Cultura Unimpresa

The Sicilian Mafia, or Cosa Nostra, is one of the most intriguing criminal phenomena in the world. It is an unparalleled organised criminal grouping that over almost two centuries has been able not only to successfully permeate licit and illicit economy, politics and civil society, but also to influence and exercise authoritative power over both the underworld and the upper-world. This criminal phenomenon has been a captivating conundrum for scholars of different disciplines who have tried to explain with various paradigms the reasons behind the emergence and consolidation of the mafia. Challenging the Mafia Mystique provides an analysis of the changes the Sicilian mafia has undergone, from legitimisation to denunciation. Rino Coluccello highlights how, from the very emergence of the organised criminal groups in Sicily, a culture existed that was protective and tolerant of the mafia. He argues that the various conceptualisations of the mafia that dominated the public and scientific debate in the nineteenth and more than half of the twentieth century created a mystique, which legitimised the mafia and contributed to their success. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of organised crime, Italian politics and Italian literature.

The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300-1600 explores the links between maritime trading networks around Europe, from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the North and Baltic Seas. Maritime trade routes connected diverse geographical and cultural spheres, contributing to a more integrated Europe in both cultural and material terms. This volume explores networks’ economic functions alongside their intercultural exchanges, contacts and practical arrangements in ports on the European coasts. The collection takes as its central question how shippers and merchants were able to connect regional and interregional trade circuits around and beyond Europe in the late medieval period. It is divided into four parts, with chapters in Part I looking across broad themes such as ships and sailing routes, maritime law, financial linkages and linguistic exchanges. In the following parts - divided into the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea, and the Atlantic and North Seas - contributors present case studies addressing themes including conflict resolution, relations between different types of main ports and their hinterland, the local institutional arrangements supporting maritime trade, and the advantages and challenges of locations around the continent. The volume concludes with a summary that points to the extraterritorial character of trading systems during this fascinating period of expansion. Drawing together an international team of contributors, The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe is a vital contribution to the study of maritime history and the history of trade. It is essential reading for students and scholars in these fields.

This book draws together debates from two burgeoning fields, liminality and informality studies, to analyze how dynamics of rule-bending take shape in Rome today. Adopting a multiscalar and transdisciplinary approach, it unpacks how gaps and contradictions in institutional rulemaking and application force many residents into protracted liminal states marked by intense vulnerability. By merging a political economy lens with ethnographic research in informal housing, illegal moneylending, unauthorized street-vending and waste collection, the author shows that informalities are not marginal or anomalous conditions, but an integral element of the city’s governance logics. Multiple actors together construct the local cultural norms, conventions and moral economies through which rule-negotiation occurs. However, these practices are ultimately unable to reconfigure historically rooted power dynamics and hierarchies. In fact, they often aggravate weak urbanites’ difficulties in accessing rights and services. A study that challenges assumptions that informalities are predominantly features of developing economies or limited to specific groups and sectors, this volume’s critical approach and innovative methodology will appeal to scholars of sociology and anthropology interested in social theory, urban studies and liminality.

This book provides a multidisciplinary approach for the study of the “abandonment” problem at the inter-section among urban studies, neo-institutionalist perspectives, and social ontology. An analytical framework (based on descriptive and operational issues, factors, reasons, policies) has been built to interpret the phenomenon of abandonment and possible ways of intervening. The work considers the Italian situation in general terms and examines the case study of Milan in depth. This case is interesting because it triggered public discussions on the problem of abandonment in a non-shrinking context. Moreover, recently, specific policies to cope with abandonment problem have been introduced. The purpose of the book is to show that the problem of the “abandonment” of urban buildings should be understood as a social fact and not as a brute fact. Thus, in this work the “abandoned” state of buildings is considered as not directly related to certain physical variables; rather, it entirely depends on human evaluations. Crucial information in this regard is how institutional frameworks (e.g. sets of rules of conduct) influence individual behaviour and actions through time. In this view, we may identify abandonment as a phenomenon intertwined with the actions of both private and public entities. The neo-institutional approach helps to highlight how the problem of abandonment is articulated with respect to property rights, formal constraints, reasons behind policy decisions, intervention strategies and implementations.

A multidisciplinary index covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities. It fully covers 1,144 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals, and it indexes individually selected, relevant items from over 6,800 major science and social science journals.

During the 1980s the Marshallian concept of industrial district (ID) became widely popular due to the resurgence of interest in the reasons that make the agglomeration of specialised industries a territorial phenomenon worth being analysed. The analysis of clusters and IDs has often been limited, considering only the local dimension of the created business networks. The external links of these systems have been systematically under-evaluated. This book offers a deep insight into the evolution of these systems and the internal-external mechanism of knowledge circulation and learning. This means that the access to external knowledge (information or R&D cooperative research) or to productive networks (global supply chains) is studied in order to describe how external knowledge is absorbed and how local clusters or districts become global systems. It provides a unified approach; showing that existing capabilities expand when locally embedded knowledge is combined with accessible external knowledge. In this view, external knowledge linkages reduce the danger of cognitive ‘lock-in’ and ‘over-embeddedness’, which may become important obstacles to local learning and innovation when technological trajectories and global economic conditions change. A selection of international experts

Educators, politicians, parents, and even students are consumed with speaking the language of academic achievement. Yet something is missing in the current focus on accountability, standardized testing, and adequate yearly progress. If schools continue to focus the conversation on rigor and accountability and ignore more human elements of education, many students may miss out on opportunities to discover the richness of individual exploration that schools can foster. In The Best Schools, Armstrong urges educators to leave narrow definitions of learning behind and return to the great thinkers of the past 100 years—Montessori, Piaget, Freud, Steiner, Erikson, Dewey, Elkind, Gardner—and to the language of human development and the whole child. The Best Schools highlights examples of educational programs that are honoring students' differences, using developmentally appropriate practices, and promoting a humane approach to education that includes the following elements: * An emphasis on play for early childhood learning. * Theme- and project-based learning for elementary school students. * Active learning that recognizes the social, emotional, and cognitive needs of adolescents in middle schools. * Mentoring, apprenticeships, and cooperative education for high school students. Educators in "the best schools" recognize the differences in the physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual worlds of students of different ages. This book will help educators reflect on how to help each student reach his or her true potential, how to inspire each child and adolescent to discover an inner passion to learn, and how to honor the unique journey of each individual through life.

This book examines the evolution of the phenomenon and explores the genesis of overtourism and the system dynamics underlining it. The 'overtourism' phenomenon is defined as the excessive growth of visitors leading to overcrowding and the consequential suffering of residents, due to temporary and often seasonal tourism peaks, that lead to permanent changes in lifestyles, amenities and well- being. Enormous tensions in overtourism affected destinations have driven the intensification of policy making and scholarly attention toward seeking antidotes to an issue that is considered paradoxical and problematic. Moving beyond the 'top 10 things you can do about overtourism', this book examines the evolution of the phenomenon and explores the genesis of overtourism as well as the system dynamics underpinning it. With a rigorous scientific approach, the book uses systems-thinking and contemporary paradigms around sustainable development, resilience planning and degrowth; while considering global economic, socio-political, environmental discourses. Researchers, analysts, policy makers and industry stakeholders working within tourism as well as those within the private sector, community groups, civil society groups and NGOs will find this book an essential source of information.