La sostenibilità organizzativa dei progetti agricoli di cooperazione internazionale allo sviluppo

The importance of organizational issues to assess the success of international development project has not been fully considered yet. After a brief overview, in 1st chapter, on main actors involved on international cooperation, in the 2nd chapter an analysis of the literature on the project success definition, focused on the success criteria and success factors, was carried out by surveying the contribution of different authors and approaches. Traditionally projects were perceived as successful when they met time, budget and performance goals, assuming a basic similarity among projects (universalistic approach). However, starting from a non-universalistic approach, the importance of organization’s effectiveness, in terms of Relations Sustainability, emerged as a dimension able to define and assess a project success. The identification of the factors influencing the relationship between and inside the organizations becomes consequently a priority. In 3th chapter, starting from a literature survey, the different analytical approaches related to the inter and intra-organization relationships are analysed. They involve two different groups: the first includes studies focused on the type of organizations relationship structure (Supply Chains, Networks, Clusters and Industrial Districts); the second group includes approaches related to the general theories on firms relationship interpretation (Transaction Costs Economics, Resource Based View, Organization Theory). The variables and logical frameworks provided by these different theoretical contributions are compared and classified in order to find out possible connections and/or juxtapositions. Being an exhaustive collection of the literature on the subject is impossible, the main goal is to underline the existence of potentially overlapping and/or integrating approaches examining the contribution provided by different representative authors. The survey showed first of all many variables in common between approaches coming from different disciplines; furthermore the non overlapping variables can be integrated contributing to a broader picture of the variables influencing the organization relations; in particular a theoretical design for the identification of connections between the inter and the intra-organizations relations was made possible. The results obtained in 3th chapter help to defining a general theoretical framework linking the different interpretative variables. Based on extensive research contributions on the factors influencing the relations between organizations, the 4th chapter expands the analysis of the influence of variables like Human Resource Management, Organizational Climate, Psychological Contract and KSA (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities) on the relation sustainability. A detailed analysis of these relations is provided and a research hypothesis are built. According to this new framework in 5th chapter a statistical analysis was performed to qualify and quantify the influence of Organizational Climate on the Relations Sustainability. To this end the Structural Equation Modeling (SEMs) has adopted as method for the definition of the latent variables and the measure of their relations. The results obtained are satisfactory. An effective strategy to motivate the respondents to participate in the survey seems to be at the moment one of the major obstacles to the analysis implementation since the organizational performances are not specifically required by the projects’ evaluation guidelines and they represent an increase in the project related transaction costs. Their explicit introduction in the project presentation guidelines should be explored as an opportunity to increase the chances of success of these projects.

Percorsi di gender performance: fotografia tra arte e moda dagli anni Novanta ad oggi

My project explores and compares different forms of gender performance in contemporary art and visual culture according to a perspective centered on photography. Thanks to its attesting power this medium can work as a ready-made. In fact during the 20th century it played a key role in the cultural emancipation of the body which (using a Michel Foucault’s expression) has now become «the zero point of the world». Through performance the body proves to be a living material of expression and communication while photography ensures the recording of any ephemeral event that happens in time and space. My questioning approach considers the gender constructed imagery from the 1990s to the present in order to investigate how photography’s strong aura of realism promotes and allows fantasies of transformation. The contemporary fascination with gender (especially for art and fashion) represents a crucial issue in the global context of postmodernity and is manifested in a variety of visual media, from photography to video and film. Moreover the internet along with its digital transmission of images has deeply affected our world (from culture to everyday life) leading to a postmodern preference for performativity over the more traditional and linear forms of narrativity. As a consequence individual borders get redefined by the skin itself which (dissected through instant vision) turns into a ductile material of mutation and hybridation in the service of identity. My critical assumptions are taken from the most relevant changes occurred in philosophy during the last two decades as a result of the contributions by Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze who developed a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach to interpret the crisis of modernity. They have profoundly influenced feminist studies so that the category of gender has been reassessed in contrast with sex (as a biological connotation) and in relation to history, culture, society. The ideal starting point of my research is the year 1990. I chose it as the approximate historical moment when the intersection of race, class and gender were placed at the forefront of international artistic production concerned with identity, diversity and globalization. Such issues had been explored throughout the 1970s but it was only from the mid-1980s onward that they began to be articulated more consistently. Published in 1990, the book "Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity" by Judith Butler marked an important breakthrough by linking gender to performance as well as investigating the intricate connections between theory and practice, embodiment and representation. It inspired subsequent research in a variety of disciplines, art history included. In the same year Teresa de Lauretis launched the definition of queer theory to challenge the academic perspective in gay and lesbian studies. In the meantime the rise of Third Wave Feminism in the US introduced a racially and sexually inclusive vision over the global situation in order to reflect on subjectivity, new technologies and popular culture in connection with gender representation. These conceptual tools have enabled prolific readings of contemporary cultural production whether fine arts or mass media. After discussing the appropriate framework of my project and taking into account the postmodern globalization of the visual, I have turned to photography to map gender representation both in art and in fashion. Therefore I have been creating an archive of images around specific topics. I decided to include fashion photography because in the 1990s this genre moved away from the paradigm of an idealized and classical beauty toward a new vernacular allied with lifestyles, art practices, pop and youth culture; as one might expect the dominant narrative modes in fashion photography are now mainly influenced by cinema and snapshot. These strategies originate story lines and interrupted narratives using models’ performance to convey a particular imagery where identity issues emerge as an essential part of fashion spectacle. Focusing on the intersections of gender identities with socially and culturally produced identities, my approach intends to underline how the fashion world has turned to current trends in art photography and in some case turned to the artists themselves. The growing fluidity of the categories that distinguish art from fashion photography represents a particularly fruitful moment of visual exchange. Varying over time the dialogue between these two fields has always been vital; nowadays it can be studied as a result of this close relationship between contemporary art world and consumer culture. Due to the saturation of postmodern imagery the feedback between art and fashion has become much more immediate and then increasingly significant for anyone who wants to investigate the construction of gender identity through performance. In addition to that a lot of magazines founded in the 1990s bridged the worlds of art and fashion because some of their designers and even editors were art-school graduates encouraging innovation. The inclusion of art within such magazines aimed at validating them as a form of art in themselves supporting a dynamic intersection for music, fashion, design and youth culture: an intersection that also contributed to create and spread different gender stereotypes. This general interest in fashion produced many exhibitions of and about fashion itself at major international venues such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since then this celebrated success of fashion has been regarded as a typical element of postmodern culture. Owing to that I have also based my analysis on some important exhibitions dealing with gender performance like "Féminin-Masculin" at the Centre Pompidou of Paris (1995), "Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose. Gender performance in photography" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York (1997), "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum (2007), "Female Trouble" at the Pinakothek der Moderne in München together with the workshops dedicated to "Performance: gender and identity" in June 2005 at the Tate Modern of London. Since 2003 in Italy we have had Gender Bender - an international festival held annually in Bologna - to explore the gender imagery stemming from contemporary culture. In few days this festival offers a series of events ranging from visual arts, performance, cinema, literature to conferences and music. Being aware that any method of research is neither race nor gender neutral I have traced these critical paths to question gender identity in a multicultural perspective taking account of the political implications too. In fact, if visibility may be equated with exposure, we can also read these images as points of intersection of visibility with social power. Since gender assignations rely so heavily on the visual, the postmodern dismantling of gender certainty through performance has wide-ranging effects that need to be analyzed. In some sense this practice can even contest the dominance of visual within postmodernism. My visual map in contemporary art and fashion photography includes artists like Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Hellen van Meene, Rineke Dijkstra, Ed Templeton, Ryan McGinley, Anne Daems, Miwa Yanagi, Tracey Moffat, Catherine Opie, Tomoko Sawada, Vanessa Beecroft, Yasumasa Morimura, Collier Schorr among others.

Visual-somatosensory interactions in mental representations of the body and the face

The body is represented in the brain at levels that incorporate multisensory information. This thesis focused on interactions between vision and cutaneous sensations (i.e., touch and pain). Experiment 1 revealed that there are partially dissociable pathways for visual enhancement of touch (VET) depending upon whether one sees one’s own body or the body of another person. This indicates that VET, a seeming low-level effect on spatial tactile acuity, is actually sensitive to body identity. Experiments 2-4 explored the effect of viewing one’s own body on pain perception. They demonstrated that viewing the body biases pain intensity judgments irrespective of actual stimulus intensity, and, more importantly, reduces the discriminative capacities of the nociceptive pathway encoding noxious stimulus intensity. The latter effect only occurs if the pain-inducing event itself is not visible, suggesting that viewing the body alone and viewing a stimulus event on the body have distinct effects on cutaneous sensations. Experiment 5 replicated an enhancement of visual remapping of touch (VRT) when viewing fearful human faces being touched, and further demonstrated that VRT does not occur for observed touch on non-human faces, even fearful ones. This suggests that the facial expressions of non-human animals may not be simulated within the somatosensory system of the human observer in the same way that the facial expressions of other humans are. Finally, Experiment 6 examined the enfacement illusion, in which synchronous visuo-tactile inputs cause another’s face to be assimilated into the mental self-face representation. The strength of enfacement was not affected by the other’s facial expression, supporting an asymmetric relationship between processing of facial identity and facial expressions. Together, these studies indicate that multisensory representations of the body in the brain link low-level perceptual processes with the perception of emotional cues and body/face identity, and interact in complex ways depending upon contextual factors.

Strategic decision making in international firms: effect of top management team internationalization on international strategic decision process

In this research project, I have integrated two research streams on international strategic decisions making in international firms: upper echelons or top management teams (TMT) internationalization research and international strategic decision making process research. Both research streams in international business literature have evolved independently, but there is a potential in combining these two streams of research. The first empirical paper “TMT internationalization and international strategic decision making process: a decision level analysis of rationality, speed, and performance” explores the influence of TMT internationalization on strategic decision rationality and speed and, subsequently, their effect on international strategic decision effectiveness (performance). The results show that the internationalization of TMT is positively related to decision effectiveness and this relationship is mediated by decision rationality while the hypotheses regarding the association between TMT internationalization and decision speed, and the mediating effect of speed were not supported. The second paper “TMT internationalization and international strategic decision rationality: the mediating role of international information” of my thesis is a simple but logical extension of first paper. The first paper showed that TMT Internationalization has a significant positive effect on international strategic decision rationality. The second paper explicitly showed that TMT internationalization affect on international strategic decision rationality comes from two sources: international experience (personal international knowledge and information) and international information collected from managerial international contacts. For this research project, I have collected data from international software firms in Pakistan. My research contributes to the literature on upper echelons theory and strategic decision making in context of international business and international firms by explicitly examining the link between TMT internationalization and characteristics of strategic decisions making process (i.e. rationality and speed) in international firms and their possible mediating effect on performance.