Search results

This study introduces Simone Weil's impersonal justice concept and its relevance to libraries' identity and role in societies. The article presents the constituents of impersonal justice and a theoretical justification for the coexistence of neutrality with libraries' commitment to social causes.

Conceptual analysis of 3 Weil's works, 13 scientific articles and 12 libraries' official documents was applied, looking at relevant concepts and findings, contexts of use, arguments and types of authority.

Five constituents of impersonal justice were found: universality, concreteness, unicity, inviolability and inappropriability. Impersonal justice, based on the inviolable value of each individual and the universal expectation of good, allows for a more accurate definition of social justice. Besides, it justifies libraries' commitment to climate change, migrants and Black lives matter, among other causes.

In contrast to previous works, this paper focuses on clarifying concepts by applying conceptual analysis to Weil's works, Library and Information Science (LIS) sources in scientific and normative contexts. Additionally, the analysis of arguments and types of authority for justifying claims pro and against neutrality allows the reconstruction of the argumentative discourse beyond the examined sources.

This paper will challenge normative disaster studies and practice by arguing that thriving communities require the pursuit of imperfection and solidarity. The authors use Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass World as a lens to critique both how disasters are understood, and how disaster researchers and practitioners operate, within a climate-change affected world where cultural, political and historical constructs are constantly shifting.

The paper will undertake an analysis of both disasters and disaster studies, using this unique (and satirical) critical lens, looking at the unfolding of systemic mistakes, oppressions and mal-development that are revealed in contemporary disasters, that were once the critiques of Lewis Carroll’s Victorian-era England. It shows how disaster “resilience-building” can actually be a mechanism for continuing the status quo, and how persistent colonizing institutions and systems can be in reproducing themselves.

The authors argue the liberation of disaster studies as a process of challenging the doctrines and paradigms that have been created and given meaning by those in power – particularly white, Western/Northern/Eurocentric, male power. They suggest how researchers and practitioners might view disasters – and their own praxis – Through the Looking Glass in an effort to better understand the power, domination and violence of the status quo, but also as a means of creating a vision for something better, arguing that liberation is possible through community-led action grounded in love, solidarity, difference and interconnection.

The paper uses a novel conceptual lens as a way to challenge researchers and practitioners to avoid the utopic trap that wishes to achieve homogenized perfection and instead find an “imperfect” and complex adaptation that moves toward justice. Considering this idea through satire and literary criticism will lend support to empirical research that makes a similar case using data.

This article sets out to show how principles and questions about method that underlie a way of interpreting the discipline of conservation and restoration can find results in research and studies, aiming at achieving even conscious reuse process. The occasion is the very recent research performed on the former Church of Saints Gerolamo and Francesco Saverio in Genoa, Italy, the Jesuit church annexed to the 17th-century College of the order. It is a small Baroque jewel in the heart of the ancient city, former University Library and actually abandoned, forgotten for years, inaccessible and awaiting a new use.

The two-year work carried out on the monumental building was conducted according to a study and research methodology developed and refined over the years within the activities of the School of Specialisation in Architectural Heritage and Landscape of the University of Genoa. It is a multidisciplinary and rigorous approach, which aims to train high-level professionals, up-to-date and aware of the multiple problems that interventions on existing buildings, especially of a monumental nature, involve.

The biennal study has been carried out within the activities of the Post-Graduate Programme in Architectural Heritage and Landscape of the University of Genoa. The work methodology faces the challenges of the contemporary complexity, raised by the progressive broadening of the concept of cultural “heritage” and by the problems of its conservation, its active safeguard and its reuse: safety in respect of seismic risk, fire and hydro geological instability, universal accessibility – cognitive, physical and alternative – resource efficiency, comfort and savings in energy consumption, sustainability, communication and involvement of local communities and stakeholders.

The goals of the work were the following: understanding of the architectural heritage, through the correlated study of its geometries, elements and construction materials, surfaces, structures, spaces and functions; understanding of the transformations that the building has undergone over time, relating the results of historical reconstructions from indirect sources and those of direct archaeological analysis; assessment of the state of conservation of the building recognising phenomena of deterioration, damage, faults and deficits that affect materials, construction elements, systems and structures; identification of the causes and extent of damage, faults and deficits, assessing the vulnerability and level of exposure of the asset to the aggression of environmental factors and related risks; evaluation of the compatibility between the characteristics of the available spaces, the primary needs of conservation, the instance of regeneration and possible new uses; the definition of criteria and guidelines for establishing the planning of conservation, restoration and redevelopment interventions.

This study analyses the socioeconomic impact of COVID-19 on government accountability regarding the employment of both national and migrant workforces by bringing evidence from an emerging market. In doing so, this study addresses if/how the government discharged its accountability to the public during this recent global health crisis, which started in late 2019, with its effects still being felt today.

This study is based on a close reading of the relevant news media (local and international), published research and official reports, as well as ten conversations with business managers to analyse the socioeconomic impact of COVID-19 on government accountability in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). This study draws on insights from public choice theory in trying to understand why some governments take an economic perspective while exercising accountability to their population during the pandemic.

It was found that COVID-19 led the government to pursue plans for the localization of the professions and increase employment rates among nationals vs. foreigners or migrant workers. The crisis was exploited by the government to achieve macro socio-political and economic goals, demonstrating its accountability to citizens, rather than foreign workers. This shift shows that difficult and exceptional circumstances can present opportunities for policymakers in emerging markets to achieve national policy and political aims.

This study enhances the author’s understanding of accountability during crises (i.e. crises-induced accountability) in emerging markets. The analyses presented enrich the crisis management literature by highlighting the implicit actions of national leaders that affect the lives and well-being of their constituents, especially vulnerable groups.

This paper explores the economic and social effects of human capital investment in the 20th century. As well as drawing on census data and statistical yearbooks in Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand, the paper develops its argument by an intersection of scholarly work in sociology, economics and the history of education to consider the effects of increased human capital investment on economic growth but also on the experiences of childhood, work discipline and the present climate crisis.

This paper considers the implications of what economic historian Claudia Goldin has described as the “human capital century” for the history of school and university education. By reconsidering education in the settler colonies, especially Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand, as “stimulus”, this helps explain key aspects of contemporary human capital investment, which the paper argues should be understood as constituted by children's and young people's free labour at school, university and across the economy.

This research argues that children's and young people's free labour, performed in educational institutions, constitutes a large portion of Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand's national investment in human capital. At key points, this investment has acted as an economic stimulus, promoting surges of profitability. The effects were not confined to young people. Systematised, educational expansion also became the foundation of environmental degradation, labour market exploitation and a relentless increase in service-sector productivity that is worn on professional bodies. Productivity increases have been associated with reduced professional autonomy as a managerial class coerced professionals into working harder, though often under the guise of working “smarter” – a fiction that encouraged or coerced even greater personal investment in collective human capital. This investment of personal time, effort and selfhood by children and the professionals they grew into can thus be seen, in Marxian terms, as a crucial vector of capitalist exploitation in the 20th century.

The paper concludes by suggesting that a reduction of managerial influence in educational settings would improve learner and professional autonomy with improved labour and environmental conditions.

The paper makes a unique contribution to the history of education by exploring education as stimulus as a key component of education’s role in 20th and 21st century capitalism. It interrogates exploitative aspects of human capital investment, especially in the midst of environmental catastrophe and the recent COVID crisis.

The introduction in Italy in July 2021 of the “COVID-19 Green Certification”, known as the “Green Pass”, was a particularly important moment in the political and social history of the country. While its use for health reasons is debatable both logically and scientifically, its effects should be measured at the general sociological level. The “Green Pass” allowed Italian social life to be shaped according to a social and political profile that can be traced back to a “society of control”. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned issue.

This paper, of a theoretical nature, intends to verify such an interpretation through a critical survey of Gilles Deleuze's well-known Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle (1990) and relating the theories to it from cybernetic science, sociology of social systems and the continental philosophy, specifically Michel Foucault. After a short introduction on the history of the instrument's introduction, the paper, divided into parts reflecting the set-up of Deleuze's text, examines the systemic social effects of the “Green Pass” with regard to its logic, and concludes with a reflection on the program of the instrument's future developments.

The “Green Pass” put into practice a model of a society of control as anticipated by Deleuze, verified with particular reference to some instances of Luhmann's theory of social systems, and in the perspective of a Foucault's “normalizing society” in the process of definition and affirmation.

The “Green Pass” has been a controversial tool that has caused forms of social discrimination and exclusion and has seriously questioned the architecture of the rule of law. The conceptual paper tries to reflect on the premises and implications of this instrument.

The approach to the problem both in a critical key and according to concepts and theories of the sociology of social systems, cybernetics and continental philosophy.