1,722,559 research outputs found
Il dono del don. Frammento di una teoria politico-culturale della mafia
No full textIn this paper I present the essential lines of a theoretical model that would explain, in a simple and parsimonious way, the vast quantity of facts and qualities that makes up the puzzle called «mafia»: the power, wealth, violence, blood, respect, honour, reputation, silence, friendship, aiding and abetting, marriage, initiations, kinship, rituals, myths, religiosity, absconding, as well as the charm, ambiguity, ambivalence, uncertainty, duplicity, and invisibility (among others) that characterise the mafia universe according to its own members and even outsiders. Moving from a neglected insight of Gaetano Mosca’s early description of the ‘mafia’ phenomenology, I propose to conceive the ‘mafia’ as an institutionalised system of social relations based on what anthropologists call the gift principle. The figure of the gift is central to the theoretical model, allowing us to connect the understanding of the mafia to a consolidated and by now enormous corpus of theory and empirical research developed since Marcel Mauss’s seminal text Essai sur le don
Identification of a sociologist. Introducing Alessandro Pizzorno’s Autobiography
No full textA recostruction and assessment of Alessandro Pizzorno's intellectual biography and career, and their relation to the Italian field of sociology, moving from Pizzorno's autobiographical text. Special attention is devoted to Pizzorno's intellectual formation in its links with colonialism and philosophy as well as politics, and to Pizzorno's mobility across countries, languages, universities, and even disciplines
Mafia Politics
No full textThis ground-breaking book offers a deep and original analysis of the Mafia – in particular Cosa Nostra – as a distinct form of politics. Marco Santoro breaks with criminal and economic approaches which see the Mafia as an industry of private protection and rationally calculating wealth accumulation. Instead he argues that it represents an alternative way of organizing political relations, the exercise of power, and the struggle for prestige. Nor is this a distortion or failure of the modern Western state, based on the rule of law: the Mafia is best understood as an older, alternative tradition of politics, a distinctly Southern institutional arrangement of social life focused on personal ties and obligations. Today, the Mafia still thrives among subaltern classes and in regions that the modern state has not yet incorporated, as a conservative counter-politics of prestige. Pivotal to understanding this world is a cultural sociology of the Mafia, offering the tools and concepts necessary to penetrate the symbolism and structures of Mafia life.
Blending diverse theoretical strands with folk sources and the voices of Mafiosi themselves, Santoro develops a political theory of the Mafia, shedding new light on this captivating, global, and remarkably resilient phenomenon
The Gini-Merton Connection. An Episode in the History of Sociology and Its International Circulation
No full textR.K. Merton’s correspondence is a large one (it addresses nearly 650 scholars through- out the world, whose letters run from 1930 to 2003). This article focuses on a single unit, the one between Merton and the Italian statistician, demographer and sociologist Gini, from 1936 to 1940. The interest of this correspondence is double. First, it sheds light on the early period of Merton’s scholarly life, before his move to Columbia (from 1941 onward) and the starting of his collaboration with Paul Lazarsfeld at the Bureau of Applied Social Research. Second, it testifies to an intellectual relationship – if not friendship – subsequently acknowledged by Merton himself as meaningful for his formation and as a source for his own thinking. The fact that, as a young scholar, Merton worked as a teaching assistant to Gini while the latter was visiting professor at Harvard (1936) is not a novelty. However, nobody has devoted any attention to what this relationship concretely was, how it developed and under which circumstances it worked. The article has therefore two objectives. The first one pertains to intellectual history and it aims to fill a gap in current knowledge of Merton’s relationship to Gini. The second objective pertains to the sociology of sociology, or better the historical sociology of the social sciences, and it focuses on this unit of communication seeing it as a partially missed opportu- nity, or a failed encounter – this time between two national disciplinary cultures, i.e. Italian and early American sociology. What emerges from the Gini-Merton correspondence is a case of (unexpected) academic friendship that fails to evolve into a productive collaborative relationship [Farrell 2001], or a case of an opportunity of exchange between two individuals that fails to evolve in collaboration and circulation between two national disciplinary cultures and communities
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
Verso una sociologia del cinema. Industria e pubblico
No full textPrima traduzione italiana di libro del 1914 che ha dato avvio alla sociologia del cinem
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