul comportamento di consumo di prodotti alimentari. In primo luogo si esamina la possibile coesistenza di sentimenti di fiducia e di sfiducia nei confronti dell'azienda. Quindi, si verifica la potenziale estendibilità dell'ambivalenza di fiducia dal produttore ai suoi prodotti. Infine, sulla base della letteratura che descrive la relazione fra ambivalenza e congruenza del comportamento (Lwicki, McAllister e Bies, 1998; Moore, 1973) si verifica l'ipotesi per cui alla condizione di ambivalenza di fiducia verso il prodotto corrisponderà una relativa instabilità nel consumo dello stesso prodotto. I dati, raccolti (N = 92) attraverso il questionario già utilizzato da Priester e Petty (1996) per la misurazione dell'ambivalenza e sottoposti al test dei Modelli di Equazioni Strutturali (LISREL), dimostrano che l'ambivalenza di fiducia provata verso un'azienda è in relazione significativa con l'ambivalenza provata nei confronti del prodotto e con la stabilità del comportamento di acquisto., This paper explores the theme of trust ambivalence and evaluates its impact on consumption behaviour of food products. In the first instance, the potential coexistence of trust and distrust feelings toward a company is examined. Then, the possible extension of trust ambivalence from the producer to its products is measured. Finally, based on the literature showing a relation between ambivalence and behavioural congruence, the hypothesis on the relation between trust ambivalence toward a product and consumption stability over time is tested. Data (N = 92) have been collected using Priester e Petty (1966)'s questionnaire on ambivalence. Structural Equation Modeling (LISREL) showed that trust ambivalence toward a company is significantly associated with product ambivalence and with consumption stability.