RISULTATI RICERCA

Controls are used to ensure “that resources are obtained and used efficiently and effectively to achieve the organization’s objective” (Merchant and Otley, 2007, p. 788). Hybrid workplaces, which include flexible work arrangements like working from home, working outside of regular business hours, having flexible work hours, etc. (Stirpe and Zarraga-Oberty, 2017), are characterized by spatial and/or tem-poral separation. This presents control challenges because controlling requires that employee behaviour be in line with the company's goals (Snell 1992). Strict con-trols signal a compromise on trust (Christ et al., 2008), and loose controls dilute subordinates getting strong and clear directives (Long, 2010). Through a quasi-experiment utilizing the theoretical underpinning of Simon’s levers of control (1995, 2000), this study explores the types of controls which enable hybrid firm’s competitiveness. According to Widener (2007), the levers both individually and collectively drive firm-level knowledge production and attention direction, and be-cause they interact with one another, their effects are intricately entangled. This entanglement causes tension for organizational actors, who are largely interested in knowing which types of controls are effective in the hybrid firm’s context and how these controls relate to each other. The results of the experiment identify that the best possible combination to enable hybrid firm competitiveness is ‘High IC and High DC’. The findings establish a significant role of high IC and high DC, in ensuring hybrid firm competitiveness.

Migrants are a heterogeneous group concerning their residence sta-tus, which determines their different ability to cope with economic cri-ses. Migrants in an irregular condition are considered the most vulnera-ble, but empirical evidence to support this hypothesis is scarce. Using survey data from the Regional Observatory for Integration and Multi-ethnicity of Lombardy Region, this paper analyses the risk of transition to unemployment or inactivity status between 2011 and 2021, confirm-ing the association with legal status. However, different trends emerge when comparing the effects of the Great Recession and the pandemic crisis. While the irregular component was more exposed to the risk of losing its job during the Great Recession, the pandemic years show the opposite trend.

The Italian immigrants’ inclusion model has been described as a "low unemployment, bad jobs" equilibrium: immigrants have relatively high employment rates but tend to be segregated in low-quality jobs. However, as these jobs are also unstable, so is the equilibrium: during periods of recession, immigrants may face higher risks of labor-market exclusion. This paper investigates immigrant penalties in terms of employment probabilities, job loss, labor-market (re)entry, and job quality throughout the first year of COVID-19 crisis, by analyzing data from the 2019 and 2020 ISTAT Labor Force Survey. We find that the pandemic crisis accelerated an already ongoing erosion of immigrants’ relative employment advantage, while at the same time increasing their segregation in low-quality jobs. The deterioration of immigrants’ employment chances is chiefly driven by increased barriers in (re)entering the labor market which, especially for women, might be due to self-selection into inactivity. These findings suggest that the structural factors that have historically facilitated the activation of immigrant workers might have become factors of instability.

The socio-economic inclusion of the children of immigrants in the host labor markets is still problematic, and connoted by a general penalization if compared with their native counterpart. Anyway, this issue has been studied only in old migration countries, while it remains largely unexplored in the new receiving ones. From this perspective, Italy represents a very interesting and uncharted case study, where first-generation migrants have already emerged as a particularly disadvantaged group. This work aims at filling this gap, by exploiting the two Eurostat “ad hoc modules” (2008; 2014) European Union Labour Force Survey. By means of multivariate statistical techniques, it will be estimated the gap in employment and socio-economic status among natives and migrants, distinguished according to their generation, and how this gap varies within the second-generation individuals with different parental area of origin.