Both Dario Antiseri and Franco Ferrarotti have frequented the field of religious experience for many years with approaches that are both philosophical and sociological, but with different results. The former arrives at results that see a strong pre-eminence of the discourse of faith, while the latter prefers to move on a more secular level, seeking answers to the mystery of human and divine existence. Antiseri refers to Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. Ferrarotti has Weber and his universal religions in mind. In the end, the Catholic scholar, in the wake of Thomas Aquinas, maintains that faith is the highest thing, while the re-founder of sociology in Italy speaks of an “ecumenical religiosity”, with an inter-religious character, founded on common, shared values, which would have been present and operating even before the birth of Christianity.
Violence is not only an individual pulsion but it is a social construction, a language bonded in every culture: it can be an adaptive response to a specific stimulus or stress. It is intrinsic in social systems that, in order to maintain their own identity and coherence and to self-perpetuate, they generate aggressive responses when the changes that involve them turn out to be too sudden or radical. Various contributions debated the decline of violence. The statistical data, with all evidence, show that the levels of aggression and violence in the various historical periods had greatly and progressively decreased. Elias’ reflections on the subject start by investigating in particular the link between the process of civilization and violence. What Elias is asking is how it is possible to live together relatively peacefully and with such low rates of violence. What about the Process of Civilization? What about human emotions? Violence must be deeply understood, analyzing the culture and the prevailing emotions of each historical period.
Ethical issues innervate the entire research process and, consequently, they have implications for the whole research’s methodological framework itself. In Italy, Social Work research has a relatively recent history. It is therefore important that the ethical issue is not left behind in the process of focusing and developing research methods appropriate to social work. In this article, some basic historical references for social work research are proposed and the main formal rules about it are summarized. In the second part, the ethical delicacy of social work research is discussed, with a focus on some issues that may arise in the different research steps, from the theme’s choice to the results’ dissemination. The conclusion proposes Relational Social Work as a useful approach for addressing ethical criticalities, not only in social work professional practice but also in social work research processes.
According to various literature reviews, American fiction has represented sociologists through negative stereotypes: use of pseudoscientific jargon, extreme competitiveness in social relationships, a tendency to aggressive and unconventional behavior. The article examines how sociology is represented in a horror novel first published in 1943, Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber. Hitherto neglected by the reviews that have examined the representation of sociology in American fiction, this novel deserves attention because it detaches itself from the aforementioned negative stereotypes. Indeed, there is a substantial harmony between the point of view of the narrator and the point of view of the protagonist, professor of sociology in a small college. In the sensationalist ways of a horror novel, Conjure Wife evokes crucial questions of sociology, such as the possibility of identifying universal laws of human behavior and the possibility of mathematizing the sociological explanation.
The paper presents a reflection about the citizens’ role in the co-production of residential care for elderly people, drawing upon the first insights of a qualitative evaluation research of the experimentation of a new model of service promoted by the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region to contrast institutionalization of non autonomous elderly people who cannot be looked after at their home. This model is realized in scattered residential buildings which can accomodate a limited number of elderly people, and is based on personalized intervention, citizens’ participation and co-production, as well as the personal budget. In accordance to the main current literature, the evaluation’s results have shown different ways in which co-production may be realized and the different levels of power and freedom allowed to users. Moreover, it has been highlighted that higher levels of power and the users freedom need a coherent system of governance which is also crucial to avoid inequity and disomogeneous system of services in the co-production.
The article explores the issue of precarity in the field of social work, proposing the concept of super-precariousness to represent the condition that specifically concerns social workers who, as a consequence of an unstable employment status, also find themselves suffering a precariousness of professional identity. The thesis is that the performance of social work with a non-standard contractual framework determines a conditioned use of the methodological apparatus and professional tools of the social service and leads to the self-perception of a weakening of the professional role. Circumstances that trigger the questioning of professional identity itself. The proposal of the concept of super-precariousness is debated by referring to the evidence offered by empirical research conducted on a sample of precarious social workers in three regions (Veneto, Tuscany, Sicily).
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