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This paper contributes to the analysis of the relationship between sociological discourse on ethnic relations and social changes produced by immigration in Italy. It is organized in three parts. The first part investigates the reasons that until recently prevented European and Italian academic debate from using the concept of ethnic minority to analyze international migration.

Dominant in the urban sociology literature on immigrant incorporation is the role of ethnic enclaves – ethnic neighborhoods that provide a “port of entry” or “context of reception” and help facilitate incorporation in the host society by generating informal resources, networks, and institutions that provide linguistic and cultural services and products (Portes & Rumbaut, 1990). While New York City's stature as a global city is replete with nostalgia about historic ethnic immigrant neighborhoods, contemporary immigrant settlement is once again transforming urban landscapes not only by renewing enclave formations but by creating numerous multiethnic, multiracial neighborhoods (Hum, 2004). As often cited, in no other historic period has New York City received as diverse a range of people from all over the world – certainly, this diversity is reshaping local neighborhood landscapes.

Purpose – This chapter examines the shift in political leadership from white ethnics and African-Americans to Hispanic/Latino representation in city-wide offices. Specifically, we explore the electoral coalition that Angel Taveras constructed to become Providence, Rhode Island’s first Latino mayor. This victory illustrates the continued strength of Hispanic/Latino political candidates in American politics.Design/method – Using public opinion survey data and a ward-by-ward analysis we provide a detailed breakdown of the type of voter Taveras appealed to and where these individuals reside.Findings – Taveras’s win was anchored in the upper-income, white liberal wards of the city. In addition, he won in the old Irish and Italian wards now inhabited by African-Americans and Hispanic/Latino voters. Overall, the significant growth of the Hispanic/Latino community in Providence from 30 percent in 2000 to 38 percent in 2010 was pivotal to his victory.Originality/value – This chapter provides an in-depth examination of how a Latino candidate won in a Northeastern city that had been dominated by Irish and Italian political leaders. The coalition that Taveras constructed highlights how Latinos appeal to liberal white voters. Finally, Taveras’s victory signals the continued political ascension and strength of the Hispanic/Latino community.

This paper aims to reconstruct the process that led to the appropriation of history – of a particular historical period, the Renaissance – as an intangible asset in the promotion of Italian fashion on the international market after the Second World War.

The paper reconstructs the process that led to the appropriation of history – of a particular historical period, the Renaissance – as an intangible asset in the promotion of Italian fashion on the international market after the Second World War.

The successful debut of Italian fashion in the fifties can be explained through an intelligent marketing campaign which placed it directly in the centre of a well-known, appreciated, not to say indisputable, tradition of “good taste”: that of the Renaissance. Connecting Italian fashion with Renaissance Italy meant in fact introducing a kind of ante litteram guarantee of provenance – a “country branding” - recognized throughout the world, which, at the same time, evoked the splendour of a period in which Italian taste was a model to follow and imitate.

The studies on the history of the Italian fashion business have accepted the association of Italian fashion with Renaissance tradition as an element to be taken for granted, without inquiring into the historical legitimacy of such a coupling (either in the way in which it was produced or why it had such an important role). This paper dismantles the consistent rhetorical sedimentation with which the subject is encrusted and provides a new insight, showing that such continuity did not exist; on the contrary, it was the product of a marketing strategy.

This chapter examines three Italian cities that have experienced a transition from “Fordism to tourism”: Genoa, Turin, and Milan. After an industrial crisis, they have invested in culture and tourism as alternative ways of development. This transition is examined using the theoretical framework of urban regimes highlighting five development trends: the city as a growth machine, the Fordist city, the creative city, the city as entertainment machine, and the blue-green city. By adopting this theoretical framework, the evidence shows how academic institutions, tour operators, and public authorities may or may not work together for the tourism development of their cities.

This paper aims to analyze the problematic relationship between the Left, the commercial revolution and the progressive growth of mass consumption during the Italian economic miracle.

Taking for example the city of Bologna, the most important city run by the Italian communist party, the paper problematizes the socio-economic and political – institutional processes connected with the emergence of “American-like” commercial and distribution strategies, and of consumerist identities.

Bologna’s administrators governed the commerce through a rationalization supported by urban planning, including the establishment of a chain of “associated supermarkets”, built on municipal areas and financed by a mixed-capital company set up for that purpose. At the same time, they sought to protect small retailers to gain their political consensus and to contain crisis-related anxieties among the consumers, a category which has still an uncertain identity in Italy.

Much remains to be seen in the characteristics of the Italian miracle, and in the manner it was ruled. The case of Bologna illuminates an important piece of the Italian Left’s attempt to interpret and to lead the modernization of the country.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

The chapter will describe the genealogy of the international social movement “Zero Waste (ZW)” and highlights its role of cultural, organizational, and scientific reference point for the waste management, in particular the public one in Italy. The chapter proposes to interpret ZW as a part of a wider social movement on “common goods” that in Italy proposed a radical critics of the neoliberal governance of local public services. The climax of this movement was the referendum of 2011, when 27 millions of Italian citizens voted against the privatization of waste, water, and transport management at an urban level. By door-to-door recycling, composting of community, pay as you throw system (PAYT), reuse centers, and environmental communication, ZW movement succeeded to create an apparatus of driver concepts for the management of waste. In particular, some of the proposed case studies were the actors that implemented the ZW strategy findings on the territory, experimenting new organizational and social practices aimed at increasing recycle and at converting the local economy into a circular one.

The Italian sociological scientific community has shown a limited interest in issues related to bisexuality. The purpose of this paper is to fill the knowledge gap on the subject, showing data of an empirical research conducted online on the Italian bisexual community.

The article is based on a mixed methods online survey on Italian bisexual people, which included 218 interviews. The questionnaire was made up of closed and open-ended questions, to investigate their behaviours, habits and lifestyles.

Social pressure and lack of understanding by others sometimes make difficult for bisexual people to show themselves openly for what they are, especially in some contexts, such as the word of work. From a sociological point of view, one can argue that one of the tools when bisexual people face the stigma related to bisexuality is to control, often in an obsessive way, the information they provide about themselves, carefully evaluating the contexts in which they can free themselves and the time when they must expose themselves in line with the expectations of the heteronormative society.

The non-probabilistic sample limits the external validity of the findings. There are also critical elements that characterise social research when transposed online: first, the profiles of the respondents not always are verifiable; second, the digital divide excludes some groups that cannot access the web or involves an over-representation of those who are more familiar with technologies.

The work presented is the first Italian sociological study aimed at deepening the “invisible B” phenomenon of the LGBT acronym in a systematic way. Nowadays bisexuality remains under-researched in social sciences and overall in sociology. Putting “bisexuality” at the centre of the sociological attention appears important to provide serious and scientifically valid data and information useful both to develop the knowledge on this identity category and to contain forms of discrimination and prejudice.