Drugstore Bologna. Una lettura del rapporto tra la città e la droga

The main task of this research is to investigate the situation of drugs in the city of Bologna. A first discussion pertains the method to adopt studying an ethical question as drug actually is. In fact it is widely known that drugs problem involves many political and religious considerations which are misleading in a scientific point of view. After a methodological chapter supposed to show the purpose of this research, it is discussed a logical definition of drugs. There it is examined an aristotelian definition of drugs with semantic instruments from philosophy of the language to fulfil meaning of terms. The following chapter discusses personal stories of different people involved in drug in the city, who actually represent the main characters of drug subculture. Afterwards the official statistics concerning drug enforcement is discussed and compared with a specific police action which allows to criticize that data, and to make some hypothesis about drug quantities circulating in town. Next step is investigating drugs addicted in town, with a validation technique of data base queries. The result is a statistics of users in which there is evidence of main presence of foreigners and not resident Italians who use to practice drugs in this city. Demographic analysis of identified people shows that drug addiction is widely diffused among all range of age and mainly pertains males, with an increasing trend. Then is examined the geographic distribution of users residence and use places, showing that drugs abuse is spread among all classes of population, while drugs squares are located in some points of town which realise a kind of drug area with a concentration of dealers not organised together. With some detailed queries in police reports statistics is studied some specific subject on nowadays drug abuse, the phenomenon of multi-use, the relation between drug and crime, the relation between drug and mental disease, recording some evidence in such topics. Finally a survey on city media along last two years shows the interest about this topic and gives an idea of public opinion’s information about drugs. The study refers to the city of Bologna only, and pertains data recorded along last ten years by the local metropolitan police corp.

The influence of career histories on team perfomance in new product development: a study of the video game industry

The purpose of this research is to contribute to the literature on organizational demography and new product development by investigating how diverse individual career histories impact team performance. Moreover we highlighted the importance of considering also the institutional context and the specific labour market arrangements in which a team is embedded, in order to interpret correctly the effect of career-related diversity measures on performance. The empirical setting of the study is the videogame industry, and the teams in charge of the development of new game titles. Video games development teams are the ideal setting to investigate the influence of career histories on team performance, since the development of videogames is performed by multidisciplinary teams composed by specialists with a wide variety of technical and artistic backgrounds, who execute a significant amounts of creative thinking. We investigate our research question both with quantitative methods and with a case study on the Japanese videogame industry: one of the most innovative in this sector. Our results show how career histories in terms of occupational diversity, prior functional diversity and prior product diversity, usually have a positive influence on team performance. However, when the moderating effect of the institutional setting is taken in to account, career diversity has different or even opposite effect on team performance, according to the specific national context in which a team operates.