Search results

In April 2009, a terrible earthquake badly damaged the city of L'Aquila. Several studies have shown that the citizens' ability to react to a stressful situation is related to the satisfaction level of services during the reconstruction process of the city. The general aim of the present study is to investigate whether the knowledge of information about the reconstruction phase has an influence on the satisfaction of the citizens, regarding the lifestyles and the capacity to adapt and respond to changes.

Five hundred and three residents in L'Aquila city were interviewed using a questionnaire that examines the satisfaction level, understanding of political issues and the resiliency skills of individuals.

The date shows that the lack of information about the work of the facilities of by the government has caused dissatisfaction among the citizens who feel that they have not been well informed about the rebuilding on the city.

The study can represent an indication concerning the facilities and assistance provided by politicians and be understood as an input in order to improve the administrative system and public welfare.

This study aims to examine the role that four distinct bundles (developmental, utilisation, maintenance and accommodative) of HRM practices play in enhancing work engagement among chronically ill employees, and to analyse whether perceptions of discrimination on the grounds of illness can affect these relationships.

The data were collected through a quantitative survey using a sample of 669 chronically ill employees of a major Italian company.

This study's findings confirm the importance of discerning between positive, insignificant and negative effects of distinct HR bundles on chronically ill employees' work engagement. Furthermore, this study's results suggest that the positive effect of utilisation practices (i.e. practices aimed at enabling employees to make full use of existing, but not yet necessarily utilised, individual resources) on engagement is greater when chronically ill employees perceive a discrimination-free work environment.

This study's findings confirm the importance of discerning between positive, no, and negative effects of distinct HR bundles on chronically ill employees' work engagement. Furthermore, this study's results suggest that the positive effect of utilisation practices (i.e. practices aimed at enabling employees to make full use of existing but not necessarily applied individual resources) on engagement is greater when chronically ill employees perceive a discrimination-free work environment.

The study highlights those HR bundles that have the capacity to positively affect the work engagement of chronically ill employees, a minority group rarely considered in HRM studies. Furthermore, the research identifies perceived discrimination on the grounds of illness as a contextual condition that may hinder the otherwise positive effect of HRM practices on the engagement of workers suffering from a chronic illness.

This paper aims to theorize on the internationalization process model to explain cases of manufacturing reshoring as decisions taken to manage risk when internationalizing.

The paper is of a conceptual nature. Building on the logic of the internationalization process model, the authors extend previous work by focusing on firms’ risk perception (determined by commitment, knowledge and uncertainty as key variables) to explain also reshoring decisions.

Four propositions were developed, concerning the likelihood of firms to make manufacturing reshoring decisions. The first two propositions deal with the effects of new risk contingencies, and the other two refer specifically to the effects of managerial perceptions of three different typologies of risk, namely, host-country, home-country and reshoring-process specific risk.

While reshoring has been discussed mainly on the basis of economic arguments, this paper offers an alternative, behavioural view of this phenomenon as a strategic risk-management process. Therefore, it offers initial steps to theorize about reshoring from a risk-management perspective and, in doing so, opens up a number of avenues for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical examination of the aftermath of the L’Aquila earthquake of 6 April 2009. It considers the elements of the recovery process that are unique or exceptional and endeavours to explain them.

The analysis is based on a survey and synthesis of the abundant literature on the disaster, coupled with observations from the author’s many visits to L’Aquila and personal involvement in the debates on the questions raised during the aftermath.

Several aspects of the disaster are unique. These include the use of large, well-appointed buildings as temporary accommodation and the efforts to use legal processes to obtain justice for alleged mismanagement of both the early emergency situation and faults in the recovery process.

Politics, history, economics and geography have conspired to make the L’Aquila disaster and its aftermath a multi-layered event that poses considerable challenges of interpretation.

The L’Aquila case teaches first that moderate seismic events can entail a long and difficult process of recovery if the initial vulnerability is high. Second, for processes of recovery to be rational, they need to be safeguarded against the effects of political expediency and bureaucratic delay.

Many survivors of the L’Aquila disaster have been hostages to fortune, victims as much of broader political and socio-economic forces than of the earthquake itself.

Although there are now many published analyses of the L’Aquila disaster, as the better part of a decade has elapsed since the event, there is value in taking stock and making a critical assessment of developments. The context of this disaster is dynamic and extraordinarily sophisticated, and it provides the key to interpretation of developments that otherwise would probably seem illogical.

This chapter embraces a rhythmanalytic approach to address the complexities of a city recovering from a disaster. Bridging Henri Lefebvre's work on everyday life with his later work on rhythms this chapter engages his theory to analyse the case of L'Aquila, a city in central Italy that was destroyed by an earthquake in 2009. To this day, the city's skyline is dominated by cranes, while life unfolds along with sounds of the ongoing reconstruction. While the city is still recovering from the earthquake, the landscape of ruins co-exists with a landscape of construction. More than 10 years after the earthquake stripped away life from its historical centre, the city continues to live in a temporal in-between the disaster and its future ‘rebirth’. While most of the current research on the city neglects the city's everyday experience, my research decentres the debate by analysing the everyday rhythms of L'Aquila's historical centre. Additionally, drawing from walking interviews this chapter highlights the perplexing aspects of everyday life in the city emphasising how the city is negotiated and learned from the locals. This chapter highlights the way different temporalities blur in the everyday practices of reconstruction, emphasising how the city is lived and created in the here-and-now.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the “knowledge city” spatial socio-economic imaginary used in the post-earthquake city of L’Aquila, Italy, to promote its socio-economic redevelopment.

The paper counters primary and secondary data with the expected qualities of a knowledge city. The analysis is supported by the literature review on knowledge-cities and post-disaster redevelopment, local and national documentation review, on-site observations and an inquiry of the case of the Gran Sasso Science Institute, the leading project towards the implementation of the knowledge-city agenda through interviews with key actors and a survey among its researchers.

Post-disaster realities and path-dependency leave little room for a positive path-shaping redevelopment trajectory related to a knowledge-city urban archetype. This vision promotes materialism and intellectualism from local, national and international stakeholders; however, the city lacks specific urban qualities to attract and maintain highly skilled labour and investments, while negative socio-economic trends still continue a decade after the earthquake.

The city’s post-disaster recovery and redevelopment contain certain degrees of inertia. The early stage of it, the lack of certain secondary data, and the focus of the paper on specific indicators limit the opportunity for stronger reasoning.

The analysis reveals that the redevelopment vision of the knowledge city was hastily adopted. The mismatch between reality and expectations highlights the need for post-disaster territories to avoid overestimation of their capabilities and adjusts their redevelopment strategies to local characteristics adopting modest future projections.

We consider what happened in the initial reconstruction interventions following the 6 April 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila (Italy). Using the disaster risk reduction and resilience paradigm, we discuss the cognitive and interactional failures of top-down approaches, and we analyse the main constraints to enacting inclusive social learning and socially-sustainable transformation and building back better more resilient communities in post-disaster reconstruction.

Our evidence comes from participant observation, action anthropology and analytic auto-ethnography conducted during the reconstruction phase following the L'Aquila earthquake. Findings were triangulated with document analysis, media analysis and retrospective interviewing conducted in 2013 and 2017.

The shift from civil defence to civil protection did not bring any advance in disaster management and development practice in terms of DRR and resilience. The militaristic command-and-control approach, which is still in vogue among civil protection systems, means that local political leaders become the civil protection authorities in a disaster area. As in the L'Aquila case, this exacerbates local social and environmental risks and impacts, inhibits local communities from learning and restricts them from participating in post-disaster interventions.

Most previous commentary on disaster recovery and reconstruction following the L'Aquila earthquake has focussed on the top-down approach carried out by the national government and the Italian Department of Civil Protection (DCP). This paper is unique in that it sheds light on how the command-and-control approach was also implemented by local authority figures and on how this undermined building back better more resilient communities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of build back better (BBB) in contexts affected by depopulation and shrinking economies discussing how and if its principles are able to drive the recovery pattern toward a sustainability re-development path.

BBB principles’ usefulness in driving toward a sustainable post-disaster recovery has been tested in L’Aquila’s area (Italy) – severely affected by an earthquake in 2009 – through interviews and analyses of reconstruction plans and policies.

Although most of the BBB principles can be recognized within the intentions of plans and policies, the recovery process highlights a major fallacy in addressing the pre-disaster socio-economic stresses inducing to shrinkage and depopulation development lock-ins.

Although most of the principles can be recognized in the intentions of plans and policies, the recovery process highlights a main fallacy of the “BBB paradigm”: the need of addressing pre-disaster socio-economic stresses while recovering from the shocks was not explicitly nor implicitly addressed.

Shrinkage as a process of territorial transformation has been little explored in relation to natural hazards and post-disaster contexts. Indeed, while from one side BBB concept and principles drive toward a potential mitigation of the main risks while re-building, it results challenging to overcome the built environment re-building priorities to question whether, what and how to re-build while investing in socio-economic recovery. Reverting, or accepting, shrinkage could indeed implies to not build back part of the urban fabric, while investing in skills and capacity building, which, in turn, would be difficult to justify through the reconstruction budget. The tension between re-building (better, the built environment) and re-development (skills and networks, at the expense of re-building) is critical when BBB faces disasters happening in shrinking territories.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the disruption and reconfiguration of the territorial organisation of the central Italian town of L’Aquila resulting from actions taken by the special commissioner, a plenipotentiary official appointed by the central government, during the ten-month emergency period following the 2009 earthquake. The study attempts to determine how during the commissioner’s short tenure the territory of L’Aquila was restructured for many years to come.

The paper discusses two major issues: first, the short-term reconfiguration of the territorial organisation through mixed operative centres (Centri Operativi Misti, henceforth COMs); and, second, the long-term fragmentation of the physical and social fabric of the town through the resettlement of thousands of families in 19 semi-permanent housing developments located in outlying, rural areas of the municipality. The methods adopted were both qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative methods involved in-depth examination of official documents and interviews with key witnesses such as local administrators, citizens and activists. Quantitative methods included the GIS analysis of spatial and census data to assess changes in population after the earthquake.

The most significant finding of this study concerns the COMs and their misuse as a tool of centralised, authoritarian governance. Analysis of the territory’s reorganisation revealed that the model of emergency management followed in L’Aquila, far from taking into account unique features of the local population and territory, was hetero-centred and consistent with neoliberal thought. Understanding violence to be an unfolding process, the author argues that such a model of management can be seen as an application of state violence.

This paper adds a new case study to the discussion of the role of the state and the application of neoliberal policies in disaster recovery. The main originality of the paper lies in its focus on COMs and their peculiar use as a tool for implementing an authoritarian model of disaster management.