Farm tourism: a cross-country empirical study in Germany and Italy

PROBLEM In the last few years farm tourism or agritourism as it is also referred to has enjoyed increasing success because of its generally acknowledged role as a promoter of economic and social development of rural areas. As a consequence, a plethora of studies have been dedicated to this tourist sector, focusing on a variety of issues. Nevertheless, despite the difficulties of many farmers to orient their business towards potential customers, the contribution of the marketing literature has been moderate. PURPOSE This dissertation builds upon studies which advocate the necessity of farm tourism to innovate itself according to the increasingly demanding needs of customers. Henceforth, the purpose of this dissertation is to critically evaluate the level of professionalism reached in the farm tourism market within a marketing approach. METHODOLOGY This dissertation is a cross-country perspective incorporating the marketing of farm tourism studied in Germany and Italy. Hence, the marketing channels of this tourist sector are examined both from the supply and the demand side by means of five exploratory studies. The data collection has been conducted in the timeframe of 2006 to 2009 in manifold ways (online survey, catalogues of industry associations, face-to-face interviews, etc.) according to the purpose of the research of each study project. The data have been analyzed using multivariate statistical analysis. FINDINGS A comprehensive literature review provides the state of the art of the main differences and similarities of farm tourism in the two countries of study. The main findings contained in the empirical chapters provide insights on many aspects of agritourism including how the expectations of farm operators and customers differ, which development scenarios of farm tourism are more likely to meet individuals’ needs, how new technologies can impact the demand for farm tourism, etc. ORIGINALITY/VALUE The value of this study is in the investigation of the process by which farmers’ participation in the development of this sector intersects with consumer consumption patterns. Focusing on this process should allow farm operators and others including related businesses to more efficiently allocate resources.

Il dilemma femminista dell'uso politico della violenza in Italia negli anni Settanta e Ottanta: tra pensiero politico e caso storico

Degli anni Settanta si parla, ormai quasi canonicamente, come gli anni della crisi, una crisi che compare quasi simultaneamente fuori e dentro i confini nazionali, e si configura come vera e propria crisi di sistema. Considerando il turning point rappresentato dai Seventies, è diffusa l'interpretazione nel contesto italiano del paradigma politologico secondo il quale è nella mancanza e nelle assenze del sistema politico-istituzionale alle domande di modernizzazione democratica provenienti dalle soggettività che emergono in quella che è stata definita la “stagione dei movimenti” che andrebbero individuate le radici prima della scelta della violenza come strumento di lotta politica e poi del cosiddetto “riflusso”. Questo studio cerca di analizzare le dinamiche e gli sviluppi nella relazione tra movimento femminista e violenza politica in Italia tra anni settanta e anni ottanta. Per comprendere ed analizzare le dinamiche di tale sviluppo è stato necessario prima ricostruire la genealogia del concetto di violenza politica elaborato dalla filosofia politica nel XX secolo e poi confrontarlo con il concetto di violenza proposto dal pensiero femminista nello stesso arco temporale. Allo stesso tempo si è considerato il fenomeno della violenza politicamente motivata agita nel decennio settanta, analizzando le specificità del femminismo stesso, ma anche, la possibilità di individuare lo scarto – politico, ideologico e esistenziale – tra le definizioni date dalla pratica femminista alla categoria di violenza e le peculiarità degli altri movimenti che si muovevano nella scena politica e sociale tra anni settanta e anni ottanta

Populism as a battlefield Populist actors and their representation on social and legacy media during the european parliament elections 2019 in Finland, Italy and the Netherlands

The objective of the present research is to describe and explain populist actors and populism as a concept and their representation on social and legacy media during the 2019 EU elections in Finland, Italy and The Netherlands. This research tackles the topic of European populism in the context of political communication and its relation to both the legacy and digital media within the hybrid media system. Departing from the consideration that populism and populist rhetoric are challenging concepts to define, I suggest that they should be addressed and analyzed through the usage of a combination of methods and theoretical perspectives, namely Communication Studies, Corpus Linguistics, Political theory, Rhetoric and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies. This thesis considers data of different provenance. On the one hand, for the Legacy media part, newspapers articles were collected in the three countries under study from the 1st until the 31st of May 2019. Each country’s legacy system is represented by three different quality papers and the articles were collected according to a selection of keywords (European Union Elections and Populism in each of the three languages). On the other hand, the Digital media data takes into consideration Twitter tweets collected during the same timeframe based on particular country-specific hashtags and tweets by identified populist actors. In order to meet the objective of this study, three research questions are posed and the analysis leading to the results are exhaustively presented and further discussed. The results of this research provide valuable and novel insights on how populism as a theme and a concept is being portrayed in the context of the European elections both in legacy and digital media and political communication in general.

Computational modeling of human atrial cardiomyocytes: integration of electro-mechanical & mechano-electric feedback pathways

The cardiomyocytes are very complex consisting of many interlinked non-linear regulatory mechanisms between electrical excitation and mechanical contraction. Thus given a integrated electromechanically coupled system it becomes hard to understand the individual contributor of cardiac electrics and mechanics under both physiological and pathological conditions. Hence, to identify the causal relationship or to predict the responses in a integrated system the use of computational modeling can be beneficial. Computational modeling is a powerful tool that provides complete control of parameters along with the visibility of all the individual components of the integrated system. The advancement of computational power has made it possible to simulate the models in a short timeframe, providing the possibility of increased predictive power of the integrated system. My doctoral thesis is focused on the development of electromechanically integrated human atrial cardiomyocyte model with proper consideration of feedforward and feedback pathways.