Rethinking the Bourbon kingdom

‘But he has nothing on!’ Throughout his career, the Italian sociologist Alessandro Pizzorno's sophisticated and penetrating sociological analysis has laid bare the shortcomings of the theoretical ‘new clothes’ woven by methodological individualism out of concepts of ‘individual’, ‘interest’, ‘decision’. As well as articulating Pizzorno's critique, this article aims to draw attention to the substantial and skilfully designed suit of theoretical clothes in which he has dressed the naked emperor. Pizzorno calls on sociologists to pay particular attention to processes of mutual recognition and attribution of identity: these processes, Pizzorno argues, give standards of value to the individuals involved, who are seen as ‘jealous of their reputation’ rather than as utility maximisers.     

'New Programming' and the Influence of Transnational Discourses in the Reform of Regional Policy in Italy

Recent developments in regional policy in Italy may be interpreted as outcomes of a mutual fertilization between two distinct policy discourses, concerning the reframing of regional programming in the framework of a reform of the State, and the promotion of local initiatives in a perspective of endogenous development. This paper presents a critical itinerary of the mutual evolution of these lines of discourse during the 1990s. Their provisional merging in the framework of the strategy of 'new programming' adopted in connection with the reform of the Structural Funds and with the new community support framework (CSF) for the period 2000-2006 is interpreted in light of the 'Europeanization' of Italian public policy and of the influence of its progressive embedding into transnational policy discourses.     

A Simulation Model of Fission–Fusion Dynamics and Long-Term Settlement Change

Archaeological analyses often detect abrupt changes over time in the hierarchy of settlement sizes and the spatial distribution of residential units. These transformations have been explained looking at a variety of possible causes, from climatic changes to the sudden release of slowly cumulating political tensions. While many of these models offer plausible explanations for specific historical contexts, a broad-breadth model is desirable if cross-cultural analysis is sought. This paper tackles this problem by starting from the theoretical proposition that human groups are characterised by a non-linear relationship between size and per-capita fitness. Increasing group size has beneficial effects, but once a certain threshold is exceeded, negative frequency dependence will start to predominate leading to a decline in the per-capita fitness. Such a relationship can potentially have long-term implications in the spatial structure of human settlements if individuals have the possibility to modify their fitness through group fission–fusion dynamics. I will illustrate the equilibrium properties of these dynamics by means of an abstract agent-based simulation and discuss its implication for understanding long-term changes in human settlement pattern. Results suggest that changes in settlement pattern can originate from internal dynamics alone if the system is highly integrated and interconnected.     

Jeux D’échelles. Une Histoire Internationale

The book Jeux d’échelles. La microanalyse à l’expérience, which appeard in 1996 under the direction of Jacques Revel, was translated in Italy in 2006 by the Viella editions under the title Giochi di scala. La microstoria alla prova dell’esperienza. This occasion seemed propicious for a historiographic and epistemological return to the microhistorical experience between France and Italy. It had to do with cross reperencing the reflections of a french historian and those of an italian philosopher to seek to place in evidence, from a distance, the theoretical presuppositions of microhistory, and to measure the displacements undergone.