CUSTOMER OWNERSHIP AND QUALITY PROVISION IN PUBLIC SERVICES UNDER ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION

The implementation of projects producing external effects is often a source of disagreement and conflict between hosting and nonhosting communities. The article focuses on the impact of participatory ownership on conflict resolution and social welfare in the presence of asymmetric information and imperfect quality monitoring. We show that in such situations the participatory solution may help solve deadlocks that money transfers to a for‐profit operator cannot solve. The analysis highlights three main factors behind this fact. First, a customer‐owned cooperative internalizes, at least partially, the external effects generated by the project. Second, the alignment of cooperative members' preferences with those of the social planner reduces (in some cases eliminates) the distortions caused by information asymmetries. Third, cooperatives require less costly monitoring than their for‐profit counterparts. We also show that cooperatives' productive inefficiency with respect to for‐profits may emerge endogenously as a consequence of a lower pressure to compete on costs for the market. (JEL H23, L33, P13)     

Employability skills for future marketing professionals

This study investigates how digital transformation has disrupted the marketing career path by analysing the most in-demand marketing skills and identifying opportunities for future marketing professionals. Through a content analysis of job advertisements and a cross-country survey of marketing professionals, the study proposes a framework defining the skillset required of marketing professionals to start and move forward in their career. The study identifies five employability skill categories and 29 skills and capabilities. The relevance of such categories is also analysed across lowly and highly digitalised firms. This research contributes to the debate on the employability of new graduates and provides useful directions to universities, tertiary education institutions, and companies to support the marketing talents of the future.     

Italy: the ‘illegality factory’? Theory and practice of refugees’ reception in Sicily

ABSTRACT

The recent surge of migrants crossing the Mediterranean in search of protection has presented a major challenge for the whole European Union. What has been labelled as a ‘refugee crisis’ is first and foremost a crisis of international politics and the result of inadequate response mechanisms at local level. This paper focuses on the case of Sicily, the second main area of arrival, after Greece, when migration to the Mediterranean reached its peak. With a long history of immigration, since 2015 the Italian island has seen the implementation of a new approach based on ‘hotspots’: designated areas for the separation of those deemed as economic migrants from ‘genuine asylum seekers’. In the view of some, this has made Italy into a model of migration management, as opposed to the chaotic situation of the Greek islands. The hotspot approach, however, has been also criticised for being engrained on practices that many deem unlawful, actively producing discrimination and condemning many migrants to an illegal status on the Italian soil. Informed by findings from an international research project (EVI-MED), this paper examines this complex scenario, exploring the social, legal and human implications of the refugees’ reception system in Italy.     

Reimagining social work case studies: a social work—creative writing collaboration

This paper describes a joint social work and creative writing project which analysed case studies from textbooks on reading lists for the Bachelor of Social Work course at Edith Cowan University. The textbook case studies were analysed from the perspectives of both social work and literary craft and it was found that they presented simplified scenarios which were limited in terms of diversity and rarely portrayed depth or complexity. The case studies were also often bereft of information about social workers’ or service users’ human qualities and frequently portrayed service users in terms of the problems they presented to the social worker. The authors argue that depicting social workers and service users in this way can create the impression that social work is a distanced procedural activity and can also serve to distance service users’ lives and experiences from social work students. Drawing on research in creative writing craft, as well as analysis of the textbook case studies, principles for writing engaging text-book case studies were developed and the paper concludes by arguing for the use of these principles when crafting social work case studies.     

Dealing with omitted answers in a survey on social integration of immigrants in Italy

ABSTRACT

Surveys are used to infer the level of social integration of immigrants. Item response theory helps to describe the relationship among responses to test items and latent traits of interest. However, in the presence of nonignorable missing data, which are omitted responses depending on the latent traits to be measured, estimates of the model parameters are biased. To account for nonignorable missing data, the quantity and quality of contacts between immigrants and natives (so called “social integration”) are taken into account through a linear function of the response propensity. Higher education, no intention to migrate again, young age, Albanian nationality, and declaring a non-Muslim religion or none, comparatively favor social integration.     

Proud to be poor? Untangling identity politics with the families portrayed in the photobook Courage (1998)

In the early 1990s, several European welfare states embraced the idea that the voice and life knowledge of people in poverty should be recognised in policymaking. In that regard, many authors proclaimed a paradigm shift from advocacy to self-advocacy, emphasising the agency of people in poverty to speak for themselves. Emblematic in these developments in Belgium was the photobook Courage, published in 1998 by an NGO called Movement for People with a Low Income and Children (BMLIK). Through documentary family photography and oral testimonies, Courage develops a visual rhetoric on the citizenship of people in poverty while reframing poverty as a violation of human rights. Historical research demonstrates, however, that Courage was produced by middle-class volunteer allies and is therefore a rhetorical tool for self-advocacy but certainly not a product of self-advocacy. Moreover, many authors have been highly critical of identity politics, since positive imagery can equally be disempowering in reinforcing neo-philanthropical principles of self-help and willpower which ultimately lead away from redistributive policies. This article therefore examines, through oral history with photo elicitation, how the people involved experienced being portrayed as the protagonists of self-advocacy on the poverty problem. The findings show how the portrayed people fluidly (dis)identified over the past 20 years through three intertwined subjective processes involving Courage as an artefact: for remembering (historical function), for assessing (evaluative function) and for advocacy (persuasive function). As such, they appear not as passive objects of others’ campaigning strategies, but as active co-constructors of self-advocacy rhetoric. Some of the pitfalls and potentials of identity politics in the struggle against poverty are discussed.