Suchergebnisse

1: Rural world, migration and agriculture in the EU-Mediterranean countries: an introduction -- 2: Restructuring of agriculture and the rural world in EUMed countries -- 3: Mobility and migrations in the rural areas of the EU -- 4: Rural destination areas: impacts and practices -- 5: Rural origin areas: impacts and practices -- 6: Mobility and migrations in Mediterranean Europe: the case of agro-pastoralism -- 7: Conclusions.

Intro -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Chapter 1: Introduction -- 1.1 Messina: A Modern Catastrophe -- 1.2 The Organization of the Book -- References -- Chapter 2: Researching Disasters: Theories for a Case Study -- 2.1 The End of the World -- 2.2 Civility in the Post-disaster City -- 2.3 Blaming the Victims -- 2.4 Public Memory and Latent Forces in Local Society -- 2.5 Public Responses to Disaster -- 2.6 The "Productive" Role of Disasters -- 2.7 Bureaucratic Classifications and Social Responses -- References -- Chapter 3: History Seen Through the Slums: The Southern Question and the Current Crisis -- 3.1 Messina, No South and No North -- 3.2 A Southern Question? Beyond the Myth of Development -- 3.3 Is an Agricultural Question at the Root of the Southern Question? -- 3.4 The Fund for the South -- 3.5 Italian Neoliberalism -- 3.6 Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 4: Messina, From the Earthquake to the Present -- 4.1 The Roots of a Speculative Economy: State, Market, and the Messina Community -- 4.2 Proto-financialization and Decadence -- 4.3 Reconstructing Inner Circles: Geographies of Separation and Exclusion -- 4.4 Fascism and the Consolidation of the Shacks -- 4.5 A Speculative Capitalism Based on Construction (1950-1990) -- 4.6 Continuity, the Neoliberalization of Building -- References -- Chapter 5: Working and Dreaming at the Margins of the City -- 5.1 A Study on the Present-Day City -- 5.2 Getting by in an Informal World -- 5.3 The Public Sector and the Circularity of Formal and Informal -- 5.4 Cynicism and Nostalgia: Being Unemployed in a Time of Crisis -- 5.5 Subaltern Politics -- 5.6 Final Remarks -- References -- Chapter 6: Formal and Informal Housing in Today's City -- 6.1 The Reproduction of the Shanties -- 6.2 The Shack and the Neighborhood: Talking on Spatial Segregation.

.

In this article, we present a historical analysis on how Sardinian pastoralism has become an integrated activity in global capitalism, oriented to the production of cheap milk, through the extraction of ecological surplus from the exploitation of nature and labour. Pastoralism has often been looked at as a marginal and traditional activity. On the contrary, our objective is to stress the central role played by pastoralism in the capitalist world-ecology. Since there is currently little work analysing the historical development of pastoralism in a concrete agro-ecological setting from a world-ecology perspective, we want to contribute to the development of the literature by analysing the concrete case of Sardinian pastoralism.
To do so, we will use the analytical framework of world-ecology to analyse the historical dialectic of capital accumulation and the production of nature through which pastoralism -understood as a socio-cultural system that organises nature-society relations for the reproduction of local rural societies- became an activity trapped in the production of market commodities and cheap food exploiting human (labour) and extra-human factors (e.g. land, water, environment, animals etc.). Looking at the exploitation of extra-human factors, the concept of ecological surplus allows us to understand how capital accumulation and surplus was possible thanks to the exploitation of nature, or rather the creation of cheap nature and chap inputs for the production of cheap commodities. We analyse historical pastoralism to understand how geopolitical configurations of global capitalism interact with the national and local scales to change pastoral production, nature and labour relations. We will pay particular attention to the role of land and the relationship between pastoralists and animals. The article is based on secondary data, historical material and primary data collected from 2012 to 2020 through qualitative interviews and ethnographic research.
We identify four main cycles of agro-ecological transformation to explore the interactions between waves of historical capitalist expansion and changes in the exploitation of agroecological factors. The first two phases will be explored in the first section of the paper: the mercantilist phase during the modern era and the commodification of pastoralist products, which extend from the nineteenth century to the Second World War. In the mercantilist phase, the expansion of pastoralism finds its external limits in the trend of international demand (influenced by international trade policies that may favour or hinder exports) and its internal limits in the competition/complementarity with agriculture for the available land that results in a transhumant model of pastoralism. In this phase, the ecological surplus needed for capitalist accumulation is produced by nature as a gift, or nature for free, which results in the possibility of producing milk at a very low cost by exploiting the natural pasture of the open fields. The second cycle, "the commodification of pastoralist products", started at the end of the nineteenth century, with the introduction on the island of the industrial processing of Pecorino Romano cheese, and which was increasingly in demand in the North American market. This pushed pastoralism towards a strong commodification. Shepherds stopped processing cheese on-farm and became producers of cheap milk for the Pecorino Romano processing industry. Industrialists control the distribution channels and therefore the price of milk. Moreover, following the partial privatisation of land and high rent prices, shepherds progressively lose the ecological surplus that was guaranteed by free land and natural grazing, key to lower production costs and to counterbalance the unequal distribution of wealth within the chain. At the beginning of the twentieth century, although the market for Pecorino Romano was growing, these contradictions emerged and the unfair redistribution of profits within the chain (which benefited industrialists, middlemen and landowners to the detriment of shepherds) led to numerous protests and the birth of shepherds' cooperatives.
The second section of the paper will explore the third agro-ecological phase: the rise of the "monoculture of sheep-raising" through the modernisation policies (from the fifties until 1990s). The protests that affected the inland areas of Sardinia, as well as the increase in banditry, signal the impossibility of continuing to guarantee cheap nature and cheap labour, which are at the basis of the mechanism of capitalist accumulation. On the basis of these pressures, the 1970s witnessed a profound transformation that opened a new cycle of accumulation: laws favouring the purchase of land led to the sedenterization of pastoralism, while agricultural modernisation policies pushed towards the rationalisation of the farm. Land improvements and technological innovations (such as the milking machine and the purchase of agricultural machinery) led to the beginning of the "monoculture of sheep raising": a phase of intensification in the exploitation of nature and the extraction of ecological surplus. This includes a great increase of the number of sheep per unit of agricultural area, thanks to the cultivated pasture replacing natural grazing and the production and purchase of stock and feed. Subsidised agricultural modernisation and sedentarisation can once again "sustain" the cost of cheap milk that is the basis of the industrial dairy chain. However, agricultural modernisation results in the further commodification of pastoralism, which becomes increasingly dependent on the upstream and downstream market, making pastoralists less autonomous. Moreover, given the impossibility of further expanding the herd, the productivity need of keeping low milk production costs has to be achieved through an increase in the average production per head. Therefore, there are higher investments in genetic selection to increase breed productivity, higher investments to improve animal feeding and a more intensive animal exploitation to increase productivity. These production strategies imply higher farm costs.
In this context, the fourth phase, the neoliberal phase (analysed in the third section of the paper) broke out in Sardinia in the mid-1990s. With the end of export subsidies and the opening of the new large-scale retail channel in which producers are completely subordinate, it starts a period of increased volatility in the price of milk. In order to counter income erosion and achieve the productivity gains needed to continue producing cheap milk, pastoralists have intensified the exploitation of both human (labour) and non-human (nature) factors, with contradictory effects. In the case of nature, the intensive exploitation of land through monocultural crops has reduced biodiversity and impoverished the soil. In the case of labour, pastoralists have intensified the levels of self-exploitation and free family labour to extreme levels and have also resorted to cheaply paid foreign labourers.
Throughout the paper, we reconstruct the path towards the production of "cheap milk" in Sardinia, processed mainly into pecorino romano for international export. We argue that the production of ecological surplus through the exploitation of nature and labour has been central to capital accumulation and to the unfolding of the capitalist world ecology. However, we have reached a point of crisis where pastoralists are trapped between rising costs and eroding revenues. Further exploitation of human (cheap labour) and extra-human (nature and animals) factors is becoming unsustainable for the great majority, leading to a polarization between pastoralists who push towards further intensification and mechanisation and pastoralists who increasingly de-commodify to build greater autonomy.

Le filiere del cibo sono state al centro di profonde trasformazioni nei decenni passati, a fronte di un debole interesse degli studi sociologici da un lato e di un basso impatto sull'opinione pubblica dall'altro. Il dibattito sviluppato all'interno delle scienze sociali italiane negli ultimi anni presenta però elementi di notevole originalità, collegandosi con la letteratura internazionale nell'analisi delle dinamiche globali della distribuzione di valore a sfavore delle realtà locali e portando alla luce l'intensificazione dei processi di sfruttamento dei lavoratori e dell'ambiente. Il ruolo fondamentale rivestito dalle filiere nella tenuta del sistema socio-economico durante il periodo di lockdown iniziato a marzo 2020, inoltre, ha riattivato nell'opinione pubblica l'interesse sulle modalità e sulle condizioni con cui i prodotti agricoli e i loro derivati vengono prodotti e distribuiti. Temi centrali a questo proposito sono la lunghezza e l'articolazione delle filiere, la qualità delle materie e il tipo di regime agricolo, questioni che vengono fortemente impattate dalla politica agricola di riferimento: nel frame del contesto europeo, le direzioni su cui insiste la regolamentazione nazionale sono rivelatrici di priorità e criticità dell'agenda politica italiana nei confronti della questione agricola. Al proposito, nel decreto rilancio (DL. 34/2020) sono stati destinati fondi pari a 1.150 milioni di euro per sostenere l'agricoltura del nostro paese, con una specifica voce a favore delle filiere. ; Le filiere del cibo sono state al centro di profonde trasformazioni nei decenni passati, a fronte di un debole interesse degli studi sociologici da un lato e di un basso impatto sull'opinione pubblica dall'altro. Il dibattito sviluppato all'interno delle scienze sociali italiane negli ultimi anni presenta però elementi di notevole originalità, collegandosi con la letteratura internazionale nell'analisi delle dinamiche globali della distribuzione di valore a sfavore delle realtà locali e portando alla luce l'intensificazione dei processi di sfruttamento dei lavoratori e dell'ambiente. Il ruolo fondamentale rivestito dalle filiere nella tenuta del sistema socio-economico durante il periodo di lockdown iniziato a marzo 2020, inoltre, ha riattivato nell'opinione pubblica l'interesse sulle modalità e sulle condizioni con cui i prodotti agricoli e i loro derivati vengono prodotti e distribuiti. Temi centrali a questo proposito sono la lunghezza e l'articolazione delle filiere, la qualità delle materie e il tipo di regime agricolo, questioni che vengono fortemente impattate dalla politica agricola di riferimento: nel frame del contesto europeo, le direzioni su cui insiste la regolamentazione nazionale sono rivelatrici di priorità e criticità dell'agenda politica italiana nei confronti della questione agricola. Al proposito, nel decreto rilancio (DL. 34/2020) sono stati destinati fondi pari a 1.150 milioni di euro per sostenere l'agricoltura del nostro paese, con una specifica voce a favore delle filiere. Partendo da questo quadro, attraverso una rassegna puntuale dei principali contributi teorici internazionali e delle più recenti ricerche realizzate in Italia sul tema delle filiere agroalimentari e sulle variegate forme in cui l'agricoltura locale si sta riconfigurando, il saggio si propone di fornire una cornice teorica di ragionamento che analizzi i rapporti tra agricoltura locale e filiere agroalimentari globali nel caso italiano. L'obiettivo è mettere in evidenza la tensione tra le pressioni esercitate nelle agri-food global chains e i processi di transizione ecologica in atto che stimolano a ripensare le forme di sostenibilità economica, ambientale e sociale. Nella ricostruzione di questi aspetti, particolare risalto verrà posto agli ambiti che emergono come particolarmente critici agli occhi dell'agenda politica, in cui la governance nazionale ha giocato un ruolo rilevante nell'impattare lo sviluppo del settore.

To what extent can PSM be considered a characteristic that evolves in the course of the individual's working life? After offering this question as a contribution to a research agenda on PSM, the article examines in what way the different dimensions of PSM, held by a group of employees in the Italian Revenue Agency, relate to their perceptions of recent changes in working conditions. It also explores the relationship between perception of change, PSM dimensions and job satisfaction, work motivation and organizational commitment. Out of the web of interactions that tie together these variables some support is found for the argument that there is a relationship between some PSM dimensions and changes in the work environment. It is suggested, however, that the question raised, besides needing further studies, could be much better researched with a longitudinal study of a cohort of individuals.

AbstractBackground: In the 1990s, Italy enacted a drastic reform of the public administration system, giving local governments (regions) unprecedented autonomy in public service management, including healthcare. This shift in responsibilities resulted in a lack of consistency in budget performance and quality of medical care in the regional health systems. Purpose: This article describes the outcomes of a 2009 study into the reasons for the regional differences in implementation of "stroke networks" in Italy. Strokes represent one of the most important health issues for Italy. They are the primary causes of permanent disability, the second highest cause of dementia, and (in Italy) the third highest cause of mortality. Evidence shows that early diagnosis and delivery of treatment in specialized stroke units, including rehabilitation therapy, can reduce the risks of death and disability. Nevertheless, there are significant differences and delays in the implementation of such practices. To understand the reasons for the delays, measures were examined, including decision makers' agendas, regional budget limitations, organizational delays, structural complexity, competition over scarce resources, power structure differences, and informal practices. Methods: The study consisted of 52 in‐depth interviews and six focus groups involving 62 people (total = 114 interviewees) and addressing key actors in the health systems from six Italian regions. In accordance with Italian regulations and research practices, the present sociological study did not require the approval by an Ethical Committee, since it did not involve minors or subjects who might be injured, coerced, or those who necessitate an informed consent. Results: This study outlines five main models of management and shows how competition with private hospitals, internal rivalries involving professionals and medical sectors, expenditure restraints, and a lack of well‐trained personnel represent the main obstacles to the development and operation of stroke units. Policy Implications: Network implementation should be framed within the culture and standards of the broader social and health context. Social networks should be central to the system of care, targeting long‐term health issues associated with strokes. There is also a need to decrease competition and increase collaboration among the stakeholders. Finally, the relation between hospitals, care services, and regional administrations requires improvement. Italian version of the abstract: Sfondo: Nel corso degli anni novanta l'Italia ha avviato una drastica riforma della pubblica amministrazione e assegnato agli enti locali di governo nuovi poteri e autonomia nella gestione dei servizi pubblici, ivi inclusa la sanità. Tale mutamento ha comportato una consistente difformità nel livello delle prestazioni e nella gestione finanziaria dei sistemi sanitari regionali. Scopi: Il presente articolo descrive gli esiti di uno studio condotto nel 2009, volto a indagare le ragioni che si celano dietro le differenze esistenti nei livelli di implementazione delle "reti stroke" in Italia. L'ictus costituisce una delle principali patologie in Italia: esso é la principale causa di disabilità permanente, la seconda principale causa di demenza e (in Italia) la terza più diffusa causa di mortalità. Evidenze scientifiche dimostrano che la diagnosi precoce e il trattamento in unità specializzate per lo stroke, ivi incluse le terapie riabilitative, possono ridurre il rischio di morte e disabilità. Ciò nondimeno, vi sono significative differenze e ritardi nell'attuazione di tali pratiche. Al fine di comprendere le ragioni di tale disomogeneità, sono state esaminati vari elementi, incluse le agende dei decisori pubblici, i limiti dei budget regionali, i ritardi organizzativi, la complessità strutturale, la competizione in regime di risorse scarse, i differenziali di potere e le pratiche informali. Metodo: Lo studio si é avvalso di 52 interviste in profonditàe 6 focus group con 62 partecipanti (totale = 114 intervistati) reclutati tra attori chiave dei sistemi sanitari regionali di sei regioni italiane. Gli attori sono stati reclutati impiegando varie reti sociali. In accordo con la regolazione italiana e le comuni pratiche di ricerca, il presente studio non ha richiesto l'approvazione di una Commissione Etica, poiché non coinvolge minori o soggetti che possano essere danneggiati, forzati o che necessitino di un consenso informato. Risultati: Lo studio individua cinque principali modelli organizzativi e mostra come la competizione con ospedali privati, le rivalità interne tra professionisti e discipline, i limiti alla spesa e la carenza di personale appositamente formato rappresentino i principali ostacoli allo sviluppo e all'operatività delle unità stroke. Implicazioni per le politiche: L'implementazione delle reti dovrebbe aver luogo dentro la cultura e gli standard del più ampio contesto sociale e sanitario. Le reti sociali dovrebbero divenire centrali per il sistema di cura, al fine di fronteggiare le tematiche sanitarie di lungo termine associate normalmente all'ictus. E' altresì necessario diminuire la competizione e accrescere la collaborazione tra i soggetti interessati. Infine, anche le relazioni tra ospedali, servizi di cura e amministrazioni regionali richiedono di essere migliorate.