RISULTATI RICERCA

L’unione Europea, a seguito di un’analisi approfondita della situazione attuale del contrasto al riciclaggio di denaro e contrasto al finanziamento del terrorismo, ha ritenuto di integrare la disciplina in materia in modo da favore ancora di più la collaborazione degli Stati membri, in quanto le differenze legislative e la necessaria dipendenza dai singoli Stati e dalle autorità preposte al controllo dei singoli Paesi, ha costituito e costituisce ancora oggi il principale ostacolo ad un efficace contesto a detti fenomeni, nonostante la regolamentazione ormai trenten-nale del fenomeno. I punti essenziali delle nuove disposizioni sono essenzialmene due: da una parte la creazione di un’Autorità centrale per il coordinamento (AMLA – Anti Money Laundering Authority), l’assistenza e la supervisione delle attività svolte dalle autorità dei singoli Paesi e dall’altra la creazione di una disciplina, auspicabilmente di fonte regolamentare, che possa avere una più rapida e diretta attuazione per far fronte a fenomeni in continua evoluzione. L’esperienza italiana in materia è inoltre alla base della candidatura di Roma quale sede centrale dell’AMLA.

EU national governments and the EU itself are committed to improving the ef-fectiveness of social protection systems to promote the spread of ‘horizontal’ relationships between individuals and remove inequalities that prevent people from fully participating in political, economic, and social life. We evaluate this process by examining the performance of social protection systems in 22 Euro-pean countries, focusing on the phenomenon of social stratification over the pe-riod 2007-2017. For this purpose, we refer to both a multidimensional perfor-mance index and principal component analysis. The empirical evidence suggests that the financial crisis of 2007 and the Great Recession that started after 2011 changed (in many ways downsized) the objectives of social protection systems, contributing only partially to the de-stratification of the population of European states over the period covered.

The performance of state-owned enterprises (SOE) depends on the quality of many essential services, the degree of efficiency and effectiveness of most public expenditure and, often, the financial statement of the participating admin-istrations. There are therefore numerous reasons why the financial statement of these companies should be inspired by the highest quality levels. The results of the research presented here, however, do not confirm this expectation and highlight the limitations caused by an uncritical adoption of the capital company model which, focused on measuring the economic result, proves unable to meet accountability needs generated by the public nature of the resources used and the presence of purposes of general interest.

This paper analyses a case of severe labour exploitation, involving a group of Bulgarian fruit and vegetable pickers of Roma origin employed in the seasonal harvest, especially of tomatoes, in the Foggia area involved in a 10-year cycle of seasonal migration between Italy and Bulgaria. The essay presents the general characteristics and factors affecting the form of extreme exploitation in farm work in Italy and reconstructs the working conditions and migration trajectories of this group of farm laborers of Roma origin to see how ethnicity, widespread anti-Gypsyism, and forms of extreme social exclusion accentuate the dynamics of labor exploitation. This group experiences the most intense forms of exploitation on the ground compared to other exploited foreign laborers. The case study is based on ethnographic that lasted about 2 years and interviews with privileged witnesses.

This study presents the results of exploratory research on precarity and class. Through key concepts drawn from critical sociology, we try to understand class as class struggle, but not in the political sense of the concept. Here class struggle means the uninterrupted efforts of a whole group of people, within the given circumstances, to create better living conditions. Precarity is part of these circumstances and it is framed within the dynamics of valorisation of labour, which tends to reduce the person to simple labour-power. The participants are parents in pre-carious employment and we want to report and reflect on their efforts to achieve decent living standards. The intent of this study is critical, it does not want to demonstrate whether the “precariat” is a social class or not, but through the narratives of parents in precarious employment about their difficult circumstances, this research wants to explore how daily struggles can be understood as class struggles of people at the margins.

Despite the growing relevance of service activities within manufacturing companies, studies on white collars employed in contemporary factories are limited. The present article discusses the results of a mixed-methods study involving financial and commercial clerks, production technicians and research and development technicians employed within a selected number of Italian plants. The article describes the characteristics of participants’ job in terms of autonomy, intensity and complexity, as well as the relationship between employees, work, companies and trade unions, focussing on topics that are crucial for the recent discussion around the spread of remote work.

University rankings are an increasingly important aspect of the world of higher education. They have become an essential component for providing transparency in universities, serving at the same time to help measure and evaluate the quality of those institutions. Rankings differ according to their objectives, target audience, content, and methodologies. In general, rankings do not include indicators relating to gender equality. There are a few exceptions that include indicators of gender balance – understood as the proportion of women and men in different academic fields – in the student body and among academic staff. The main objective of this article is to consider which indicators should be incorporated into measurements of equality in Spanish universities. The article explores the idea that measuring equality can be interpreted from two different perspectives: either as a measure equivalent to parity or as a measure equivalent to equity. The two approaches have distinct ideological and philosophical bases, and their operationalization provides different results in the classification of universities.

The academic trajectories of women in the Southern Cone are marked by different obstacles. From an intersectional perspective, this article asks: what are the discriminatory situations that affect the academic trajectories of women in the Southern Cone of Latin America? To address this question, a survey was conducted among 453 female academics from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Based on the collected data, a descriptive analysis was performed, to explore the type and the level of exposure to discriminatory situations, enriched with brief descriptions of the types of discrimination experienced by the academics. The findings suggest that academics in the region face discrimination based on sexism, racism, classism, xenophobia, and homophobia. Yet, although female academics in all the analyzed countries experience discrimination, it is those who identified themselves racially, as migrants and as women, who suffer the major levels of exposure to discrimination.

Several studies have shown the impact of parenthood on academic careers and the existence of a motherhood penalty. However, fathers’ experiences of reconciling caring responsibilities with academic work are less studied. The article explores the representations of fatherhood and men’s reconciliation practices in Italian academia. The analysis is based on 64 semi-structured interviews with male associate professors and postdoc researchers in various Italian universities, working in STEM and SSH departments. The results indicate that, in the early stages of the academic career, men similarly to women tend to postpone parenthood or to “choose” not to have children. Those men who have children, instead, enact different models of fatherhood that we have called the ‘absent father’, the ‘negotiator’ and the ‘present father’, without significant differences among disciplines or academic positions. However, only a minority of fathers are closely involved in childcare, and they experience penalties and work-related stress. The article gives insights into possible policies to support the work-life balance of the (still rare) involved academic fathers and to encourage the others to share care duties more equally with their partners.

The gender pay gap (13.7% in 2022 in the UK Higher Education (HE) sector) provides an overall snapshot of gender inequality in a specific setting. The causes of the gender pay gap are multifaceted but inextricably linked to the transition to parenthood. However, despite the transformative potential of family leave policy and practice as a strategy to progress gender equality, there has been less focus on HEIs’ approaches to supporting transition to parenthood as a strategy to tackle the gender pay gap. I employ the Capability Approach (CA) combined with a discursive conceptualisation of gender to explore how gender norms shape parents’ decision-making within university workplace cultural contexts. This study contributes evidence of incongruence between parents’ gender justice aspirations, their experiences and HE employer gender justice strategies. The study identifies the need to explore how gender justice is framed, and translated in practice, within HE employer EDI strategies.

This contribution analyses how gender inequalities are reproduced in the everyday life of research work. From a theoretical point of view, the author concentrates on presenting the transformations that have taken place in research work since the establishment of the culture of evaluation, within the so-called global neo-liberal university. Subsequently, these reflections will be interpreted concerning their incidence in reproducing gender asymmetries within this field of work, also analyzing the main theories that interrogate these dynamics within the academy. Finally, 12 narrative interviews with female researchers will be analyzed, to demonstrate that the gender asymmetries that characterize the contemporary academy cannot be resolved solely through normative practices, but how there is a need to transform the everyday relationships that are reproduced in university classrooms and departments.

Over the last decades, Italian university reforms have put increased pressure on academics and researchers towards greater productivity and accountability. These changes have generated an ‘overtime culture’, which is one of the main determinants of workaholism, over-commitment, and presenteeism among academics. The consequences of such changes are not gender-neutral: women – more often disadvantaged in academic careers than men – might be more affected by increased work pressure and more likely to work excessively to avoid career penalties. By using an original web-survey of about 1300 academics from four Italian universities, this article investigates gender differences in workaholic behaviours (i.e., working at night, on Sundays, etc.), and their link with the way researchers perceive the recruitment processes and gender disparities. The authors found that women are more workaholic than men, and this is explained by perceptions of gender equality in their working environment.

This special issue aims to contribute to the debate on gender inequalities in academia and the gender equality policies that address them. In this introduction we offer an overview of the debate and of the main research issues and theoretical perspectives, showing how a multiplicity of approaches are needed for both understanding and transforming higher education institutions. Macro, meso and micro level approaches illuminate the gendered individual, cultural and institutional factors that constrain and enable academic life, with special attention paid to how the neoliberal turn, and its organizational consequences, exacerbates gender inequalities. Women, gender, care, and intersectionality approaches allow scholars to focus on the different gendered or intersectional relationships within academia. Policy-oriented approaches allow us to analyse and assess progress in institutional efforts to close the gap on gender inequalities in academia. Actor-centred studies expose the power struggles between actors that oppose or promote gender equality policies in academia.

Viene raccontata una esperienza clinica di circa quarantacinque anni fa in cui un paziente affetto da paralisi isterica alle gambe viene trattato con un breve intervento suggestivo che gli ha fatto riac-quistare l’uso degli arti inferiori. Il terapeuta non aveva alcuna esperienza di ipnosi, e l’intervento, che è durato una ventina di minuti, è stato improvvisato, impiegando diverse tecniche suggestive e includendo anche tentativi di interpretazione di conflitti inconsci.

Lo storico viennese Johannes Reichmayr ha coordinato la pubblicazione delle Opere Complete dello psicoanalista Paul Parin (1916-2009) in 19 volumi pubblicati dal 2018 al 2024 dalla casa editrice viennese Mandelbaum. Pioniere dell’etnopsicoanalisi, Parin ha vissuto la psicoanalisi co-me una forma di critica sociale e di azione politica, la cui graduale e sistematica articolazione emerge finalmente con grande chiarezza dalle Opere Complete. Ne viene fatta una dettagliata rico-struzione, entrando anche nel merito della vita di Parin, del Seminario psicoanalitico di Zurigo (PSZ) da lui fondato, e della sua stretta collaborazione con la rivista Psicoterapia e Scienze Uma-ne. Lo stesso vale per la sua fortunata attività letteraria e per la sua partecipazione alla vita politica, documentata da una serie di scritti a sfondo autobiografico e di epistolari, come viene mostrato anche alla luce dei volumi 9 e 10, dedicato quest’ultimo agli “Scottanti problemi dei nostri tempi”.

Riteniamo che nel commento di Piero Porcelli (2024) vi sia una rappresentazione delle teorizza-zioni di Franz Alexander che non trova riscontro nelle sue opere. Alexander non identifica il con-flitto intrapsichico come variabile indipendente da cui sorgerebbe la malattia, e non è riscontrabile che per Alexander la psicosomatica riguardi alcune malattie e non un metodo. Alexander propone esattamente un metodo di indagine della sofferenza psichica che contempla l’esame dell’organismo nella sua interezza, realizzato da una équipe che include competenze di medicina interna e di psichiatria. Concordiamo con l’analisi di Mauro Fornaro (2024) sulle dinamiche post-Alexander che hanno portato alla crisi della psicosomatica e sulla necessità di tornare a ragionare in termini di paradigma, centrato non sulle relazioni mente/corpo ma sull’organismo, nelle sue dimensioni psichiche e biologiche, di cui la ricerca contemporanea, basata sulla PsicoNeuroEndo-crinoImmunologia (PNEI), illustra efficacemente le influenze reciproche. La PNEI rappresenta un avanzamento del paradigma presentato da Alexander. [

In questo commento sull’articolo di Bottaccioli & Bottaccioli (2024a) viene analizzato criticamente il ruolo di Franz Alexander nello sviluppo della psicosomatica contemporanea sia negli aspetti innovativi che nei limiti. Da un lato, Alexander ha contribuito a emancipare la spiegazione dei sin-tomi fisici dall’impostazione classica del primo Novecento irrigidita sul modello della conversione isterica e a promuovere organizzativamente il movimento psicosomatico internazionale, anche ita-liano. Dall’altro, i suoi limiti riguardano soprattutto l’impostazione teorica tipica della psicoanalisi novecentesca: l’adozione di un modello monodimensionale centrato sul conflitto intrapsichico e l’indeterminazione – necessaria per l’epoca – di un “fattore X” biologico come mediatore. Nel secondo Novecento si è invece affermato un modello di spiegazione centrato sul deficit (come per esempio l’alessitimia) e della complessità (modello biopsicosociale) in cui i vari fattori biomedici, psicologici e socio-culturali di moderazione assumono pesi relativi differenti nella spiegazione delle malattie fisiche e nella gestione clinica del paziente.