Edizioni FrancoAngeli - Last issue of RIVISTA TRIMESTRALE DI SCIENZA DELL’AMMINISTRAZIONE (1/2012)

Organizational well-being, group dynamics and homeostatic balance in public administration system

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Renato D'Amico
The need for innovation in public administration by focusing on their organizational dimension and the human factor has opened the way for a wider debate on issues such as organizational well-being. This has also involved a meditation on the paradigmatic structures that operates as sense making in the public administration system. In this article the unit of observation is the social relationship between individuals or relations between groups, with the result, for the organization, of the permanent search for a balance: here defined homeostatic balance. In this perspective, the core of the analysis is the subjective dimension in power relationships that ensure the control of the sequence "balance - ruptures and crises - new balance". In this contest, especially in Italy, the issue becomes the nature of change, transformative rather than evolutionary, and, together with it, the organizational learning proposed here as systemic process.

Public job market and failed local development: the case of the Sicilian Region

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Patrizia Santoro
For decades, we have been known that in Southern Italy the job offer is absorbed almost exclusively by the service sector. But the most important aspect - not yet explored by the official statistics - is that this sector is composed largely of organizations directly or indirectly financed by public resources. With the result that the majority of the southern population is paid by public administrations. How much do this anomaly of the job market impact on the ability and/or ways in which the southern governments drive the development process? Trying to answer this complex question, the author, after having given a definition of "public job market" that goes beyond the concept of the "wider public sector", traditionally understood, reconstructs with empirical researches the extent of the phenomenon using as a case study the satellite of the region Sicily as main core.

Political influence and occupational stability in the Albanian public administration

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Raimondo Ingrassia
This paper is split into two parts. In the first the issue of political influence and its relationship with occupational stability in the civil service is discussed. At the end of this part reasons are suggested for the political, bureaucratic, economic and organisational causes for the instability phenomenon in the public sector. In the second part the occupational situation of the Albanian public administration is explained in the light of the reasons stated above. This study argues that Albanian politicians tend to exploit personnel stability in order to direct administrative activity, to control bureaucratic performance and to achieve success at the ballots. On the contrary economic and organisational reasons for instability seem to be less important. The author concludes the study by proposing an escape-route with regard to the problem of occupational instability, from a perspective of modernisation of the Albanian public administration.

Miembros y miembras de la Comisión de Igualdad. Language and Gender in Spanish Public Communication

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Laura Mariottini, Veronica Sica
The institutional commitment to ensure equal opportunities between women and men involves an active work of (re)construction of the gender category through the language used in politic and public communication. Starting from the recognition of gendered linguistic categories, it is possible to consolidate the underpinning socio-cultural changes and, only then, reflection on gender will acquire a substantial feature. The authors examine the reformist instance of the Spanish public language by presenting the "miembra case" which has generated a debate in language, socio-cultural and media contexts from 2008 until today. The theoretical framework of the work is represented by gender studies.

Ideology and diffuseness of political and society repression in the late modernity

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Amplification of repression in Western modernity is a worrying and unsatisfiable question. From last period of 20th Century it develops new forms outside sanction law, integrated with medias and great trades projects. His imagine coincides with global politics and economies in the world. This essay tries to produce a sociological explanation, with a bit of philosophy, on repression development: his extra juridical presence, powerfully in spectacular advertisings distributed in rights war projects and consolidation of privileged freedoms.

Social analysis and the language of praxis. Pier Paolo Pasolini and the social documentary

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Anna Maria Paola Toti
Documentaries, as testimonies of social reality and as realistic devices, are a source of study and analysis for the sociologist; in fact, visual material is an essential document to understand how every culture represents itself, its alternatives and options. The idea that cinema is a reflection and a continuation of the real world, is at the basis of some important contributions such as those of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who offers a critical interpretation of man and history; the proletariat, the “street boys”, the Roman suburbs, the subhuman condition of life become the privileged contents of a cinema which has learnt the lesson of neorelism, though transfiguring and critically going beyond it. This cinema tends to transpose the direct data of experience in a strongly characterized artistic dimension.

A Revolution for the Constitution. Remarks on Maria Sofia Corciulo’s last work

Fri, 15 Mar 2012 8:00:00 GMT

Erica Antonini
Neapolitan revolution of 1820-21 has been diffusely considered a marginal rising by a wide part of Italian historiography. According to this view, it would be a movement quite disjointed to the following events regarding Italian "Risorgimento", especially because of its short duration (july 1820-march 1821) and of the limited impact exercised by it on "Regno delle Due Sicilie's" population. Maria Sofia Corciulo’s last work - Una Rivoluzione per la Costituzione (1820-’21) - with its meaningful subtitle Agli albori del Risorgimento Meridionale - aims to contradict these superficial evaluations, by a deep analysis of a rich historical and archive literature, in order to present a firm "revaluation" of the event, both from an institutional and socio-cultural point of view.