1,720,967 research outputs found
New Chinese migrants in Italy
No full textItaly joined the group of European nations with a positive migratory balance in 1980, but now the presence of an immigrant workforce is definitely embedded in the Italian development model. The shift from a net emigration to net immigration country occurred when the internal migration from southern Italy, which had provided the factories in northern Italy with the necessary manpower for their economic development, was coming to an end, and productive decentralization was beginning with the re-emergence of small businesses. Twenty years later, small dynamic businesses that are mainly clustered in industrial districts specializing in local production are a distinctive feature of the Italian economy to the extent that among industrialized countries Italy counts the largest number of small businesses and the lowest number of employees per business (Accornero, 2000). Starting from the 1980s, opportunities for a low-skilled labour force opened for new migrants mainly in these productive activities. In addition, throughout the 1980s and the 1990s niche opportunities for self-employment in workshops producing for Italian suppliers were also appearing or expanding. Among other migrant groups arriving in Italy were those of Chinese origin. The crucial time for the recent migration flow from China to Italy - either directly or via other European countries, such as France and Holland - can be dated from the early 1980s. Since then, a succession of unskilled workers originating almost exclusively from the south-eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang arrived in the country, after the family-based chains of emigration that had almost come to a halt during the years of the Cultural Revolution had again been revitalized. The number of immigrants of Chinese origin has grown rapidly over the last 20 years, as has the number of businesses owned by the Chinese. By today, the Chinese migrant community shows the strongest entrepreneurial aptitude, and, according to recent national data, account for the largest number of small business owners among non-European Union (EU) immigrants in Italy. Unlike the situation in most of the western European countries, such as Great Britain and the Netherlands, where the Chinese are active mainly in the catering service, in Italy their main areas of activity are the production of ready-to-wear garments, leather garments and bags, and woollen sweaters. Until recently, these seemed to be the only productive sectors open to Chinese immigrants. However, new trends are emerging in the employment patterns of the Chinese in Italy. The two most striking new features are the expansion from performing only simple manufacturing tasks for Italian suppliers to actually managing the entire productive process in the garment sector, and the growing employment in Italian firms, especially in the dynamic industrial districts where migrants of other origins were already working in large numbers
The making of a skilled worker: the transnational mixed embeddedness of migrant workers
Full text linkMigrant workers’ employment pathways are mainly analysed by observing
their behaviour in receiving societies. In dialogue with critical studies
of mobility, migration, and skill, we argue that the ‘transnational
mixed embeddedness’ approach, used to analyse migrant businesses,
should extend to include migrant workers. Based on multi-sited ethnography,
we discuss the phenomenon of Chinese migrant workers in Italy
who exploit the transnationally embedded opportunities to access training
courses in China. We analyse the transnational workers’ agency in
circumnavigating socially constructed notions of training and skill, and
stress the transformative logic of the migrant trajectories as transnational
mobility influences the trainees’ perspectives
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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