BOOKS BY ROSANGELA LODIGIANI

Il volume invita a riflettere sui modi per riconciliare lavoro, welfare e cittadinanza, contrastando le derive che si profilano soprattutto in una fase di recessione come l’attuale: contrattualizzazione della cittadinanza; segmentazione del mercato del lavoro; fragilizzazione dei lavoratori liminali; individualizzazione delle protezioni e ampliamento delle disuguaglianze. Derive che investono in primo luogo alcune categorie sociali e, nel tempo, l’intera società, fino a minarne la coesione e la capacità competitiva.

Assuming that the concept of social capital has a heuristic capacity if applied to the study of international migrations, the article employs it as a key to understand the features of Moroccan immigration in Lombardy, with specific attention to female immigration, which is less known and investigated by the research in Italy. By making use of the concept of social capital is possible to explain settlement strategies of the Moroccans and their integration dynamics in the local labour market. However, studying the peculiarity of these phenomena, it becomes clear that it is necessary to consider the different types of social capital as first Putnam and more recently Woolcock and Fiedl suggested, distinguishing by three types: bonding, bridging, linking in order to understand which one is the more common in an ethnic group, the Moroccans, that is described as a familistic community. Furthermore, the article tries to investigate both the link existing between social capital and human capital, and the role that local institutions could have in developing social capital.

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.

The characteristics and research targets of the Osservatorio Istud The essay presents characteristics and research targets of the Osservatorio Istud on high qualified young labour; it investigates the theme of the matching between the enterprise demand and the high qualified young labour supply; it debates the results of the first two years of research, that had analysed the ways of transition to job of young graduated, theirs expectations and their job perceptions; the mining given to the job, to the inherent quality of it. Specific attention is dedicated to the theme of work flexibility. Moreover the essays shows the existing link between the job quality and the life quality and the needing of young people self-fulfilment.