RISULTATI RICERCA

In the last twenty years, the Italian television environment has changed deeply as a result of the digital revolution and the media convergence: the contemporary television is a complex phenomenon encompassing several changes in consumption practices, in textual features and in the industrial strategies of broadcasters. The essay will explore the principals dynamics that characterize the complex relationship between Tv and its audience today: the proliferation of screens and texts, the multiplicity of production and consumption practices, the variety of touchpoints to connect TV content and viewers.

The paper analyzes some recent developments regarding communication phenomena and asks for a deep critical rethinking in the field of media studies. The unexpected and surely unforeseen communication development has decisively affected societal norms and behaviors, thus provoking a sort of shock in contemporary societies. Communication scholars have shown a severe lack of preparation towards these social changes. In a wider sense, Sociology as a discipline risks to be marginalized by communication, thus loosing her own social reputation.

Communication, method, and interpretation are always tightly related, but the current cultural scene - also thanks to the "society of communication" - makes the interpretative nature of the method more undeniable. This article looks into this cultural horizon in order to briefly illustrate what is changing in the field of social research methodology. The active use of media, the concept of "text", the investigation on the new media, the convergence of "qualitative" and "quantitative" research, and the relation between method and art are only but a few examples of the topics elicited by communication sciences, which also concern the methodologist.

The article shows the vitality and the latest trends of Sociology of communication in empirical researches, theoretical studies and practical implementations "in" and "with" the media. Communication studies deal with the development of research methodologies and with the observation of a system of phenomena in constant evolution, which involves media and their topics, culture and consumption. In the present mediatized and transmedial context, it’s possible to observe profound evolutionary processes that concern cultural industry and its studies, journalism, television and reception, concepts such as public opinion and citizenship. But also issues such as new identity narratives, food, fashion and new forms of communication and consumption. This multiplicity of perspectives distinguish from the beginning the Sociology of Communication Review, which reaches with the present issue its 50th year of existence.

This paper intends to propose a personal and professional witness on how Hirschman’s approach can contribute to enlighten the practice of evaluation. The author, after recalling how she got in touch with Hirschman and his thought, describes the way in which Hirschman’s concepts (the thesis of the slack, the linkages effects, the exit and voice scheme, the ethical concern, the political rhetoric, etc.) have gradually influenced her research activities and her evaluation practice. In this way, the author can thus focus on recurrent problems, and ways to address them, as regards the planning of development measures, the role of intellectuals in change process, the relationship between politics and evaluation, the use of methodologies and evaluation techniques.

Through an ideal dialogue with Albert O. Hirschman and Charles Lindblom, in this article, I focus on how to envision and assess desired change. The most innovative contributions by Hirschman and Lindblom are still in tune with recent complexity theory-based approaches to policy analysis and evaluation. Departing from rational choice premises, I highlight learning and social mechanisms to mobilize those contextual resources, which are underutilized or hidden. The aim of this article is to shed light on those processual dimensions of change where to focus public policy analysis and evaluation.

Most of Hirschman’s theories and mechanisms is present, although not openly recognized, in a series of recent evaluation approaches, from theory-based evaluation to positive thinking approaches. This refers to some topoi of evaluation, as the complexity of programs, ways and timing of implementation, expected and un-expected consequences, lessons learned, evaluation uses, multidisciplinarity. By proposing such a dialogue between Hirschman and contemporary evaluators, the author shows that Hirschman can be considered at the same time a forerunner and a valid interlocutor, and that his thinking can strengthen the theoretical basis of those approaches, while helping to challenge theories and methodologies given for granted in traditional approaches to evaluation, whose validity is at stake.

Over the last three decades, the spread of football - that is a sport involving a really wide and heterogeneous public, as well as animated by strong passions - has often gone hand in hand with the spread of violence phenomena. In order to manage these phenomena, Institutions have been forced to adopt several measures aimed at reducing the number of incidents inside and outside the stadium. The paper aims to describe the evolution of the violence phenomena through the analysis of some significant indicators. From a methodological point of view, it carried out a quantitative analysis of official data. Even though the research doesn’t allow us to deduce any causal implication in respect of the new rules efficacy, it shows some interesting trends in the development of violence phenomena. At the same time, it highlights some policies indications for the public debate.

According to a shared interpretation in the policy analysis literature, the failures of the development policies for the Mezzogiorno should be attributed to the distributive nature of those policies, which not only were ineffective, but also perpetuated the underdevelopment of that region. This article will test that hypothesis on two important instruments: territorial pacts and integrated territorial projects. Through the analysis and the comparison of the selection and evaluation methods used since the Nineties to allocate founding, the study shows that the absence of a serious selection and evaluation, first at central then at regional level, encouraged a distributive deviation.

The present article aims to contribute to the debate on qualitative methods in policy evaluation. The central claim is that those methods are fundamental in order to uncover and refine our knowledge on why programmes work. The article starts with a brief review of the literature on causal mechanisms, providing a basic definition of mechanisms and discussing their utility in policy evaluation. The article proceeds by defending the methodological advantage of case studies for the formulation of new theories and then presents process tracing as a rigorous methods for drawing within-case inferences. An extended example of a local development programme is used to illustrate the method.

We report the results of Lavoro&Psiche (L&P), a RCT which analyzes the effectiveness of intensive and personalized support - provided by professional operators named coach - on the probability of mentally disabled people to take up paid work. The result of the intention-to-treat analysis, which measures the effect of receiving the offer of service, shows a difference - not statistically significant - by 5 percentage points between the employment rate of patients assigned to the coach and that of control patients. A different interpretation analyzes L&P as an Randomized Encouragement Trial in which a particular treatment (the traineeship) is being actively promoted by the coach only to a subset of users. With this analysis, having done a traineeship increases the likelihood of obtaining an employment of 18.5 percentage points. It is possible that, for the mentally disabled, the traineeship can be an effective gateway into the labor market.

In this paper we focus on the impact of low cost carriers on tourism. With respect to the previous literature our paper has the advantage of using a very rich dataset, including territorially disaggregated data on tourism expenditure. To ensure greater consistency we employ an instrumental variable estimator, devised by exploiting the exogenous airports’ structural characteristics. Our results indicate that proximity to a low cost operating airport, measured in terms of travel time, exerts a positive effect on total tourism receipts; the estimated impact is larger if we consider leisure tourism expenditure only.