RISULTATI RICERCA

The article examines the changing centrality of work in Europe through Honneth’s recognition theory. Using a Work Centrality Index based on five European Values Study items, it analyses three waves (1999–2021) in five countries representing distinct welfare regimes: Denmark, France, Italy, Spain, and Great Britain. Findings show that work centrality is neither universal nor timeless, but varies across gender, generation, education and, employment status, as well as by institutional and occupational contexts. In Italy and, to some extent, Denmark, paid work remains a credible route to recognition, while in France, Spain and especially Great Britain it is increasingly experienced in instrumental and disenchanted practice. The paper argues that the erosion of work centrality reflects not a cultural rejection of work itself, but the weakening of institutional conditions that allow work to function as a dignified, stable and socially recognised basis for identity and citizenship.

Digital platforms have reshaped the boundaries of labour, accelerating the post-Fordist expansion of value production beyond formal employment and blurring distinctions between work and non-work. Within platform economies, creative, affective, and aesthetic practices increasingly sustain commercial value while remaining weakly institutionalised as labour, raising questions of recognition, subjectivation, and rights. This article examines micro-influencers in the second-hand and vintage fashion niche as a revealing case of platform-mediated labour situated between passion and obligation, autonomy and constraint. Drawing on one year of digital ethnography on Instagram and TikTok and semi-structured interviews with Italian micro-influencers, the study identifies three intertwined dynamics: the production of primarily symbolic rather than monetary value, the ambivalent negotiation of autonomy under platform logics, and the centrality of algorithmic visibility as both opportunity and source of precarity. While participants invest sustained time, skills, and emotional labour, they often refrain from naming their activity as “work”. The article conceptualises this condition as work without workhood: a form of platform labour that functions as labour in terms of effort, discipline, and value production, yet remains weakly recognised at the social and subjective level.

For many workers, the pandemic accelerated pre-existing shifts in subjective relationships with work. In Italy, the abrupt remotization of work reshaped workers’ aspirations and priorities, particularly around work–life balance and the quantity and quality of free time. The article proposes a theoretical-epistemological framework to delimit the notions of sense, purpose, meaning, and relevance of work, while conceptualizing aspirations through the Weberian notion of worldviews (Weltbilder). Empirically, it draws on fourteen semi-structured interviews in two large Italian companies that revoked access to remote work after the emergency phase, triggering organized worker conflict.

This article examines misbehaviour practices among fast-food workers, an industry characterized by a standardized labour process and a high degree of managerial control. Karlsson (2012) expands on Ackroyd and Thompson’s (1999) conceptualization of misbehaviour by analyzing behaviors that do not conform to organizational expectations and that are directed towards those at the top of power hierarchies as forms of resistance. Using the concept of misbehaviour as a heuristic device, this study explores the tacit forms of resistance enacted by fast-food workers to reclaim the subjective meaningfulness of their work when objective sources of meaning are limited. From exercising mobility power through quitting to engaging in silent workplace rebellions, such as quiet quitting, fast-food workers enact daily practices of resistance that allow them to assert autonomy and dignity, thereby creating meaningful work experiences.

Questo articolo esamina la sperimentazione della settimana lavorativa di quattro giorni introdotta da Automobili Lamborghini nel 2024. Avvalendosi di un approccio qualitativo, basato su interviste a rappresentanti sindacali e lavoratori, la ricerca ricostruisce sia il processo di negoziazione sia le percezioni dei dipendenti. I risultati mostrano che la riduzione dell’orario di lavoro è vista come un’opportunità per riequilibrare lavoro e vita privata, disporre di più tempo per sé stessi, viaggiare, dedicarsi alla formazione, alla cura di sé e alle relazioni familiari. Nonostante alcune preoccupazioni relative all’intensificazione del lavoro e alla perdita delle ferie retribuite, la risposta della forza lavoro è prevalentemente positiva. Il caso evidenzia il ruolo chiave della contrattazione collettiva e come la flessibilità da sola non sia sufficiente per un adeguato equilibrio tra vita lavorativa e vita privata, poiché non riduce efficacemente l’orario di lavoro e può persino intensificare i carichi di lavoro. Al contrario, una reale riduzione dell’orario di lavoro crea spazio per attività alternative e un più forte senso di autonomia al di là dell’organizzazione del lavoro.

This paper examines the shifting relationship between subjectivity and work in contemporary post-industrial societies, focusing on the ways in which workers are renegotiating the meaning, boundaries, and practices of employment amid the structural erosion of stable labour. Drawing on the metaphor of "ruins," the introduction argues that the decline of the Standard Employment Relation has not produced a simple collapse of work-centred identities, but rather a layered process of decay and reconfiguration, in which moral expectations surrounding work persist even as their material foundations are progressively undermined. Within these ruins, new interrogatives and a re-imagining of social priorities have led some individuals to rethink the relationship they have with their jobs, opening up spaces of possibility in which the contours of a new world of work are potentially beginning, unevenly, to take shape. Though often fragmented, these spaces of possibility reveal attempts to redefine the meaning, boundaries, and conditions of work, seeking to establish a more sustainable relationship from within the "ruins of stable employment”.

L’autrice riflette sulla tenuta delle attuali norme di diritto internazionale alla luce dei recenti conflitti in Ucraina e a Gaza. Dopo aver illustrato come si sono dapprima formate e poi modificate le regole sul divieto dell’uso della forza, sull’autodeterminazione dei popoli e sulla responsabilità penale individuale, l’autrice esamina le reazioni all’aggressione russa all’Ucraina e alla guerra scatenata da Israele a Gaza dopo gli attacchi del 7 ottobre. Da un lato analizza la reazione degli stati e dall’altro quella della Corte internazionale di giustizia e della Corte penale internazionale. L’atteggiamento degli stati assume particolare importanza al fine di valutare se le norme internazionali sul divieto dell’uso della forza, sull’autodeterminazione dei popoli e sulla responsabilità penale individuale sono state violate o se si stanno modificando.

La Lega nord è stata oggetto, nel corso della sua lunga vita, di numerosi studi a carattere politologico, sociologico e antropologico che, tuttavia, molto raramente ne hanno preso in considerazione la politica estera. L’autore propone qui una ricostruzione di questa dimensione, indagando in particolare il modo in cui i dirigenti leghisti: hanno inteso l’Europa e il federalismo europeo; hanno collocato una forza a vocazione autonomista tra gli Stati Uniti e l’Unione Sovietica nell’ultimo decennio della Guerra fredda; e, infine, hanno affrontato le sfide del nuovo ordine internazionale, dopo il crollo del comunismo e fino alla guerra in Iraq del 2003. L’analisi conferma la scarsa rilevanza che ha avuto la politica internazionale nell’elaborazione del partito, ne evidenzia le contraddizioni e le discontinuità, chiarisce come le stesse dipendessero in ultima istanza dalle ricadute della dimensione internazionale sulla politica interna e sulle questioni migratorie.

The paper examines socio-spatial marginality in Stockholm through territorial stigmatization (Wacquant, 2008). It aims to (i) identify if and where such stigmatization occurs by exploring related imagery and mechanisms, and (ii) assess its impact on residents. Data derives from 26 interviews (March-May 2022) with experts and local organizations. The findings reveal how Stockholm outskirts’ marginality align with the description of territorial stigmatization and spotlight its impacts on residents.

The article reconsiders the formation of urban sociology through the overlooked contribution of the women of the Chicago School. Focusing on Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge, it argues that their work developed a distinct way of knowing the city, grounded in situated observation, empirical proximity and attention to the social organization of inequality. By reconstructing this feminist-pragmatist genealogy, the article shows how questions of embodiment, intersectionality and everyday urban experience were already central to their research and reform practices. The discussion then examines Vienna, Barcelona, Toronto and Seoul as contemporary cases in which this legacy reappears, in different forms, through gender-sensitive planning, proximity policies, gender-responsive budgeting and women-friendly smart urbanism. Recovering this lineage allows urban sociology to rethink its conceptual foundations and to imagine more equitable urban futures.