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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a recent training programme for graduates, implemented in Italy and entitled Work Experience Laureati and Laureate, i.e. Work Experience for Graduates. The aim of the programme was to increase the career prospects of unemployed graduates in the region of Umbria.

The authors rely on administrative data and matching methods to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention in terms of employability of participants.

The results show that participants are more likely to be employed and to sign an apprenticeship contract within the region boundaries. The authors also find substantial differences in employability and type of contract by gender, with men having a higher probability of finding a job (permanent contract and apprenticeship). The authors show that this may be explained by the different choices in terms of field of study, with males being more prone to enrol in scientific areas and females in the humanities.

It is an intervention implemented in one Italian region.

This is one of the few studies that analyses the effectiveness of active labour market policies targeting unemployed graduates, especially in the Italian context. The authors rely on different administrative data sources that allow them to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme.

The purpose of this paper is to replicate Cohan and Cole (2002) Hurricane Hugo study in the context of a different type of natural hazard and in a different country.

Change in marriage following the 1997 Umbria-Marche (Italy) earthquake was examined prospectively from 1987 to 2007 for the 15 municipalities declared disaster areas and for the whole Marche region and country.

Autoregressive integrated moving average time-series analysis showed that the year following the earthquake marriage rates decreased only in the 15 municipalities declared disaster areas.

In the present study, the paper found results in the opposite direction to Cohan and Cole (2002) Hurricane Hugo study. Taken together, the findings suggest that the direction of the change may be in either direction and depends on the characteristics of the disaster, of the response to it, and on social and economic conditions of the context.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the structural characteristics, the governance and the performance of two French and Italian groups of wine cooperatives, with two objectives in mind. On one hand, the study will analyse the presence of similarities between the characteristics of the two groups of companies which were founded in the same period within a similar legal framework; on the other, it will study the presence of links between the strategic policy of the companies and their structural, governance and performance characteristics.

The study uses survey data obtained from interviews with 25 wine cooperatives. It covers the topics of their structure, organisation, strategies, management and performance in Italy (specifically in Umbria, a region in the centre of Italy), and in France (in Languedoc‐Roussillon, a region in southern France). Other indicators of performance, calculated from the balance sheets of the companies, were added to this analysis, and a careful analysis was drawn up to check the factors which condition the performance of the companies.

The main finding underlines some strong differentiating elements between those cooperatives selling the biggest part of their production as bulk wine and those selling it as packaged wine. But the first situation does not lead automatically to inferring a decline or an involution of these cooperatives. On the contrary, the mitigated performances that were found clearly question whether there is a strategic evolution towards more specialisation (intermediate phases of product transformation, leading to business‐to‐business differentiation strategies) which could be more profitable for their growers‐owners than further integration towards packaged wine sales.

The analysis deals with the problem of performance and governance of the transformation cooperative companies in the wine sector, which produce more than 50 percent of the entire wine production both in France and Italy.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of the modes of organizing the technological knowledge (make, buy and hybrid organization) in the decision to innovate the production process.

The study first develops a conceptual framework drawing the concept of mode of organization from the Transaction Cost Economics. The three research questions are coherently formulated which concern: the influence of the modes of organization on the decision to innovate and to invest in supporting instruments; the variability of this influence and the complementarity degree between the decision to innovate and to invest. The empirical analysis is carried out with respect to the olive oil sector considering a representative sample of olive millers (Umbria, Central Italy) and a complementary accidental sample drawn from an existing database.

The main results of the study provide evidence for the role of modes of organization in the knowledge acquisition finalized to the process innovation. The role of the “buy” option is important, while the collaboration – the “hybrid” organization – seems to influence strongly the innovation and the related investment decision. The important role of the information sources appears effective and articulated. Finally, despite the great economic importance of the quality requirements, the millers appear to be more sensitive to the difficulties to build up a clear process vision in terms of technology.

The main limitation of the study is that it refers to a specific supply system including small enterprises and does not account for the pattern of innovation in other olive oil production systems. Moreover, one of the samples that was observed and analyzed is accidental in nature and does not allow a clear and robust comparison for the representative sample.

The findings of this study can contribute to the identification of organizational constraints to the rate on process innovation.

The originality of the study is based on the main focus, i.e. the attention to the role of the modes of organization in the decision to innovate, which provides complementary information to the extant literature on the choice of modes of organizing the technological knowledge acquisition. Moreover, the conceptual framework and findings are connected to the current research on the variety of the agribusiness organizations which is still a partially explored field of inquiry.

The study compares the social services functioning in two local contexts, one urban and one rural, in the same Italian region, to understand how contextual features affect frontline workers' work.

By applying the framework of the street-level bureaucracy theory (SLB) and proposing a framing of the spatial contexts under analysis, the present study adopts a qualitative approach. In particular, semi-structured interviews were conducted among street-level workers, decision-makers and privileged witnesses.

The study shows how the typical features of the rural and urban Italian contexts analyzed impact differently on the working conditions of frontline workers, leading to substantive differences in the possibility of exercise their role at the street-level.

The article contributes to a wider understanding of social services provision in a highly fragmented system like the Italian one by taking into consideration contexts that are usually little investigated in SLB and welfare studies in the Mediterranean Europe area: those rural and, in particular, those belonging to the so-called “inner areas”.

The objective of this exploratory research is to investigate the role of Twitter in crisis communication by analysing all the earthquake-related messages from local public authorities in four Italian regions (Abruzzo, Lazio, Marche and Umbria) during the seismic sequence that began on 24th August 2016 and finished at the end of January 2017.

The study is based on a manual data collection of earthquake-related tweets. Founded on a theoretical framework, the data analysis has been developed both through textual analysis and in-depth interpretation by two researchers to catalogue the messages according to identified categories.

It emerges that the affected Italian regions used Twitter only for information coverage without offering a complete and detailed picture of the disaster. Most of the tweets concerned daily statements by politicians or regional administrators engaged in crisis management, while an accurate selection of the topics and messages to be launched does not emerge, with significant implications on the effectiveness of the tweeting activity itself.

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on crisis communication and social media during a natural disaster, highlighting the criticalities shown by the Italian case studies. The originality of this study relates to the comparative examination of Twitter activities for four regional government bodies involved in the 2016 Italian earthquake.

The present study provides an economic and empirical framework to examine the role of organised crime in an entrepreneurial crisis. The effect of criminal pollution on law firms depends on financial — money‐laundering and usury — as well as non‐financial crimes — extortion and unfair competition.

Academic studies have sought to understand the motivations of festival and event attendees usually through single-event case studies. This approach has failed to generate a generalizable set of motivation items. In addition, there is increasing criticism in the literature of the common methodological framework used in festival motivation studies, due to a perceived over-reliance on motivations derived from the broader tourism and travel research, with too little attention to event-specific factors. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues by analyzing a sub-category of motivation studies, music festivals, in order to see if this approach can elicit a consistent set of motivation dimensions for the sub-category, which can in turn be compared and contrasted with the broader literature. A new case study of motivations to attend the 28th Macau International Music Festival (MIMF) is included to complement the existing music festival sub-category by adding a classical music and music festivals in Asia.

Motivation dimensions important to music festivals are compared to dimensions across the broader festival motivation literature to find similarities and differences. Factor analysis is used to identify the motivation dimensions of attendees at the MIMF and the results are compared to those of existing music festival studies.

Music festival goers are shown to be primarily motivated by the core festival offering, the music, in contrast to festival attendees in general, where socialization has emerged as the primary motivating element. The results of the additional case study support these findings.

In contrast to previous research, this study examines the possibility of identifying common motivations among festival attendees through studying festivals by sub-categories.

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 “economic miracle” in postwar Italy was accompanied by a rapid increase in the industrial accident and illness rates. Italian workers demanded occupational safety and health enforcement mechanisms that would be more accessible to grass‐roots workers' groups and unions. In the early 1970s local “Occupational Medicine Services” were voluntarily established in many regions. The entire health care system was decentralised in 1978, giving regions exclusive authority to implement occupational safety and health standards within Local Health Units (USLs). The concrete results of these reforms are investigated and the validity of the assumptions of the calls for decentralisation. The difficulties encountered by leftist‐administered regions in attempting to translate their political commitments into significant health and safety improvements are documented. The track‐record of the USLs is examined. An ironic consequence of decentralisation has been that the concentration of all health care activities in the USL has swallowed up occupational safety and health. As a result it is less politically visible and less responsive to worker input.