Search results

Mental health interventions for Italian prisoners with mental disorders remain a problematic issue, despite radical changes in general psychiatric care and a 2008 major government reform transferring mental health care in prison to the National Health Service. The aim of this study is to describe the mental health intervention model implemented since January 2020 for prisoners allocated in the Parma Penitentiary Institutes (PPI). This approach is specifically based on specialized, “person-centered” and “person-tailored” therapeutic-rehabilitation plans in line with psychiatric treatments usually provided in community mental health-care centers of the Parma Department of Mental Health.

All the processes and procedures included in the PPI intervention model were first carefully illustrated, paying special attention to the service for newly admitted prisoners and each typology of specialized therapeutic-rehabilitation treatment potentially provided. Additionally, a preliminary descriptive process analysis of the first six months of clinical activity was also performed.

Since January 2020, 178 individuals entered the PPI service for newly admitted prisoners. In total, 83 (46.7%) of them were engaged in the services of the PPI mental health-care team (35 with pathological addiction and 48 with mental disorders): 56 prisoners were offered an integrated mental health intervention and 27 exclusively an individual psychological or psychiatric treatment.

The results support the potential applicability of an integrated mental health intervention in prison, planning a person-tailored rehabilitation in close collaboration with the prisoners, their families and the local mental health/social services.

Demonstrates the importance of family values in employment policies at Italian food group Ponti's.

Looks at the firm's recruitment, training and reward policies and provides the comments of employees who work there.

Highlights the importance of recruiting from within to maintaining the organizational culture and observes that a number of employees have been with “the family” for more than 30 years.

Reveals that Ponti's offers its employees not only restaurant-based and highly practical training followed by targeted courses but also the chance to visit the area of Italy from which the founding family originates.

Explains the policies – including promotion from within – that are helping one business in the volatile catering sector to keeping its employees longer than the average.

Provides examples of individual employees who have worked their way up the company hierarchy.

This paper aims at explaining variances in the contribution of Islamic crowdfunding platforms (ICFPs) to sustainable development (SD), by adopting an institutional logic perspective (ILP). ICFPs represent a dual institutional overlap between two logics (the Western-mainstream and the Islamic logic) which have an impact on corporate social responsibility (CSR) interpretations, practices, and decisions and whose conflicts are mitigated by choosing different resolution strategies. The authors aim at showing that this choice affects SD differently.

The authors develop a conceptual typology through the following steps: (1) choice of variables and identification of corresponding variable domains, through literature review. Variables chosen are the elemental CSR dimensions related to various social and environmental corporate responsibilities to whom diverse meaning and emphasis are given under the Western-mainstream and Islamic logics. (2) Identification of three distinct ideal types of ICFPs, building on different resolution strategies to mitigate conflicts between logics; (3) development, for each ideal type, of a set of implications related to SD; (4) implementation of a first test aiming at assigning real cases to each ideal type.

The authors identify Western-mimicking (platforms adopting as resolution strategy decoupling or compartmentalizing strategies), Islamic-driven (platforms focusing on one prevailing logic) and Syncretism-inspired (platforms adopting hybridizing practices) ideal-types.

It is the first paper suggesting ILP to explain variances in crowdfunding platforms' role in addressing SD. It focuses on a specific type of CF platforms till now neglected.

This paper analyses emergency management in two regions of Italy – Emilia-Romagna and Veneto – in order (1) to understand whether they impact on the spread of local coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) contagion and (2) evaluate which strategy works best.

A three-step method was developed consisting of (1) a regional incidence curve analysis; (2) a descriptive statistical analysis of the respective operational measures related to the COVID-19 curve stages; and (3) a dynamic Structural Equation Model.

The results show the effects of the models during the various stages of the local contagion, focussing both on the two individual regions and a comparison of the way they responded.

Three theoretical implications are highlighted: (1) Better results are not necessarily the outcome of increased expenditure; (2) The overall rigidity they both show does not work; (3) The decision to centralize was, to some extent, effective for both regions.

The article empirically tests the effectiveness of emergency management in tackling a single event. Instead of the widely-used normative approach, the authors adopted a descriptive one, which is not frequently discussed in the emergency management literature.

In Italy, worker cooperatives (WCs), whose workers hold major control rights over collectively-owned assets, are the leading vehicle for the promotion and development of employee ownership. Worker cooperatives are present in all regions and in most economic sectors, employing about 506,000 workers and generating a turnover of about €22 bn. Despite their history and diffusion, the high prevalence of WCs in Italy is under-researched and -thematised and requires new research.

The paper leverages unpublished primary and secondary data from Centro Studi Legacoop databank, the Aida-Bureau Van Dijk databank and the Cooperative Registry of the Ministry of Economic Development (CRMED) to explain the spread of WCs in Italy.

This paper reveals descriptive statistics of WCs and investigates their distribution across economic sectors and regions, their economic and financial performance and gives an overview of the relevant legislation. The paper indicates that older small- and medium-sized cooperatives located in central and north-eastern Italy perform best economically. However, in recent years, an increasing number of young cooperatives has emerged in South Italy thanks to favourable legislation, cooperative finance and the diffusion of cooperative know-how. Limitations to such results are reported in the conclusions.

The paper sheds light on past and recent development trends of WCs in Italy, highlights their growth in South Italy and revitalises the debate on the drivers, structures and rationales of employee-owned enterprises in Italy. Findings generate implications for research and practice. Given the tendency of WCs to better protect jobs than investor-owned enterprises, the spread of these enterprises may help workers find better and more stable jobs, counter-cyclically mitigating the dangerous effects of macro- and meso-economic fluctuations and instability.

The paper examines the different trajectories of externalisation and the development of different kinds of welfare mix in three different sub-sectors of socio-educational services: long-term care for the elderly, early childhood services and kindergartens. By integrating the industrial relations and comparative public administration literatures, it analyses the different rationales underpinning contracting-out decisions of Italian local governments.

The paper adopts a multi-method, multi-level approach: quantitative data on the provision of socio-educational services and the nature of the providers are combined with the analysis of 12 case studies of municipalities through 80 semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis.

The paper argues that differentials in labour regulation across the public/private divide and the consequent possibility to access labour markets characterised by cheaper labour and higher organisational flexibility are a key explanation in local governments' decisions to outsource. Despite labour market factors playing a prominent role, their relevance is significantly tempered by political and social factors and particularly by the strong opposition of citizens, personnel and trade unions to pure market solutions in the provision of such services. However, the centrality of these factors depends on the nature of the services: political sensibility against privatisation proved to be stronger in kindergartens, while services for the elderly were more frequently and less contentiously privatised.

The main contribution is the integration of the two research traditions to analyse patterns of outsourcing in the socio-educational services in Italy, showing that neither of them is able, alone, to explain the different private/public mix characterising different social and educational services.

This paper aims to know the dimension and scope that research on the district effect has had in the literature about industrial districts, as well as to shed some light on the connection between industrial districts and business results; or expressed differently, on how being located in an industrial district or not affects or might influence the performance of the firms located therein.

The purpose of this paper has been achieved through an exhaustive review of the empirical literature dedicated to the so-called district effect. The papers selected in the analysis were selected on the basis of the following criteria: (1) publications in scientific journals; (2) studies carried out in Spain and Italy; and (3) works published between 1994 and 2017.

The outcome of the literature review suggests, on the one hand, that the debate on the extent to which the territory influences the competitiveness of firms located in industrial districts still remains a topic of great interest. It can additionally be observed that most of the works dedicated to measuring the district effect have done so using three dimensions: (1) productivity/efficiency; (2) international competitiveness; and (3) innovation.

From a theoretical perspective, the findings of this paper make it possible to carry out an integrating proposal for the measurement of the district effect which revolves around three dimensions (productivity/efficiency; international competitiveness; and innovation).

This paper makes a twofold contribution to the literature: (i) it brings together the most important empirical contributions that measure the competitive advantages obtained by firms located in industrial districts through the district effect; and (ii) it theoretically and empirically establishes the essential dimensions of that effect.

The paper aims to focus on traceability as part of information management in the fruit supply chains of Emilia‐Romagna, Italy. A review of the rules in use for traceability distinguishes between baseline traceability and traceability plus (T+), which encompasses many further embedded value attributes.

The paper takes the form of a qualitative study involving in‐depth interviews with key informants in the Italian fresh produce chain.

Findings are discussed in terms of different themes including identification of three distinct types of supply chains and the impact upon them and categorisation of traceability systems across the different chains. Identified are the impact of information systems management; purchasing management; product management transaction costs; and co‐ordination issues.

The study's findings are based on Italian fresh produce traceability context only.

Elements of competitive strategy are considered in the analysis of fruit supply chains of Emilia‐Romagna, to demonstrate that not only strategic, but also operative choices determine the way a single firm or supply network manages traceability and information issues. Applications of such elements to buyer and seller selection as well as to competing retailers of the fruit supply chain, verify the hypothesis.

The paper adds to the body of knowledge surrounding prior studies on the development of traceability systems and develops further the analysis of legal and value‐adding dimensions of traceability.

The paper, starting from research conducted on the implementations of gender policy in six Italian regions, aims to explore the limits of the actual strategies and ask some questions on the possibility to enter some principles of the diversity management (DM) approach in the Italian context.

The qualitative research was conducted through a textual analysis of the Regional Operative Plain, and some interviews with the different stakeholders involved in the planning and implementations of the policies.

Starting from the characteristics of the regional policies, the research provides some indication of levels of applicability of the DM in the Italian context in terms of both definition and execution of the interventions.

The paper presented has important implications for the field of equality and diversity in Mediterranean countries, but the research is based only on institutional policies and not on the organizational measures, so researchers are encouraged to deepen the organizational practices.

This paper aims to reduce the gap in the current literature that often does not consider the necessity of studying the detailed rules of defining and implementing policies in close relation with the characteristics of enterprises and institutions.

The European Community is currently experimenting with the use of Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) and other patient classification systems. Disease Staging is a clinically based classification system which focuses on the dimensions of severity of illness and can be implemented using the same data required for the DRGs. Reports a pilot study in the Emilia‐Romagna region of Italy, where data were analysed from three hospitals for patients hospitalized in 1988 with four diseases: coronary artery disease/acute myocardial infarction, cholecystitis, appendicitis, and diabetes mellitus. The same patients were classified using DRGs and Disease Staging, and the Disease Staging methodology was used to analyse issues of timeliness of hospital admission, length of stay patterns, and in‐hospital mortality rates.