THE INTELLECTUAL IN QUESTION

Although contemporary scholars in various disciplines readily appropriate many of his ideas, Antonio Gramsci's theory of intellectuals remains curiously unappreciated. From the standpoint of the oft-lamented crisis of the contemporary intellectual, however, it represents a resource that is both indispensable and difficult to retrieve. In this article the historical and sociological nuances of Gramsci's theory, as well as the powerful, yet unheeded lessons of his own life as an intellectual will be examined. In particular, Gramsci's analysis of the social affiliation and political agency of the intellectual provides the framework necessary to explain the rise and ongoing crisis of the academic intellectual as a historically unprecedented figure. This point will be illustrated by examining the case of influential academic intellectuals such as Michael Walzer and Michel Foucault. The article concludes with some reflections on the merits of Gramsci's distinctive way of being an intellectual.     

The Sphere of Action of the Alterglobal Movement: A Key of Interpretation

Drawing on extensive data gained from activist interviews, questionnaires and ‘sociological interventions’, this article sets out the conflicting dimensions of the alterglobal (global justice) movement in three countries (France, Italy and Great Britain). Proceeding from the various interpretations given by movement actors to the relationships of domination engendered by contemporary globalisation processes, we aim to construct an interpretative framework of the alterglobal movement and its different components. We argue that the internal identity of the movement can be plotted within a series of contrasting ideological, symbolic, and organisational relationships, and – despite the considerable diversity of the movement – movement actors share a common construction of their own alterglobal subjectivity across three specific dimensions: a resistance to domination, the importance of the elaboration of alternative worldviews and the practical steps taken in the pursuit of these alternatives.     

Towards an adapted lean system – a push-pull manufacturing strategy

Abstract

The direct transplantation or imitation of lean production has led to difficulties of applying a number of lean principles and practices. Thus diffusion of one of the main lean principles, just in time production, which refers to producing only “what is really needed, when it is needed, and in the amount needed”, seems to be limited. To date, some of the these companies produce more than their customers really need. This method of production enables them not only to amortize the high changeover costs over a large number of products, but also to benefit from commercial opportunities. However these companies are exposed to financial losses related to storage costs and risks of non-sale. To provide decision elements for determining the best production strategy, we have developed a model for calculating the optimal quantity to be produced. Moreover, we suggest using a fuzzy aggregation system to optimise the consideration of the risk of non-sale. This new approach defines the limits to not be exceed by taking into consideration the drawbacks linked to the risks of non-sale.     

ICT-based solution approach for collaborative delivery of customised products

Growing interest on business collaboration motivates today’s industries, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to establish and manage dynamic and non-hierarchical business networks to respond to market opportunities with added business benefits. This business environment requires concurrent work and real-time information sharing between key business partners in order to design and develop customised products. The use of traditional communication media such as e-mail, phone and fax is not satisfactory to get real-time information and is time-consuming and most often ineffective. In such environments, an Information and Communication Technology (ICT)/Web-based technology supports real-time information sharing among networked SMEs for the collaborative design and manufacturing of customised products. This study proposes an innovative ICT platform supporting SMEs collaboration, through Web and the Internet of Things technologies, which follows the Net-Challenge conceptual approach and methodological guidelines for SMEs to form and operate virtual organisations for the collaborative development and delivery of customised products. The ICT Platform was assessed in three different industry domains, namely the textile and apparel, the footwear and the machine tools, respectively. This ICT solution promotes collaboration, with substantial advantages for SMEs including the reduction of costs and delivery time and improvement of the innovation potential.     

Fighting the Curse of Sparsity: Probabilistic Sensitivity Measures From Cumulative Distribution Functions

Quantitative models support investigators in several risk analysis applications. The calculation of sensitivity measures is an integral part of this analysis. However, it becomes a computationally challenging task, especially when the number of model inputs is large and the model output is spread over orders of magnitude. We introduce and test a new method for the estimation of global sensitivity measures. The new method relies on the intuition of exploiting the empirical cumulative distribution function of the simulator output. This choice allows the estimators of global sensitivity measures to be based on numbers between 0 and 1, thus fighting the curse of sparsity. For density-based sensitivity measures, we devise an approach based on moving averages that bypasses kernel-density estimation. We compare the new method to approaches for calculating popular risk analysis global sensitivity measures as well as to approaches for computing dependence measures gathering increasing interest in the machine learning and statistics literature (the Hilbert–Schmidt independence criterion and distance covariance). The comparison involves also the number of operations needed to obtain the estimates, an aspect often neglected in global sensitivity studies. We let the estimators undergo several tests, first with the wing-weight test case, then with a computationally challenging code with up to $\text{◂,▸}k=30,000$ inputs, and finally with the traditional Level E benchmark code.     

Nonparametric estimation of probabilistic sensitivity measures

Statistics and Computing - Computer experiments are becoming increasingly important in scientific investigations. In the presence of uncertainty, analysts employ probabilistic sensitivity methods...     

Public investment and growth: Lessons learned from 60-years experience in Southern Italy

This article analyses the contribution of public investment to economic growth in Southern Italy in the second half of the twentieth century (1951–2011). The Bai–Perron tests suggest that economic growth followed three distinct regimes: accelerated growth in the years 1951–1973 (average growth rate 5.3%); low growth in the period 1974–1995 (average growth rate 1.6%); zero growth on average after 1995. Using cointegration analysis, we find a positive effect of public investment on per unit of labour output of the Mezzogiorno in the whole period, 1951–2011. However, the estimates of the model show statistically significant parameters of public investment in the first regime, but not in the second regime, when economic growth is sustained by business investment and technical change. The last phase of growth sees the negative influence of the social and institutional environment on the functioning of the economy. The different impact of public investment on growth over time is ascribed to changes in the quality of institutions.