Filippo Barbano is a Chief grounder of post-war Italian Sociology. With him I have been acquainted since the Seventies during the preparation of my Bachelor Degree. In this interview he speaks about his intellectual formation, his path toward sociology, his scientifical contributions and theoretical work, his relationships with the sociological community. He adds an autocritical balance and finally suggests his present interests as well as directions of his current sociological work.
Women’s laborious adjustment to their working activities and their family world, which
includes looking after children, a traditional female perquisite, often implies a role conflict difficult to
control when a mother also works. The aim which the present research takes into consideration is the
perception of a possible role conflict that women holding middle-high professional positions have to
cope with as they manage their professional and family activities, and the proposed solutions which
the aforesaid wish for themselves in view of an evermore significant conciliation between the
demands of both roles. The experiences linked to the professional career paths of a sample made of
30 women with middle-high level of education, employees in large businesses or entrepreneurs, have
been analyzed so as to verify common difficulties or strategies which are here pointed out in order to
make the abovementioned conciliation between their double role an eventual reality.
For a long time, in the international literature about migrations, women seem to have been relegated
to subordinate and marginal positions. More recently, however, the social research has began to
pay more attention to the feminine component. This is due on the one hand to a very pragmatic fact
that is the massive presence of women in the migration fluxes, and secondly to the push given by studies
developed within the last decades which through different approaches. These ones have brought
to light that women migrate not only following close relatives - but also as an active working force
themselves within the countries of arrival. Within international migrations, women have generally
responded to a request for unskilled labour, both within the indutrial sector and especially in that
niche of the service sector where the gender division is strong. Starting from the type of work mostly
undertaken, this labour force has also been an important element for the promotion of welfare - both
in the European countries of older immigration as well as in those of more recent immigration.
This article is the continuation of a previous research carried out on immigrant women forced
to become street prostitutes in Italy. The research showed that, notwithstanding their violent
exploitation, those women had maintained their trust in men. Such results prompted the need to
understand whether the phenomenon was linked to the culture of their place of origin, which
reduces women’s critical abilities of managing social trust bonds. The current study has analyzed the
representations of immigrant and non-immigrant women from northern Albania to determine their
convictions about and descriptions of male and female roles. Particular importance has been given to
the traditional Albanian culture associated to the Kanun code. Results have been linked to those
obtained by important investigations carried out by some NGOs working in Albania to promote the
culture of equality between men and women.
The article explores the most common concepts in the theory of youth. Based on recent international
literature, it shows how the concept of age, social class, deviant behaviour, life style are social
constructions often used to analize youth, while a more interdisciplinary and intercultural analysis of
the phenomenon is needed. Youth cannot be reduced in general definitions, for the increasing importance
of individualization and individual biography. Consumer culture and life style are useful concepts
if they are considered as a language people use to express themselves, a symbolic code with
which young people negotiate self image depending on the context they relate to. The importance of
image can be viewed also in peer groups, although in some cases the style is not anymore the key of
access (like mohican hairstyle for punk) but becomes an individual choice, without the role of marks
of belonging.
The contribution deals with the social representation and the young maghrebin’s way of life in
Paris. The young maghrebins in France, above all in Paris, live a hard situation since the tradition’s
principles of Maghreb (North Africa) clash with french society. Consequently, this conflict bears to a
problem of social identity for young maghrebins; and, exactly, this situation leads to a condition of
no-identity. The young maghrebins is a felon, a dangerous person, for the french idea; this labelling
will establish a peculiar subculture.
The essay discusses the sense and use of history in the sociological work as well as the utility of
studying and making ‘history of sociology’ in a world under the sign of a more and more ‘fluid’
Modernity. For ‘classical sociology’ (that of Saint-Simon, Comte, Durkheim, Simmel, Weber,
Benjamin etc: the Founding Fathers) history was a current term of comparison for constructing theories
about the functioning of society as well as for being aware of the sense of contemporary time and
actual action. From all these considerations then follows a strict invitation to read and re-read our
Classics in order to verify through them current theoretical work, to enlarge our vision of time as well
as to grasp consciousness of the potentialities of our still young and self-transforming discipline.
Although George Simmel and Karl Popper show deep differences between their intellectual
and personal biographies on one hand and their degree of integration in the sociological tradition on
the other hand, they present meaningful affinities as to the subject of prospects of individual freedom
in modern society. Such affinities are particularly apparent, and surprising as well, in two crucial
aspects of the study of recent social evolution: the factors which fostered (in the passage to social differentiation
which has characterized the passage to modernity) the subject’ autonomy; the ambivalent
– and, in some respects, paradoxical – character that both Simmel and Popper have acknowledged to
many impacts of social change with regard to the relashionship between social order and individual
subject in modern society. The feasibility of Simmel and Popper’s philosophy lies in the contribution
it still offers to the analyses of «risks for freedom» that also the present period of social change reproposes.
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