Research Frontiers in Economic Sociology and Labour Studies (ResFron ESLS)
Seminar Cycle
WHAT HAS SOCIO-ECONOMIC RESEARCH TO SAY ABOUT ITALIAN SOCIETY AND ECONOMY?
3rd February - 20th June 2014, h: 13.00 - 14.30
Room A, Graduate School of Social and Political Sciences
via Pace 10, Milan
PROGRAMME 2014
30th JUNE 2014, Prof. F. Barbera, F. Ramella (Università degli Studi di Torino) and M. Rostan (Università degli Studi di Pavia)
"LOCAL DEVELOPMENT, INNOVATION and KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER IN ITALY"
The seminar addresses the relationship between regional development and innovation focusing on both high-tech firms and university knowledge.
1. Innovation and regional development: the áItalian Paradoxâ in High-tech Industries. - Francesco Ramella (University of Turin)
In the last decades there has been a re-discovery of the territorial aspects of innovation, by economists, economic geographers and economic sociologists. Innovative activities, in fact, are territorially agglomerated both in low-tech and high tech industries, in advanced countries as well as in emerging economies. The seminar will address this topic from a specific point of view: those of the development in Italy of innovative enterprises in the high tech sectors, and their relationship with local/regional economies.
There is an "Italian Paradox" in high-tech industries. As it is well known, Italy is under-specialised in high tech and medium-high tech industries and, during the last decade, has recorded disappointing performances in these sectors. In particular, the innovative capacity of Italian firms is quite low. However, Italy has a potential in these industries, which has not been fully exploited yet. In fact, it ranks third amongst European countries for the number of high tech firms and for the volume of added value. Moreover, the percentage of employment in high-tech and medium high-tech sectors on the total of workforce is similar to the European Union average.
The "Italian paradox" in high tech industries can be explained focusing on two aspects of the gItalian caseh: 1) the weakness of its National system of innovation and 2) the territorial unbalances of its economic development. To corroborate this thesis, the results of an analysis carried out on a sample of over 400 high-tech firms with European patents will be presented. These firms were studied for the first time in 2010 and then a second time in the last months of 2012.
2. Regional development, innovation and academic knowledge: are universities giving a contribution to invention processes? - Michele Rostan (University of Pavia)
It is widely assumed that universities and other research institutions give a crucial contribution to both inventions and innovations. Yet, little is known on how actually academic knowledge has an impact on innovation processes and firms' performance in Italy, especially at the regional level. Does university knowledge have an impact on innovation? How is this knowledge transferred from university to industry? Why firms and universities develop research partnerships? Who is more likely to be involved in university-industry interactions? In order to answer these questions, a survey has been carried out interviewing inventors . that is people who applied for a patent. operating within an Italian region. The survey aimed at investigating various aspects of university-industry interactions trying to measure local universitiesf contribution to the invention process. The survey provides interesting findings on the importance of university knowledge in the development of inventions . mostly within industrial firms . and opens up new research questions to be addressed.
26th MAY 2014, Prof. I. Fellini (University of Milan Bicocca), G. Fullin (University of Milan Bicocca)
"STRUCTURAL FEATURES AND RECENT TRENDS IN THE ITALIAN LABOUR MARKET"
The seminar will present some recent trends in the Italian labour market and will discuss them starting from some structural features and comparative weaknesses as the low employment rate, the low qualification of the overall employment and the strong segmentation along several dimension as age, gender, geographical area and ethnicity. Adopting a macro perspective and drawing from ongoing research two aspects will be discussed: a) the unique process of deskilling that is in the making in the Italian labour market. We will look at this trend in the frame of the recent debate on the polarization of employment and of occupations in the EU countries; b) how the relatively low penalization of immigrants in terms of unemployment risk counterbalanced by their high penalization in terms of occupational qualification contributes to that outcome. The Italian case can be considered, to some extent, as an example of the South European model of immigrantsf integration in the labour market.
References
Eurofound (2013), Employment polarization and job quality in the crisis, Dublin, Eurofound.
Fellini I. e Chiesi A. (in print), Le specificità e le trasformazioni della struttura occupazionale italiana nel quadro delle tendenze europee", in Barbieri P. and Fullin G. (eds.), Lavoro, Istituzioni, Diseguaglianze. Per una sociologia comparata del mercato del lavoro, Il Mulino, Bologna
Fernandez-Macias, E. (2011) Job Polarization in Europe? Changes in the Employment Structure and Job Quality, 1995-2007, in Work and Occupations, Vol. 39, n. 2, pp. 157.182
Fullin G. e Reyneri E. (2011), Low unemployment and bad jobs for new immigrants in Italy, in International Migration, Vol. 49, pp. 118-147
Fullin G. (in print), Mercati del lavoro e processi migratori. Il caso italiano come esempio di un modello sud europeo di inserimento occupazionale degli immigrati?, in Barbieri P. and Fullin G. (eds.), Lavoro, Istituzioni, Diseguaglianze. Per una sociologia comparata del mercato del lavoro, Il Mulino, Bologna.
Oesch, D., Rodriguez Menes, J. (2011), Upgrading or polarization? Occupational change in Britain, Germany, Spain and Switzerland, 1990-2008, in Socio-Economic Review, Vol. 9, n. 3, pp. 503-531.
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17 JUNEth 2014, Prof. L. Bordogna (University of Milan), R. Pedersini (University of Milan)
"INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN ITALY TODAY" (CANCELLED)
3rd February 2014, Prof. G. Ballarino (University of Milan) and C. Meraviglia (Università degli Studi di Studi del Piemonte Orientale)
"WHAT HAS STRATIFICATION RESEARCH TO SAY ABOUT ITALIAN SOCIETY? The Italian Social Structure in comparative perspective"
The seminar will look at Italy from the point of view of the key structural parameters of social stratification, namely the relations between social class of origin, education and social class of destination of individuals. Drawing from ongoing research and brand new data analyses, the comparative situation of Italy will be presented, looking at a) inequality of educational opportunities, b) social fluidity and c) the effect of family background on job attainment among people with the same education. A multi-fold comparative perspective will be adopted. Firstly, comparisons will be drawn between Italy and other countries, both EU and non-EU; secondly, the country under focus will be compared across time, considering the changes in the main features of its social stratification; thirdly, we will compare the subjective perception of the social structure to its gobjectiveh features as resulting from stratification studies.
References
Ballarino G. (2009), Stratificazione e mobilita sociale, in L. Cavalli Sforza (a cura di), La Cultura Italiana, vol. V (Struttura della societa, valori e politica, a cura di A. Bonomi, N. Pasini, S. Bertolino), pp. 437-459.
Ballarino G., Barone C., Panichella N. (2013), Inequalities in Returns to Education in Italy, unpublished paper.
Ballarino G., Schadee, H. (2013), Educational expansion, educational inequality and school design in Europe: a comparative analysis,unpublished paper.
Barone C., Lucchini M. and Schizzerotto A. (2011), gCareer mobility in Italyh, European Societies, 13, 3, 377-400
Checchi D. (2010) (a cura di), Lfimmobilita diffusa. Perche la mobilita intergenerazionale e cosi bassa in Italia, Bologna, il Mulino
Meraviglia C. (2012), La scala immobile. La stratificazione occupazionale italiana, 1985-2005, Bologna, il Mulino
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Download ResFron 03_02_2014 Presentation
24th FEBRUARY 2014, Prof. M. Pallini (University of Milan)
"SEMIDEPENDENT WORK IN EUROPEAN AND ITALIAN LAW"
Under the post-fordist production system, self-employed work has been stably integrated into a firm's organizational structure. The depth of such integration often renders the worker economically dependent upon the firm, especially when he or she has only this source of income. This seminar intends to compare and analyse the legal regulation of this phenomenon in the European Union and in Italy. In particular, for Italy, we will consider the so-called Fornero Reform (Act n. 92/2012), which modified the regulation of work by projectcontract (lavoro a progetto) and, in effect, created a new contract for regulating such economically dependent self-employed work. The legal notion of "economic dependence" adopted by Italian law does not refer to a worker's income-dependence upon a firm, but rather to her/his technical-organizational dependence upon it. One might situate this new contract somewhere between subordinated employment
and autonomous work, combining characteristics of both types. The two traditional work contracts, by virtue of a systematic reaction, have been transformed too. In particular, the employment contract can no longer be seen as limited to subordinated work, but, rather, it now includes work that is highly integrated in the production process of goods and services – a production process that is organized and governed by the firm, even as it allows the worker some decisional autonomy regarding when and how that work is to be carried out. This Reform seems to indicate an evolution of Italian labour law that brings it closer to the law of other major European countries.
References
Pallini M., Il lavoro economicamente dipendente, Padova, 2013.
Davidov G., "Who is a worker", in Industrial Law Journal, 2005, vol. 34, 57
Freedland M., Kountouris N., The legal construction of personal work relations, Oxford, 2011
Kountouris N., "The employment relationship: a comparative analysis of national judicial approach", in Casale G., The Employmente relationship. A comparative overview, Geneva, 2011
Nogler L., "The concept of 'subordination'" in European and comparative law, Trento, 2009
Perulli A., "Subordinate, autonomous and economically dependent work: a comparative analysis of selected European countries", in Casale G., The Employment relationship. A comparative overview, Geneva, 2011.
Pedersini R., Coletto D., Self-employed workers: industrial relations and working conditions, EuroFound Report, 2009.
Razzolini O., "The need to go beyond the contract: 'economic' and 'bureaucratic' dependence in personal work relations", in Comparative Labor Law and Policy, 2010, 267 ss
Supiot A., Beyond Employment. Changes in Work and the Future of Labour Law in Europe, Oxford University Press, 2001
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31th MARCH 2014, Prof. F. Squazzoni (University of Brescia) and N. Casnici (University of Brescia)
"WISDOM OF THE CROWD OR FOOLS WITH TOOLS?"
- A quantitative Study of 10 years of peer-to-peer messages between 300.000 Italian investors in the finanzaonline.com online forum -
Real-time, global scale ICTs have transformed financial markets in a "global nervous system" hardly predictable for anyone. The market digitalization has allowed individual investors to easily access markets through their personal computers and mobile devices. This also fuelled the development of online social networks and communities that are increasingly used as a source of information and communication by a massive population of investors.
Our research aims to understand the unexplored world of online investors by focusing on the most popular financial virtual community in Italy, i.e., finanzaonline.com, which includes an online forum used by about 170.000 investors. First, through an online questionnaire distributed to all the registered users of the community, we wanted to understand the profile of the typical online investor, with particular attention to investment strategies, the level of financial education, the risk propensity and the individual attitude towards information sharing and communication.
Secondly, we wanted to look at how investors develop collective knowledge under increasing market uncertainty by peer-to-peer communication and information sharing. For this purpose, we built an eight-years time series including 800.000 messages on the Unicredit Group. We traced all the conversations by using a social network approach and examined how the communication patterns changed in conditions of high/low market volatility. We also classified the type of message contents and built a model that ranked users depending on their degrees of expertise. Our results showed, first, that finanzaonline.com investors were mostly self-learners, although a certain degree of heterogeneity of background and education is present. We also found that online exposure increases investors' risk propensity without ensuring higher portfolio performance.
More importantly, we found a self-reinforcing mechanism between education and experience, so that online exposure cannot help investors to fill their educational gap. On the other hand, the analysis of the communication networks showed that uncertainty induced investors to increase the information sharing to develop a joint effort of interpretation. On the other hand, the quality of information shared tend to decrease when investors are under market uncertainty pressures. Furthermore, this distributed cognitive effort of interpretation recurrently gave rise to network fragmentation that tends to trap investors' information search in local sub-optimal paths, with potentially dramatic implications in terms of lack of information exploration. The network topology and dynamics are dramatically different in conditions of low market volatility.
This calls for the potential role of formal reputational mechanisms that could help investors to explore information and communication space more extensively. Indeed, the micro-inefficiency in the online information and communication search by investors has dramatic impact on the quality of shared information and may undermine collective learning processes.
Our findings help to discuss the prospects and limitations of online virtual communities of investors, can cast new light on the mantra of pop finance and call for reconsideration of the need for educational initiatives to reduce financial illiteracy in Italy
28th APRIL 2014, Prof. L. Solari (University of Milan)
"THE DIFFUSION OF ORGANIZATIONAL PRACTICES ACROSS INSTITUTIONAL BOUNDARIES: Downsizing in Italy and in the USA"
In this seminar, we examine the diffusion and transfer of the controversial management practice of downsizing from the U.S. to Italy. We trace the evolution of downsizing in the U.S., and use Kostova's country institutional profile, and specifically the social context (regulative, cognitive, and normative institutions), to understand how downsizing has been adopted in Italy. We find that the simultaneous institutional pressures to adopt and reject downsizing have led to the hybridization of downsizing in Italy. While many management practices appear isomorphic between the U.S. and Italy, downsizing differs in many ways. Most notably, unlike the U.S. downsizing is not a legitimated management practice in Italy. Companies can restructure and conduct layoffs as a last effort to ensure survival and save remaining jobs, but they cannot downsize to increase profitability. Hence, the term 'downsizing' is rarely used in Italy, in part because of the negative stigma associated with the term. Further, the regulatory environment offers many protections for workers, compared to the 'at-will' employment practice in the U.S. Finally, the limited success of downsizing for U.S. companies has begun to shift the schema of "downsizing is effective" in the U.S., which helps countries such as Italy to resist continued efforts to legitimate this controversial management practice. These findings contrast the oft-discussed globalized or isomorphic trends regarding management practices across cultures.
ESLS (Economic Sociology and Labour Studies) is a brand new PhD programme, created and managed by a network of scholars in economic sociology, labour studies and related fields working in six universities in North-Western Italy, as a part of the Nasp-West project. As ESLS network aims at integrating both teaching and research in the field, the ResFron cycle of seminars, now in its second year and kindly sponsored by Fondazione Cariplo and Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, is one of the major activities promoted to this aim. Six sub-areas in economic sociology and labour studies have been selected, on the basis of their substantive interest and methodological innovation. From February to June 2014, seven seminars will be held by scholars from the network, each one on one sub-area (two for one sub-area), presenting contemporary Italian society from the point of view of their own research. The aim is not just to share advanced concepts and techniques, but also to discuss the situation of the country from a social scientific point of view.
Seminars, held in English, are open to faculty, PhD students and to anyone interested .
A NASP-West Project with financial support of
Fondazione Cariplo and Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo
Download the ResFron ESLS Seminar Cycle Leaflet as pdf file here