RISULTATI RICERCA

The role of patents is threefold: first, they are important to state the property rights of an invention; second, they are necessary to secure financing for starting a new venture; third, they are fundamental to recoup R&D investments. Noting the imperfections of the patent legal system, the market has two potential levels of competition under different structures: the inter-sector monopolistic competition and the intra-sector Cournot oligopoly. Considering the sectorial market share as the indicator of patent system enforcement, the author finds that growth takes place, if and only if, there are some property rights of private knowledge produced by R&D activities. In turn, the enforcement of patent system translates into a low degree of competition among firms. Its influence on the growth rate goes in a single unambiguous direction. As competition rises, few resources are available for R&D, so the growth rate goes down.

This paper aims to show in which way the joint use of analysis techniques of the complex networks and the human capital economics might lead to the implementation of new and more effective policies to contrast organized crime. For this purpose, the paper employs an interdisciplinary approach and studies, making use of the techniques and concepts of Social Network Analysis, the structure of existing interpersonal relationships inside two criminal networks engaged respectively in international drug trafficking and in the local providing of social welfare services to the person. The study of the above mentioned networks is based on the analysis of judicial acts issued in the context of two recent police operations successfully completed. The results highlight the remarkable ability of networking and the resilience to law enforcement activities of the examined criminal organizations, suggesting the adoption of new and diversified repressive policies based on the analysis of human capital which these organizations can use for their own purposes.

In a recently published book, Bruno Jossa (2015) proposed an economic system composed mainly of co-operative firms (democratic enterprises), where means of production are publicly owned and wage labour is forbidden. Jossa argues that a system of co-operative firms, not a system of planned economy, is the true socialism, fully compatible with the letter of Marx’s writings. Jossa’s proposal is compared with that of Meade (1989, 1993) involved in the use of a special kind of co-operative, DLCP, defined as a firm in which workers and capitalists negotiate an agreement which fixes the firm’s profit appropriation criterion and provides for the issuance of two different categories of shares, labour shares and capital shares. Meade’s project also provides a large state intervention in the economy. Both proposals lead, according to their authors, to reduce unemployment and to an improvement in the material and moral condition of individuals. Strengths and weaknesses of the two proposals are highlighted.

The contribution investigates the origins of Made in Italy communication and promotion. It stresses the importance of the relationship between the complex Italian fashion system and Italian cultural industry: fashion exhibitions, the role of specialized press and magazines, the movie industry and the star system of the Fifties. This history was shaped by important protagonists such as the "legendary" figure of Gianbattista Giorgini, inventor and realizator of the first Italian runway show in 1951 which is considered amongs the specialists the founding event of Italian Fashion. In these origins we meet the most important names of fashion and of the best Italian craftsmenship tradition as well as buyers, entrepreneurs and Italian and foreign journalists. All of these people and professionals together contributed to the definition and the success of Made in Italy.

The article proposes the notion of infomediation as an useful tool for empirical sociological research on the role that new social subjects play today in web communication. After a brief illustration of the contribution of the social sciences for the analysis of the effects and practices of media technologies, especially about the agenda building of the public sphere, the paper describes some examples of the infomediation phenomenon. It assumes from the literature the hypothesis that new technological oligarchic élites are constituting, with strong relationships with other types of élites. Finally, it shows some results and methodological suggestions of a few first empirical researches on the role of Google or Twitter for the newsmaking practices of information.

The paths of public communication in Italy are interwoven according to many different factors: the reform of public administration, the crisis of trust in institutions, the widespread movements for the defence of collective goods, the central role of mainstream media in public life, the diffusion of digital media, the main role of politics in defining the public sphere, the process of europeanization. A factor which has characterized the development of public communication in Italy is the number of regulations which constantly redefines its boundaries and contents. The paper reconstructs these itineraries in four main phases: the experimentation phase, the institutionalization phase, the performance evaluation phase, the model of collaborative administration. The analysis has been conducted in relation to the different meanings that concepts of transparency, image, services, participation and active citizenship assume in different phases.

The article intends to offer a literature review of Italian sociological research on status communication of Italian middle class in the last fifteen years. We focus on a central topic of sociology of consumption, such as middle class distinction and identity strategies, and on a status group who was strongly affected by the recent economic crisis. The review is structured in two sections. The first section focuses on the middle class consumption strategies before the 2008 economic crisis, the second is aimed to identify the strategies of facing the crisis.

The essay reflects on citizens’ proximity mediated by personal and community technologies. Once distinct technologies, now in an unprecedented mix, that creates a space and a time that are parallel and interfering, generated by users themselves. A third channel that goes beyond private communication, a non-public sociability but communitybased, characterized by personal and informal exchanges. The essay presents the project In Media Loci, which focused on two fields very representatives for Italy: the network of small towns scattered throughout the territory and cultural heritage, investigating the relationship between local communities and the new digital spaces that locative technologies are defining.

The article briefly sketches the development of the studies on media and political communication in Italy, from the parties democracy (or so called First Republic) in which prevails the intra-élite political communication, to the spectacularization of extra-élite and public opinion communication in the berlusconian age, up to transition to a postmodern political communication, of which the pop politics is one of the prominent topics. Particular attention is dedicated to items as electoral campaigning and leadership personalization.

The article discusses the role of food as an instrument of identity and a channel of contact through cultures. This is argued drawing from the food practices of international migrants in the context of the global flows of people and commodities in present day Italy. In this regard, food plays an essential role in the rebuilding of a familiar context in which migrants can feel temporarily "at home". At the same time, food is an important form of communication and contact between different cultures and social contexts. In this process of exchange both migrants and hosts, food habits and diets are modified as they incorporate elements and ingredients from each other, making more porous the boundaries of difference.

The article explores the phenomenon of ethical fashion from the beginning to nowadays as an example of material culture where the role of new values is particularly visible. Fashion, long-considered the most frivolous/useless/negative way of consumption, is framed by the author through the categories usually employed when explaining the passage from rational productive modernity to the aesthetic consumer culture of postmodernity. Ethical fashion seems to contrast this dichotomous mentality and expects to integrate aesthetic innovation and morals, sustainability and shared welfare, production and consumption. A new Ethical Imagination, supported by advanced digital instruments and the recent sharing economy values, drives toward work/consumption solutions that promise to subvert old hierarchies and alienated relations as well as gender bias.

The article summarizes the Italian debate on the concept of cultural industry, since the first translations of the main authors in the field (Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Morin). The article is articulated in three parts. The first one discusses the way the national debate developed the concept, following the main indications of the authors quoted above. The second part follows the two main theoretical path in studies on cultural industry in italian bibliography: the sociohistorical studies on the media production and the ethno-social studies on creative industries. The third part proposes some questions about the possible development of the studies in the era of digitalization.

The article is focused on the birth of a new style in TV series in the United States around the end of the Eighties (the so-called “HBO Style”) and discusses their characteristics, narrative plots and features. Furthermore the article depicts the landing of these narrative contents in Italy, facing a backward-looking mediascape with a duopolistic presence of two networks, Rai and Mediaset. New American series greatly contribute to change this blocked system, now challenged by a multinational conglomerate, Sky. Finally the article depicts the shifts from free-to-air television to pay-per-view and then to video on demand.

The digital age has been producing a real cultural revolution within the journalistic field. Journalists and editorial organizations have to adapt their working practices to comply with new forms of news coverage, which change our way of accessing and consuming news. At the same time, sources are getting more and more professional in managing news processes. This has deeply influenced both news contents and the containers through which reality is delimited and shaped. Every newsroom must be able to oversee the newsmaking process in three different contexts: the traditional one, the web, and social media; therefore journalists must develop efficient strategies and criteria to manage each of them.

The contribution analyses the social change from the point of view of the mediatization approach. The concept of mediatization has to be distinguished from that of mediation, because it identifies a meta-process of cultural and social transformation such as urbanization, globalization and individualization. This meta-process is influenced -but not determined - by media and it refers to the ability of media to spread their format or to impose specific frame in the lifeworld. On this basis, the article identifies three strands of the debate about mediatization - institutionalist, social constructivist, material - and then identifies the systemic approach as an important corrective to the limits of the three approaches. The systemic approach, using the themes of "synchronization" and "irritation" among the social systems and the "media logics" shows how the mediatization is a complex process that must also include non-media factors and agency of subjects. In summary, the mediatization is a meta-process that can not be reduced to specific techno-communicative devices and therefore has a more abstract generalized valence. But at the same time the mediatization does not incorporate an (average) unitary logic and therefore can only be observed through the specificity of the media practices. Ultimately the mediatization is not proposed as a new paradigm or as a middle-range theory. Rather it is a guiding concept for the empirical exploration of the social transformations that takes into account how it is today intensified media’s saturation of social interaction.