Authors:Luca Giachi, Fabrizio Tuzi, Francesca Proia Pages: 13 - 26 Abstract: The role of CCs as tools for rebuilding local economies through communities appears to emerge from the Italian experience. The projects launched in our country range from community of businesses – closed circuits in which members voluntarily exchange goods and services, offsetting debts against credits – to projects characterized by solidarity and participatory systems aimed at strengthening community relations as well as at promoting sustainable development models. These systems lie on the border between formal/informal economic activities. The proximity to existing projects, a certain ability to intercept emerging requests as well as the need to face the effects of the crisis caused by the pandemic has pressured some Regions to include CCs in their legislations as an attempt to move these systems to formal economy. However, the promotion of the complementary currencies is basically an investment in relationships, therefore stimulating trust and a proactive role in community decision-making is an issue that cannot be resolved just through legislation. Consequently, local institutions must rethink and improve their role in order to be able to become themselves pro-active subjects for the development of community initiatives. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.36253/cambio-10730 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
Authors:Elisabetta Bucolo Pages: 27 - 35 Abstract: Many consumers express concern about the ecological consequences of their purchases and go so far as to promote collective action to encourage the spread of practices that address environmental impacts. Among the informal initiatives promoting the culture of sharing and reusing objects, we are interested in the phenomenon of free shops. These activities are characterised by the fact that they are promoted by groups of citizens whose aim is to explore alternative routes to ecological transition, while at the same time proposing a critique of the dominant market model. In this paper, we wanted to highlight the modalities of ecological engagement through the individual and collective trajectories of the people who frequent these atypical places as they reveal the evolutions and contradictions that remain in the transition between social and ecological challenges. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.36253/cambio-10739 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
Authors:Alberto De Nicola Pages: 37 - 50 Abstract: This paper intends to propose a critical examination of some of the theoretical orientations that have most characterized the debate on the informal economy in recent years. The reflection will take welfare regimes as a research field for analyzing the impact of informality on institutional systems. The paper will be divided into two parts. In the first one, structuralist, geographical and governmental approaches to informality will be discussed, showing some theoretical limits in their interpretation of the plurality of social practices and institutional change. In the second part, some indications will be proposed on how to understand the role of informality on institutional systems starting with a review of some Gramscian notions relating to the problems of normativity and historical change. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.36253/cambio-10799 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
Authors:Pietro Saitta Pages: 51 - 64 Abstract: This essay explores the semantics of the term “informal economy” and, in particular, the relation between the two words. It shows how this subject is anything but something with no form and no structure. Moreover, it reflects on the historical relations between this type of economy and the cyclical transformations of capital. Informal economy is seen as a buffer that makes such changes both socially bearable and symbolically necessary – in order to produce alliances between classes and mobilize different sentiments in given circumstances. The example of (neo-)populism(s), especially in a Southern Italian city (Messina), is provided and shortly discussed. Finally, it advocates descriptions of the phenomenon that unfold the substantial overlapping of what is official and “secret”, and is in fact part of the experience of millions of people in an endlessly changing world. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.36253/cambio-10825 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
Authors:Vittorio Martone Pages: 65 - 77 Abstract: Informal housing includes the range of practices associated with producing or occupying residential spaces which falls beyond formal systems of urban planning. In this field it is complicated recognize what is legal or illegal and informal self-building and social innovation coexist with urban crime. On the one hand, informal housing is an opportunity for counter-movements against marketisation of the housing sector (squatting, self-construction, grassroots neighbourhood organisations). On the other hand, in the informal housing we can find urban crime, including organised crime groups, which control over the territory, occupy public housing, and manage public housing building. Massive urban security policies tackled informal space through segregation, surveillance, and punitive initiatives. Here the accusation of “mafia” has intensity the criminalisation of urban poverty, and the complexity of socio-spatial inequality is confused under the penal repression. The essay tries to deepen this ambivalence by looking at the outskirts of Rome and, in particular, at the relationship between informal housing in neighbourhoods with public housing complexes, with a high concentration of socio-economic disadvantage and high criminal density. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.36253/cambio-10842 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
Authors:Patrick Cingolani Pages: 79 - 89 Abstract: The outsourcing movement of the second half of the 20th century had fueled informality on its edges: illegal workers in European construction companies or sweatshops of subcontractors from developing countries with unsanitary buildings and degraded working conditions. Digitization in the 21st century has reconfigured this movement in an original way, shifting work towards the home or towards the sphere of everyday life. The article attempts to explain the ways in which capitalism invades spheres and areas that sometimes remained relatively unspoiled or free: random mobility of the driver or the rider of the platforms; interstitial temporality of the “turkers” or “click workers”, space for staging oneself or for gaming on YouTube; amateur management at Lego. The informality of capital is here the effect of the original process of market colonization of the interstitial time in everyday life. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.36253/cambio-10903 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
Authors:Stefanie Ernst Pages: 91 - 102 Abstract: Current diversity and anti-discrimination policies are the result of intended and non-intended long-term social movements and changes. This implicates informalisation processes as well as formalisation processes of organizations, in which sexism, racism, homophobia etc. are blamed and fought. In this context, the presented EU-Project SPRYNG consists of several data about the cognitive structure as well as the awareness of discrimination in order to support organizational diversity learning. Based on The Established and Outsiders and the process-theoretical debate on diminishing power differences, informality and equality, the paper presents a snapshot of discrimination in educational organizations (schools) and society. The data (survey and expert interviews) give insights into the perception of discrimination. As part of organizational change processes, these collected data supported the discussion about “sensitive and good school culture”. The paper reports about the results, pitfalls and theoretical implications of anti-discrimination politics in the area of education as part of organizational integration politics. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.36253/cambio-11574 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
Authors:Claudia Mariotti, Alberto Marradi Pages: 107 - 120 Abstract: Politics in many Western democracies have become increasingly personalized; as a consequence, the individual personalities of voters and their social identity are now essential in order to understand political choices. This essay explores the role of social and personal identity, by relating such factors as one’s family, occupation, class consciousness, religion, and personality in general to political choices in order to understand the recent cultural changes in the political scenarios in Italy and Argentina. This research is based on almost 7,000 face-to-face interviews collected between Italy and Argentina from 2014 to 2020. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.36253/cambio-11242 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
Authors:Onofrio Romano Pages: 121 - 134 Abstract: Facing the hitches of the neoliberal global turn, which first emerged with the 2008 financial crisis, social theory doesn’t appear able to provide an overall critical interpretation of the current regulation pattern and to imagine a different institutional regime, addressing the problems on the ground. This is an unprecedented situation. As we contend, social theory has always glimpsed well in advance the social system crises, assessing at the same time an alternative paradigm, thanks to a sort of canone inverso played against the coeval institutional regime: when a horizontal form of social regulation prevails in a given period, sociology adopts a knowledge paradigm based on the primacy of the vertical social dimensions. And vice-versa. This attitude transcends any conceptual content and mainly concerns the “form” of the theoretical building. In general, social theory opposed both the self-regulating market regime of the nineteenth century, and the following state-centered regime of the twentieth century. Sociology has found its raison d’être in this kind of critical monitoring towards social regulation. What happens today is that the dialectic between social theory and social regulation appears jammed. Evoking the case of the generative social action approach, the article shows that, contrary to the past intellectual seasons, the form of social theory “mirrors” the form of social regulation, instead of overturning it. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.36253/cambio-10487 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
Authors:Monica Musolino Pages: 135 - 148 Abstract: The paper proposes the analysis of a socio-spatial segregation process of a post-earthquake slum in the city of Messina (Southern Italy). We will focus on the analysis of the dynamics related to territorial stigmatization in relation to the specific characteristics of the urban structure of Messina. The field research was carried out in two phases (2014/2016 and 2017/2018) and used a qualitative approach, moving in the context of two urban regeneration interventions. The research revealed those characteristics of the territorial stigma that seem to be present in very different societies and contexts. In particular, escape trajectories affirm themselves as the only certain ways of escaping from stigma and spatial confinement. We recorded also the peculiarities of the Messina case. In fact, the process of socio-spatial marginalization and segregation observable in this slum is linked to the structuring of urban space that have their own specific characteristics. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.13128/cambio-10568 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
Authors:Claudio Marciano Pages: 149 - 161 Abstract: The aim of the article is to analyse the social transformations produced and observed in the field of waste management. In particular, the focus is on the «Zero Waste» strategy, which has been proposing for at least two decades at a global level an alternative model of waste governance to the one centred on incinerators and landfills. The article proposes a theoretical framework to describe the genesis of «Zero Waste» as a discursive practice, proposing to observe jointly its characteristic symbolic, technological and organisational elements. In reporting the results of an ethnographic research conducted on the case of «Zero Waste» in Italy, the article also focuses on the processes of knowledge exchange between social movements, local administrations, universities and municipalised companies, the conjunctions between ecological movements and movements for the commons, the start of processes of remunicipalisation of local public services starting from a new strategy of legitimation of the public vs. the private, and the progressive institutionalisation of political ecology in the European and local policy arena. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.36253/cambio-10632 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
Authors:Domenico Trezza, Gabriella Punziano, Ciro Clemente De Falco Pages: 163 - 184 Abstract: Related to the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic (March-June 2020), some recent studies on the application of content analysis of geolocalized tweets (Bashar et alii 2020, Punziano et alii 2020) have demonstrated the negative relation between the Coronavirus spread (with Northern Italy most affected) and the polarity of social narratives about the pandemic. In brief, the «resilient» social narrative of the most impacted regions has corresponded to a negative and worried emergency narrative of the less affected regions. In relation to epidemiological data, the second phase of the pandemic (also referred to as the «second wave», in autumn 2020) has been very different from the first (ISSa 2020). The severity of emergency, without considering questions about the reliability of the first wave data (Istat 2020a), has been more relevant and homogeneous across Italy. The study questions whether there are differences between the geography of contagion and that of the narrative. Given the increasingly homogeneous spread of the virus, the assumption has been that the digital arena also has ended up showing a narrative more united on negative sentiments. The issue is addressed by analyzing a corpus of geolocalized tweets, extracted in the period from the new October lockdown to the partial and fragmented pre-Christmas reopenings in 2020. Following the application of a model combining text mining and GIS analysis, the most recurrent themes in social discourse on Twitter were mapped. This geography of emerging social narratives (COVID-Issues) compared with the geography of contagion spread (COVID-Spread) and the norms (COVID-Measures) allowed to detect the trend in the relationship of these three dimensions during the second emergence from COVID-19. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.36253/cambio-10255 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
Authors:Andrea Bellini Pages: 185 - 198 Abstract: Two years after Erik Olin Wright’s death, this article rereads one of his most famous works, Class Counts. This book, published in 1997, can be considered at the same time a contemporary classic of scientific Marxism and the manifest of neo-Marxist class analysis. The objectives of the article are manifold. Firstly, it contextualizes the author’s theoretical contribution in his biography, emphasizing his complicated relationship with sociology as a Marxist. Then, it focuses on the book’s specific contribution in terms of conceptual work, also looking at the theoretical implications of the empirical results. Finally, it reflects on the resilience of the heuristic capacity of Wright’s categories to understand social inequalities in contemporary society. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.13128/cambio-10851 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
Authors:Stefano Diana Pages: 199 - 211 Abstract: As I show with examples from the Grundrisse and the Capital, some fundamentals of Marx’s critique of political economy can be rewritten with simple substitutions to yield surprisingly pertinent analyses of today’s “information society” and the role that data and AI play in it. The reason behind this strange phenomenon is that Marx’s penetrating study of money as a dehumanizing abstraction and self-replicating capital can be extended with minor changes to the main abstraction and “automatic fetish” of our historical regime: digital data. As money-capital tends to grow by itself independently of humans, so does data. AI is the main engine of this new dangerous cycle. PubDate: 2021-11-30 DOI: 10.36253/cambio-10637 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 21 (2021)
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