RISULTATI RICERCA

The paper analyses the concept of ‘fictional world’ that a brand builds around itself. In a hypercompetitive market a brand needs to differentiate its way of expression; one of the possibilities is the adoption of a fictional world that can be shared by consumers. Such a world has its actors, its narratives, its spaces and times that are build mainly trough advertising, that creates a if-world which consumers recognise as unique and typical. Nowadays enterprises can use other means to the construction and definition of a fictitious world: the point of purchase and the Internet. Concept store, flagship store and new retailing forms represent, indeed, a new meaningful space where brands and consumers meet and the Internet allows consumers, sharing the same enthusiasm for a brand, to meet and debate in a virtual place (brand communities).

In contemporary society, imagery and symbolic are part of the process of economic valorisation of goods. More than a simple covering of merchandise, the flow of stimuli, evocations, and expressions that arise from imagery, symbolic, and myth is a structure. It pervades daily life and people’ relationships with merchandise. As a consequence, the economy of late capitalism has the appearance of a symbolic economy, where the production of sense which is not a prerogative of companies or media, but is increasingly a creative and critic activity that belongs to people becomes production of value. The essay intends to define the concept of ‘symbolic economy’, as well as to understand the meaning of such expression in the social and business context, and to investigate company strategies.

The processes of change towards immaterial aspects plays an important role in contemporary society. This is particularly clear if we think of the evolution undergone, in the latest years, by cultural models that influence the image and social use of the body. The human body, in fact, has traditionally been considered as the most physical and concrete object that individuals had at their disposal; but, in the current era, it tends to become increasingly intangible as well. Such phenomenon is taking place as a consequence of a process called spectacularisation faced by western societies from the Eighteen century onwards. What we will try to demonstrate, therefore, is how the current cultural models of the body have their origins in such process.

The theme of this essay is the transformation of value produced by media processes in contemporary society. Media produce indeed a mediation and therefore a transformation in the processes of valorisation. Products, goods, merchandise, and services are converted into brands. As a result, the accumulation of valorisation of products is not only given by the amount of time spent to produce it; but to the time of exposure to brands, or rather to the advertising of brands to which individuals are exposed. The more time they are exposed to advertising (in all its forms), the more value is acquired by brands.

The author is inspired by Wassily Kandinksy’s famous treatise Über das Geistige im der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1912) when he states that the vocation for the immaterial is an essential ingredient in aesthetic practice. Taking into consideration, above all, the figurative arts, he does not intend to recount the history of this vocation, but rather to refer to a number of significant examples and periods of decisive importance also for modern art. The most significant example for the author is constituted by the Dada movement, which in the collective imagination tends to defuse the most dangerous elements of the infatuations or fears and senses of guilt generated at the beginning of the last century by scientific and technological progress and, above all, by the myths of mechanism. The analysis stops on the threshold of the modern society of virtual immateriality with a reference to two great post-modern artists who also feel the need to stress the immaterial vocation of art by grafting it onto ‘libertarian’ machines that are unproductive, useless and dematerializing: the artists are Jean Tinguely and Yves Klein.

Today’s economy has become an economy of symbolic or, in other words, of symbolic goods, of experiences, a feeling economy, or a fiction economy. The consequence of this circumstance is that new and tighter connections between economy and culture, as well as between management and human sciences, have emerged. But today’s economy is not only an advanced or creative sector of economy or human sciences; a sector that study new symbolic consumer behaviours. Its development determines a change in the nature itself of what is called symbolic. People treats it in a neutral, operative, and technical way: they are not sufficiently conscious of it, with the result that there are dangers they ignore. The scope of the paper is to provide a critical reflection on such a change.

Immateriality is a distinctive trait of today’s society, and many are the consequences it has on production and work. An analysis of such consequences is carried out. Essential competences are increasingly immaterial; such competences have to be constantly adapted to changes in production and society; they have to be enriched by immateriality that grows outside companies; value arises from giving significant immateriality to material products. That means it is immateriality what creates value: the value of material products is in their immaterial aspects. Problems and ambivalences are then discussed, such as the process of knowledge privatisation and the importance of individuality, subjectivity, and creativity.

The author reflects on aesthetics as the main distinctive trait of post-modern society; aesthetics in terms of ability to experience feelings and basis of post-modern tribes. It characterises people’s attitudes, who are not concerned with the consequences of theirs acts, but with the acts themselves (e.g. in affects, politics, production, and economy). Indeed, there is a strong desire of living the present: this is similar to the eternal paganism and accompanied by a return to ancient and archaic world. The logic of aesthetics is thus defined as participating to general creativity of life, as well as to its consumption. Further discussion and argumentation follow.

The paper underlines above all how the analysis and interpretation of school-towork transition and, more generally, of the relationship between young people and labour, need a complex theoretical and methodological framework, involving structural, institutional and individual variables. Secondly, it focuses on the not satisfying condition of young Italians for what regards their participation to the labour market: they often find work opportunities characterized by precarity and/or low professional skills. Thirdly, it suggests how young generations show some innovative behaviours and moods aimed to find good and new opportunities inside ongoing transformations.

Several years ago, Philippe Schmitter characterized tripartite concertation as a second-best solution for all actors concerned. But collective actors with basically the same features do not always succeed in reaching shared solutions that a) do not correspond to the preference order of any of the actors involved and b) to be effective, must be accepted by actors that do not directly participate in the agreement. How can we account for this varying degree of success? This article claims that we should try and combine three different types of independent variables. The first type is widespread in the political economy literature and refers to such variables as actors’ interests and behaviour which is path-dependent on the institutional context, changing power relations among these actors, conditions which do or do not allow for cooperative games. The second type refers to actors’ cognitive processes, such as their perceptions of power relations, ability to formulate alternative scenarios and their implications, willingness to learn from previous experience. Finally, symbolic action aimed at maintaining collective identities may be important. Leaders that strike a deal must be able to rely on symbolic devices capable to convince their rank and file. Also, all actors must be able to argue that second-best solutions are necessary to achieve public goods that may even be socially constructed as national emergencies.

The paper examines the nature of modern work in Britain. It probes an apparent paradox. Classical sociological models of work were strongly influenced by the organizational features of factory production. These models appear decreasingly to epitomize modern factory work but increasingly to characterize large areas of contemporary service sector employment. This apparent paradox forms the cornerstone of the present analysis. The empirical focus is both on manufacturing and on three sub-sectors within services: call centres, retailing and logistics. The paper concludes that skilled work is increasing within modern factories yet non-skilled work is also increasing across a range of private service sector arenas of employment.

Abstract: this paper presents a conceptual framework for understanding the development of the cultural constraints that the society puts on consumption phenomena. The author considers first the ideological criticism which had characterized the sociological thought, focusing on the exponents of the School of Frankfurt. Issues such as false need, alienation, standardization of culture and manipulation by the capitalistic system come under review. Other social constraints are then identified in the growth of consumer protection associations (consumerism) and no global pressure groups. Implications on the social role of brands and the ethical dimensions of consumption are drawn.

The aim of this article is to summarize some elements about the transformation of work, analysed in more details in a little handbook just published by the author on the sociology of work today. The idea is that there is a shift from the traditional forms based on making things towards new forms of social skills. In a theoretical perspective, the contribution by Amartya Sen is considered very relevant to understand this metamorphosis. In the empirical sense, the article takes in consideration the results of the last researches by many sociologists (Accornero, Beck, Castells, Florida, Gallino, Gorz, Kern and Schumann, ecc.). The main result of the study is that the conditions of the social exchange in the division of labour, industrial relations, labour markets and welfare systems will have more and more influence not only on quality, pay and hours of work but above all on the right combination of the two dimensions of doings and beings for the future worker.

University is required to make its way towards a less academic and speculative but more applied type of vocational training. Society becomes more complex and integrated, work more differentiated and variable and the demand for knowledge and professional capabilities is rapidly changing. Higher education, and therefore university, is required to train individuals capable of acting efficiently in the society and developing inside themselves an applied type of abilities, whose benchmark is the economic performance. The aim is to train expert individuals. Thus a mono-dimensional conception of knowledge prevails; it tends to level the goals of higher education on the aspect of activity so that terms such as wisdom, reflexivity, criticism, introspection, comprehension give way to expressions like competence, capability, ability, outcome, information, technique, flexibility. The article critically discusses the theme of competences and argues about the goals of university education.

Production, distribution and consumption are usually described in managerial literature as equally strong, following the so-called theory of balancing powers. Actually, in Italy power has always been concentred in the hands of producers, whereas distribution looks archaic and fragmented and consumers are deprived of representative organisations. But this scenery is changing, getting more and more consumer-oriented (not just marketing-oriented). For the first time in history, we can remark a convergence of interests between producers and consumers, as customer satisfaction emerges as the main competitive asset.

This text aims to synthetize recent evolutions in the subjects and approaches of the French contemporary sociology in the field of work, organizations and institutions. 272 The underlined hypothesis is a cultural proximity with other latine countries, specially Italy, inside the wider international scientific debate. One of the main common theme is the institutional and socio-political embeddedness of economic activities, quite different and complementary with the network analysis promoted by such authors like Granovetter. In the French context, there is a strong tradition for services and society, a sociology of institutions, for Durkheim and Mauss to Sainsaulieu. It has to be adapted in a situation of globalization.

In the arena where job seekers and firms are looking for each other, as well as it occurs in all spaces for economic action, according to Polanyi’s approach, which the new economic sociology reverted to, we can find three modes of regulation: the market, the social network and the organisation. Empirical research is aimed at showing which mix is prevailing in any particular situation. Two recent surveys carried out in some Italian provinces, let us to see, on the one hand, how people having different personal and professional characteristics are looking for jobs and find their jobs and, on the other, how firms having different economic features are looking for workers to hire. Those behaviours of job-seeking and job-finding can be grouped according to the triad market, network and organisation. Both for job-seekers and firms social networks and personal activity are the most used and the most successful ways to achieve their goals, but both job-seekers with the weakest characteristics and firms having vacancies difficult to fill are by far more likely to address public and/or private employment services. Therefore, the results of those surveys prove once again the hypothesis that organisations are called to cope with the economic and social problems when market forces and networks failed. Thus organisations have to be well-built to face situations that both market and networks were not able to solve. This is an important lesson not only for public employment services, but more generally for all public policies.