RISULTATI RICERCA

Since the European Union came into existence, it has faced two major economic crises. In the 1970s, the first oil crisis put an end to the continuous and fastest economic growth of the first period of the European Economic Communities. More than 40 years later, the 2008 financial crisis generated a series of acute crises, the effects of which can be felt to this day. Comparing the European Union’s social response to these two key periods, and more specifically comparing how the European Union faced the issue of company restructuring, highlights the evolution of Social Europe. While the 1970s saw the first steps towards harmonising social legislation, with the adoption of the first social directives, it has been almost impossible to adopt new rules on the European level since the 2000s. After analysing these two periods, the specific objective of this paper is to analyse whether the European Pillar of Social Rights marks a real departure from current prevailing trends.

This article explores the contribution of the European Pillar of Social Rights to the principle of equal treatment. Given that this is an area of EU labour law where there are well-established instruments, it is necessary to consider whether the Pillar makes any significant new contribution. To this end, the article analyses the Pillar’s principles relating to: gender equality and work-life balance; equal opportunities, including the inclusion of people with disabilities; and the fair and equal treatment of workers, irrespective of the type or duration of the employment relationship. It identifies instances where the Pillar moves beyond the standards of existing instruments, as well as examples of the Pillar creating momentum for fresh legal interventions. Yet this is coupled with a tendency to rely upon non-binding instruments and it remains within existing paradigms for regulating the European labour market, such as fle-xicurity.

Questo scritto si propone di offrire una valutazione sulle prospettive dell’Eu-ropa sociale attraverso l’analisi del ruolo affidato ai diritti sociali fondamentali sanciti dalla Carta di Nizza/Strasburgo. Vi si sostiene che l’insufficiente effettività della Carta, frutto di interpretazioni giudiziali non sempre coerenti e giustificate dalle pur restrittive disposizioni generali che ne disciplinano l’interpretazione e l’applicazione, non implica l’abbandono di un processo di integrazione informato ai principi della solidarietà transnazionale, a condizione che, al di là della Carta, si inneschino processi politici di risocializzazione dell’Europa in grado di correggere l’attuale governance economica.

History sometimes jumps. For EMU and Social Europe, that jump occurred in 2010. Since 2010, because of the nature of the EU institutional response to sovereign debt in its Member States, EMU has been one of the key drivers of Social Europe. The goal of this analysis is to explore the key manifestations of this new policy frame for Social Europe and how it fits with other Social Europe policy frames. I first briefly identify other pre-existing Social Europe policy frames. Three key manifestations of the EMU frame, sovereign debt conditionality, the European Semester and the European Pillar of Social Rights, are then analysed to consider the policy reach, distributive implications and normative bite of Social Europe via EMU.

The main purposes of this study are:
-to frame, from a historical point of view, the Salesian Congregation starting from the year of its constitution (1859), by first identifying aspects of the provincial government and then focusing on the common administrative practices followed by the Community’s organization;
-to analyse the main documents of the Congregation, because ‘all the archives, mainly the provincial ones and also those of the Houses, are important and must be guarded and expanded following the archival rules and the most modern techniques’ (Brocardo, 1966); to understand, in light of the evidence that emerged, how the organizational, managerial and, mode of all informational tools were implemented inside the Congregation, allowing it to pursue its institutional purpose with adequate control of resources and a growing improvement of operations.

Conceiving of accounting as a social practice, this study examines the role of accounting practices in facilitating the development process. The period chosen was characterized by political, social, and economic events that would lead to Milan becoming the financial capital of Italy. These events similarly influenced the development of the Monte di Pietà, a type of charitable organization originating in Italy that ultimately, through a law passed in 1898, became the country’s first credit institution. The analysis carried out on accounting practices of the Monte di Pietà of Milan shows, in particular, how the functioning of the institute completely changed after the Napoleonic isolation. Furthermore, the considerable attention paid to producing detailed reports induced virtuous behaviour among the members of the organization that was not required by national regulatory provisions. In this sense, accounting was not only an instrument shaped by the context in which it was inserted, but it was also an instrument that shaped company functioning. The Monte, a charitable institution at the time actually functioned as a credit institution, even before legislative intervention. The accounting practices used, well above the legislative obligations, induced virtuous behaviours among the members of the organization. In other words, the Monte’s change into a credit institution was not the result of a path originated by legislative provision but rather from the social behaviour of its members, even by the means of accounting practices.

Secularisation is a complex and multidimensional concept. The article frames secularisation as the decline in the social significance of religion and differentiates it from personal religious beliefs, though negatively correlated. The article further explores Dobbelaere’s notion of compartmentalization and underlines that people’s expectations from religion are crucial aspects to understand its public and social role. While it is well known that education provides a rich field for uncovering the relation between state and religion, the article takes a closer look at citizenship education through the lens of Dobbelaere’s compartmentalization. Indeed, they both encompass different levels and spheres of life, including the educational, the economical, the juridical, the familial, the medical, the political and the scientific. Moving from the results of a recent international study on civic and citizenship education (ICCS 2016), and presenting some of its main findings in the area of students’ attitudes toward the influence of religion in society, the article shows that a higher degree of religious involvement tends to increase support for religion having a role in society, confirming also for students a tendency already identified by previous research. On the contrary, students’ higher levels of endorsement of religious influence are negatively associated with parental education and levels of civic knowledge. This last trend suggest that students with a higher level of civic knowledge held somewhat less positive attitudes toward religious influence in society. The result can be interpreted as a higher level of compartmentalization, in the sense that students believe that religion should not influence the other spheres of life, the so-called profane sub-systems, leading to the conclusion that learning about civic issues may have the by-product of strengthening convictions about the necessary separation between state and religion.

The article offers a critical review of the tools available to evaluate transformative learning process and outcomes. In the literature, there are different approaches to validate and use these tools, confirming that Transformative Learning Theory is a multi-layers theory. We would like to: 1) show the state of the art of assessment perspectives in TLT; 2) define a framework to categorize them; 3) depict a possible evolution of TL assessment approaches. Starting from this backdrop, in the second section of the article, we describe how and to what extent an on-line tool (Doctors’ Perspective Inventory) has been constructed and adapted to manage continuing educational activities for doctors in the framework of the transformative learning theory and professional development. The DPI is a quantitative, multi-language and self-respondent survey based on a Likert scale that is grounded on the TPI model (Teaching Perspective Inventory, Pratt, 1998). The thesis we will present is that the administration of this tool could support to plan organizational devices and transformative learning paths for professional development of community of practitioners within medical institutions