Reintermediating Voluntary Action: The Path-Dependent Pluralization of the Italian Volunteering Field

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - While the international literature has significantly addressed the “new forms of voluntary action,” there has...     

Building Industry–University Research Centers: Some Strategic Considerations

This paper reviews the importance of industry–university relationships and the strategic considerations within the context of these partnerships in university research centers. We have identified several factors that are particularly important to industry in building relationships with university centers. These include: acquiring skills, knowledge and gaining access to university facilities; organizational cultures that are more organic; flexible university policies for intellectual property rights, patents and licenses; and the presence of champions. Firms also have explicit collaborative strategies for partnering with universities where firms can be segmented into three distinct clusters: Collegial Players, Aggressive Players and Targeted Players. Collegial Players are often large firms working with universities and university-sponsored consortia on topics of interest that have long-term value rather than promise immediate commercial opportunities. Aggressive Players are both large and small firms who employ university relationships specifically to develop and commercialize a wide range of marketable products and services. Targeted Players are often smaller firms, largely interested in using university relationships to address specific issues central to their business. We conclude by discussing key implications for both industry and universities.     

An Indicator for the Measurement of Political Participation: The Case of Italy

In the modern globalized world, political participation is of paramount importance for balanced socio-economic growth and for human development. The Indagine Multiscopo sulle famiglie, a survey by Italian public institutions (ISTAT and CNEL), provides a wide range of data to evaluate specific aspects of Italian life. This work uses a set of data from the Indagine to analyse political participation in Italy at a regional level, by means of a composite indicator using parametric (Pena’s distance) and non-parametric (Mazziotta–Pareto Index) techniques. We have obtained a ranking that shows the level of political participation in different territorial contexts. The aim is to analyse the relation between Italian regions and the political behaviour of their communities: political discussions, participation in political meetings and marches, voluntary activity or donations to political parties and so on. The ranking is not correlated to voter turnout. We can assume that the politically engaged minority are unable to convince and involve the rest. At the same time, these small groups do not alter the general mistrust in parties and, generally speaking, in politics, which is spreading across Italy and also Europe.     

‘If I’m going to teach about the world,I need to know the world’: developing Australian pre-service teachers’ intercultural competence through international trips

Increasingly, there is an imperative to prepare teachers who can address the needs of ethnically and racially diverse learners. One way to do so is to make available to pre-service teachers opportunities for an international experience so that they might learn about the world and develop better understandings of cultural diversity and difference. In this article, I draw on the findings of a qualitative study that aimed to investigate pre-service teachers’ perceptions of the value of an international experience to their development as teachers. I present excerpts of interview data that highlight how fourteen Australian pre-service teachers who went to India to live and teach for a month, made sense of their experiences. Findings raise concerns about how they saw the trip primarily as an opportunity for tourism and how it became a vehicle through which postcolonial and neocolonial views were developed and maintained. I conclude by making recommendations for teacher education as well as for the organisation of the trip.     

Finding disjoint paths on edge-colored graphs: more tractability results

The problem of finding the maximum number of vertex-disjoint uni-color paths in an edge-colored graph (called MaxCDP) has been recently introduced in literature, motivated by applications in social network analysis. In this paper we investigate how the complexity of the problem depends on graph parameters (namely the number of vertices to remove to make the graph a collection of disjoint paths and the size of the vertex cover of the graph), which makes sense since graphs in social networks are not random and have structure. The problem was known to be hard to approximate in polynomial time and not fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) for the natural parameter. Here, we show that it is still hard to approximate, even in FPT-time. Finally, we introduce a new variant of the problem, called MaxCDDP, whose goal is to find the maximum number of vertex-disjoint and color-disjoint uni-color paths. We extend some of the results of MaxCDP to this new variant, and we prove that unlike MaxCDP, MaxCDDP is already hard on graphs at distance two from disjoint paths.     

Themed section: the person-centred turn in welfare policies: bad wine in new bottles or a true social innovation?

This themed section is aimed at evaluating different personalised policies and at drawing a clear map of opportunities and challenges for future implementations. All the essays are based on evaluative researches and on original case studies. They concern different policies: the Australian National Disability Scheme (NDIS) a first serious venture into personalised funding; personalisation in the management of offenders in probation services within the English criminal justice system; social care services for young disabled people attempting to personalise their transition from childhood into adulthood (in Redbridge, UK); health personal plans for disabled people (in Sardinia, Italy). These case studies address the question of how transferable the concept of personalisation is from the social care sector to other and outline different methodologies for developing and evaluating person-centred policies. Last but not least they reflect on a bundle of issues which seem to emerge autonomously from such different case studies. We can sum up their results affirming that personalisation is not an individual consumer-client technology, simply confronted with a single market context and new professionals. It has to be steered within an appropriate context, including new type of professionals, users' led associations and a new governance's architecture. If the public role has to shape freedom and control, helping people to exercise choice in a collectively responsible way and, consequently, to participate in creating public goods, then the person-centred turn will have to confront, at least, some emergent issues, which in turn need specific forms of governance.     

Labour Supply: Which Theory? A Critical Empirical Assessment

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to test econometrically a number of models of labour supply which fall within the neoclassical and Keynesian theories, in an attempt to obtain indications of validation of the theories themselves. The econometric assessment, carried out with a cohort approach to labour supply, shows that Italian female participation rates react well to the variables belonging to both the neoclassical versions of models — with the exception of the version regarding intertemporal choices — and the Keynesian ones. Both in terms of testing for the selection of alternative regression models, such as those for non-nested hypotheses and for selection of regressors, and of “internal” investigation within the estimated models, the results obtained are not without ambiguity. They therefore leave open the question as to which theory can explain labour supply in the most significant and appropriate way.     

Scenario planning,cognition, and strategic investment decisions in a turbulent environment

We explore how scenario planning contributes to cognitive dynamics and strategic investment decisions in a changing environment. Our research is based on an in-depth, longitudinal case study of Shell's ventures in Russia between 1994 and 2016. We show that Shell's scenarios did not foresee some major events that occurred in the turbulent Russian energy market. However, the scenarios envisaged the rising role of gas, the strategic relevance of the gas transportation infrastructure, and the growing interventionism of the Russian government. The scenarios thus helped Shell's managers to adapt their strategic beliefs and ultimately enabled them to notice, assess, and respond successfully to external changes—even though these changes had not been foreseen in the scenarios. Shell has been the first (and, for almost a decade, the only) foreign company to produce and export gas from Russia.     

Age,Period, Cohort and Early Mortality: An Analysis of Adult Mortality in Italy

Changes in adult mortality in Italy for cohorts born between 1882 and 1953 are analysed and interpreted by means of two different statistical models. The first, an Age–Period–Early Mortality (APEM) model, is employed to analyse the possible relationships between adverse conditions during the first 15 years of life and subsequent mortality. It is shown that higher mortality early in life is associated with higher mortality up to age 45 and lower mortality at latter ages. Finally, possible links between the observed decline in early mortality and the evolution of adult mortality are analysed and discussed.     

Researching ethnic ‘others’: conducting critical ethnographic research in Australia and Scotland

In many parts of the world, classrooms are characterised by cultural and ethnic diversity. Increasingly, researchers are interested in exploring these rich and socially complex contexts. However, research into ‘the ethnic other’ can present complex ethical and methodological challenges. In this paper, the authors discuss, with reference to their respective studies in Australia and Scotland, their mission to give voice and agency to research participants and develop research relationships that reduce the power imbalance between researcher and researched. They conclude by suggesting that critical ethnographic research methods can assist in alleviating some of the difficulties inherent in research conducted in contexts where researchers are cultural outsiders. The authors also argue the need for protocols to be developed for research into ethnic minority communities.