1,721,155 research outputs found
Women and transnational organized crime: the ambiguous case of the italian Mafias
No full textIn this chapter, I am interested in discussing the roles of women in TOC. But, if we are to study the roles of women in the criminal universe of the Italian Mafia in any detail, we must first begin by deconstructing the prejudices that have sprung up over time on this subject. The first of these is the notion of the marginalisation of women, both inside and outside the Mafia. A cursory reading of the existing literature devoted to the phenomenon shows that it has served the purposes of the Mafia organisations it describes, in that the narrative that has developed on the exclusion of women from criminal environments has always been intended as a safety valve for them, creating an area entirely safe from prying eyes. If we question female ‘extraneousness’ from the Mafia, this means re-discussing their position by observing them from a double perspective: internal and external to the criminal context. If we reflect on the factors defining their position, we realise how the boundaries between the inside and the outside are not clear and how belonging to a Mafia context does not exhaust the identity of women, nor univocally determine their actions, which are expressed in various ways by different personalities, experiences and contexts.
Some theoretical issues, however, need to be highlighted: the first concerns the ‘contaminated’ dimension of the ‘space’ of analysis. The difficulty of maintaining an aseptic vision is a constant of this study that requires taking a look that neither isolates nor ghettoises but that draws on multiple theoretical paradigms, keeping together a ‘right distance’ and a careful listening ability. I chose, therefore, to overturn the perspective of deconstructing the female images, ‘deformed’ by the gaze of men, to listen to their stories; considering the construction of the feminine as a public narrative that feeds and is fuelled by processes of ‘differential socialisation’.
A second issue is that of ‘positioning’. I refer to the ‘performative geographies’ elaborated by Pickering-Iazzi when dealing with stories of Mafia women. These perspectives of analysis transform ‘places’ into ‘social spaces’, where the encounter takes place and the identities are produced. I would like to draw attention to the contaminated dimension of the story generated on the border areas, recognising in that contamination the characteristic feature of the encounter with Mafia women: a condition with which to deal from a methodological point of view
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
Women and transnational organized crime: the ambiguous case of the italian Mafias
No full textThis chapter examines the transformation of the roles of women in Italian organized crime groups. Starting from a comparative analysis of the way in which – over time – the different manifestations of female power and male domination in certain organized crime groups (Cosa Nostra and others) have changed, we seek to understand what female power is in these contexts and what are the circumstances which make it legitimate and visible, what are the different modalities in which it expresses itself over time, in different locations and criminal contexts.
The studies of women’s roles in mafias have shown how, over time, these have changed, particularly in terms of their ‘visibility’. Over the last 20 years, when organized crime groups have encountered difficult moments because of the many arrests, they have increasingly given women the task of preserving, asserting and reflecting their own image of power to the outside world. Often during moments of emergency for organized crime groups, even with potential male substitutes, women are perceived as more reliable. They have been given important tasks for the survival of the organization. They have been used to manage the profits and collect payments, communicate between prisons and the outside world. They have been given roles of responsibility in the business of the clan, playing important roles in the criminal strategies in their own right.
The international situation is also examined. We show how the specific ambiguity which characterizes the role of women in crime has forced women to interpret roles which are marginal and isolated when in reality they are of central importance for the mafia: even though their role is not recognized by their men or public opinion, they have direct/real power. Although a superficial analysis may partially justify why there is little reference to women criminals in the legal statistics, a closer look reveals a more complex picture. There are many cases of the function women in the mafia which have been interpreted (and also in judicial material) as cases of a ‘temporary delegation of power’ – reducing the role of the female to a marginal and limited one which, also at the judicial level, offers the mafia ways of escaping punishment. In reality, the female roles in mafia organized crime - which have always been seen as limited because of the small number of women sentenced for mafia association – are varied and more important than we may think.
In order to show their full extent of their role, using the few available sources, we seek to give mafia women a voice, exploring their beliefs and their life experiences in relation to mafia membership. Using primary sources, interviews, letters, judicial material we seek to establish the narrative and image of the women who exist in the mafia world or who come into contact with it. A mafia explained through the metaphor of a ‘prism of types’ – rather than by a male narrative – exposes different unexplored routes and perspectives which hopefully allow us to elaborate on and define new aspects of a world which is continuously changing in a transnational context. An innovative approach is used to show new aspects and ideas
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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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