Search results for "NETWORKS"
showing 10 items of 3260 documents
Planning in the Era of Information and Communication Technologies. Discussing the "label: Smart" in South-European cities with environmental and soci…
2016
In the last decades, planners have explored various approaches to sustainable urban planning and development. Scholars widely argued the limits to uncontrolled physical growth, to the exploitation of resources, and the necessity of finding alternatives. Within the general framework of sustainability, urban planners are in the search for approaches aimed at coping with current uncertainties that cities have to face, based on the deterioration of natural-socio-cultural environments and uncontrollable economic and financial flows. Notwithstanding, the rise of post-industrial urban economies has introduced Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as successful devices that are proposed…
Managing the flow of private information on children and parents in poverty situations : Creating a panoptic eye in interorganizational networks?
2018
In this article, we discuss how the flow of private information about children and families in poverty situations is managed in interorganizational networks that aim to combat child poverty. Although practices for sharing information and documentation between child and family social work services are highly encouraged and recommended to create supportive features for parents and children, this development often results in undesirable forms of governmentality. Interorganizational networking also creates controlling side effects because the exchange of information in networks of child and family services may wield a holistic power over families. We theorize this issue by using the Foucauldian…
Getting support in polarized societies: Income, social networks, and socioeconomic context
2013
AbstractThis paper explores how unequal resources and social and economic polarization affects the size of social networks and their use to access resources. We argue that individual resource position generates divergent expectations with regard to the impact of polarization on the size of networks on one hand, and their usefulness for accessing resources on the other. Social and economic polarization encourages reliance on informal networks, but those at the bottom of the social structure are forced to rely on more extensive networks than the wealthy to compensate for their isolated and underprivileged position. At the same time, social and economic polarization limits the resources the po…
Internationalisation of social work doctoral studies : experiences and perspectives in the changing context of European higher education
2016
The internationalisation of doctoral education in social work has become a newly developing area particularly in Europe during the last two decades. It has been promoted by two factors: (1) the reform of higher education (Bologna reform), which contributed to the development of doctoral study and (2) the establishment of European funding programmes that would allow international cooperation and ensure the quality of the programmes. Also, in the European Qualification Framework the knowledge, skills and competences gained by doctoral qualification are defined. In this article, we analyse three international doctoral projects that were developed in Europe in last 10 years. We focus on what th…
Innovation and networks in rural areas. An analysis from European innovative projects
2014
Abstract Innovation is a central factor for the development of rural areas, both in terms of diversification and increased competitiveness, also related to new structures of governance. The creation, adoption or adaptation of innovations is particularly complex, requiring the right combination of local knowledge (often tacit and implicit) with expert knowledge (often more explicit and formalised), as well as the support of extensive networks. This paper analyses a number of innovation projects in several European rural areas, through the data collected via in-depth interviews. It examines the projects' contributions and the role played by stakeholders in each stage of the projects. On the o…
“Rationally Local”: Consumer Participation in Alternative Food Chains
2015
Why are consumers increasingly participating in alternative food chains to co-produce and distribute foods with farmers? In this paper, values and food-related lifestyles, as well as transaction costs and socio-demographics, are used to analyze consumer participation in alternative food chains in Italy. Using a simultaneous system of equations, a model with instrumental variables is implemented to measure the relationships between values and food-related lifestyles, and between the latter and participation in an alternative food chain. Our results show that Italian participants in alternative food chains have the profile of rational shoppers who typically look at price and taste criteria. A…
Who Uses Intermediaries in International Trade? Evidence from Firm-level Survey Data
2013
The present paper uses data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey conducted in Turkey in 2005 to shed light on the firms that use intermediaries in international trade. It lends robust empirical support to recent theories which suggest that indirect exporters are mostly small firms that are not profitable enough to cover the high fixed costs of building an own distribution network abroad. Manufacturers who develop new products are more likely to use trade intermediaries, as are firms that produce low-quality goods. In contrast, neither foreign ownership nor credit constraints are correlated with the choice of export mode. Moreover, firms that rely on trade intermediaries to sell their goods…
Insurance fraud detection: A statistically validated network approach
2022
Fraud is a social phenomenon, and fraudsters often collaborate with other fraudsters, taking on different roles. The challenge for insurance companies is to implement claim assessment and improve fraud detection accuracy. We developed an investigative system based on bipartite networks, highlighting the relationships between subjects and accidents or vehicles and accidents. We formalize filtering rules through probability models and test specific methods to assess the existence of communities in extensive networks and propose new alert metrics for suspicious structures. We apply the methodology to a real database-the Italian Antifraud Integrated Archive-and compare the results to out-of-sam…
International trade and migrant networks: Is It really about qualifications?
2014
Personal characteristics of migrants could help to strengthen the impact of migrant networks on bilateral trade. While most of the attention has been focused on immigrants' educational attainment, this paper focuses on the relevance of the tasks carried out by migrants. Our empirical results confirm that the existence of a large number of foreign-born workers with managerial duties is critical to explain the reduction of transaction costs caused by migrant networks.
Re-examining the migration–trade link using province data: An application of the generalized propensity score
2013
Abstract The migration–trade link has been studied extensively since the mid nineties, finding a positive impact through different channels. Based on the generalized propensity score (GPS) methodology, we estimate a dose–response function, depicting a non-linear impact of immigration on exports using province data for Spain and Italy. For both countries the response of province exports to more immigrants from a given nationality is always positive, although varies with the level of immigrants. First we find neither minimum threshold nor exhaustion point in the effectiveness of the immigration networks on province exports. Second we find that the value of the potential bilateral exports reac…