Vita e Pensiero

The essay argues that evaluation can be a space for critical thinking that assumes criteria for judging public policies that are alternative to those present in neoliberal politics. In the history of evaluation, there are methodological orientations and theoretical reflections that look at the ability of evaluation to promote social justice by assuming judgment criteria that consider the interests of less privileged groups as priorities and look at the ability of the evaluated programs to promote the equal access to civil liberties, human rights and opportunities...

In the progressive evolution of the Internet from an open to a closed system controlled by private actors, few U.S. companies, known as Big Tech, have garnered increasing influence over users, other companies, and public institutions...

Italy is one of the European countries in which young people face greater challenges in achieving independence and full social integration. This study explores the potential of guidance in non-formal educational contexts to support young people who are on the margins of education and labour systems The findings of an action research project are presented, in which 52 young people facing multiple vulnerabilities participated in a guidance programme designed to address their specific needs...

Gaetano Mosca’s perspective on the historical-comparative method aims at elucidating the connection between the historical and the comparative aspects. When employed correctly and distinguished from the historiographical investigation, this method is relevant in acquiring knowledge on phenomena, and a valuable tool for fostering interdisciplinary dialogue...

The Covid-19 pandemic forced the Cultural and Creative Industries to face the shift into the digital sphere. While so far research observed how Covid-19 accelerated the process, on the basis of interviews with seventeen CCIs in Bologna, this contribution deepens how digitalization impacts the reorganization of work and audiences’ engagement, and what function digital technologies have for CCIs’ innovation...

The article hypothesizes that technological languages orient relationships, perceptual fields, patterns of choice and behavior in individuals exposed to them, constructing technologically oriented forms of life. An algorithm, while being the product of the linguistic play of the engineers and mathematicians who made it, itself generates technological language games, that is, grammars and order systems for many communicative processes...

The article deals with some processes of naming society, against the background of the emotions that the different names evoke. Society is an abstraction – sociology equally – but the use of names allows us to evoke specific images, which outline the contours of an essentially dynamic reality, which exactly is society, giving substance to the object to be analysed...