A mixed methods inquiry into the political economy of agriculture and rural areas in Lebanon

The present work, then, is concerned with the forgotten elements of the Lebanese economy, agriculture and rural development. It investigates the main problematic which arose from these forgotten components, in particular the structure of the agricultural sector, production technology, income distribution, poverty, food security, territorial development and local livelihood strategies. It will do so using quantitative Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modeling and a qualitative phenomenological case study analysis, both embedded in a critical review of the historical development of the political economy of Lebanon, and a structural analysis of its economy. The research shows that under-development in Lebanese rural areas is not due to lack of resources, but rather is the consequence of political choices. It further suggests that agriculture – in both its mainstream conventional and its innovative locally initiated forms of production – still represents important potential for inducing economic growth and development. In order to do so, Lebanon has to take full advantage of its human and territorial capital, by developing a rural development strategy based on two parallel sets of actions: one directed toward the support of local rural development initiatives, and the other directed toward intensive form of production. In addition to its economic returns, such a strategy would promote social and political stability.

La convivialità urbana nei quartieri di Milano, Bologna e Roma. Un'analisi mixed-methods sulle Social Streets

Le Social Street sono gruppi di vicini di casa che vogliono ricreare legami di convivialità avendo notato un indebolimento delle relazioni sociali nei loro quartieri. Nascono come gruppi online, tramite la piattaforma Facebook, per materializzarsi in incontri offline andando a costruire legami conviviali grazie pratiche di socialità, inclusività e gratuità. Questa Tesi ha come obiettivo l’analisi dei profili socio-demografici degli Streeter e dei quartieri coinvolti per comprendere come sia possibile creare convivialità e come la variabile urbana intervenga in questi processi. Inoltre, si vuole comprendere le dinamiche di attaccamento al quartiere, gli interessi portati avanti dagli Streeter, il loro profilo civico e il posizionamento di quest’esperienza rispetto all’associazionismo tradizionale. Per perseguire l’obiettivo della ricerca, sono state studiate le tre città che vedono la maggiore presenza di Social Street: Milano, Bologna, Roma. La ricerca ha previsto sia un’analisi degli Streeter grazie a un questionario online replicato in tutti i contesti. Inoltre, sono state realizzate 131 interviste ad amministratori e fondatori di Social Street e condotte osservazioni etnografiche e netnografiche. I risultati mostrano come gli Streeter siano appartenenti alle classi medio-alte, tra trenta e cinquanta anni, che hanno sperimentato la mobilità tra un quartiere e l’altro o tra diversi contesi nazionali ed internazionali e trovano nelle Social Street un modo per creare legami di vicinato che hanno perso nei loro trasferimenti. Gli stessi quartieri dove si diffondono le Social Street sono agiati e vi è una buona corrispondenza tra Streeter e modello della centralità sociale elaborato da Milbrath (1965) per cui anche la partecipazione civica è molto sentita tra gli aderenti alle Social Street. Il contributo di questa Tesi al dibattito sociologico risiede nell’aver offerto un’analisi empirica di un’azione collettiva a livello urbano, quella delle Social Street, mostrando come vi sia circolarità tra azione e contesto grazie all’azione mutualistica conviviale.

Kinematics and statics of cable-driven parallel robots by interval-analysis-based methods

In the past two decades the work of a growing portion of researchers in robotics focused on a particular group of machines, belonging to the family of parallel manipulators: the cable robots. Although these robots share several theoretical elements with the better known parallel robots, they still present completely (or partly) unsolved issues. In particular, the study of their kinematic, already a difficult subject for conventional parallel manipulators, is further complicated by the non-linear nature of cables, which can exert only efforts of pure traction. The work presented in this thesis therefore focuses on the study of the kinematics of these robots and on the development of numerical techniques able to address some of the problems related to it. Most of the work is focused on the development of an interval-analysis based procedure for the solution of the direct geometric problem of a generic cable manipulator. This technique, as well as allowing for a rapid solution of the problem, also guarantees the results obtained against rounding and elimination errors and can take into account any uncertainties in the model of the problem. The developed code has been tested with the help of a small manipulator whose realization is described in this dissertation together with the auxiliary work done during its design and simulation phases.

Drug of abuse analysis: new methods in herbal and biological matrices for medicinal chemistry and forensic investigation

In this Ph.D. project, original and innovative approaches for the quali-quantitative analysis of abuse substances, as well as therapeutic agents with abuse potential and related compounds were designed, developed and validated for application to different fields such as forensics, clinical and pharmaceutical. All the parameters involved in the developed analytical workflows were properly and accurately optimised, from sample collection to sample pretreatment up to the instrumental analysis. Advanced dried blood microsampling technologies have been developed, able of bringing several advantages to the method as a whole, such as significant reduction of solvent use, feasible storage and transportation conditions and enhancement of analyte stability. At the same time, the use of capillary blood allows to increase subject compliance and overall method applicability by exploiting such innovative technologies. Both biological and non-biological samples involved in this project were subjected to optimised pretreatment techniques developed ad-hoc for each target analyte, making also use of advanced microextraction techniques. Finally, original and advanced instrumental analytical methods have been developed based on high and ultra-high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC,UHPLC) coupled to different detection means (mainly mass spectrometry, but also electrochemical, and spectrophotometric detection for screening purpose), and on attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) for solid-state analysis. Each method has been designed to obtain highly selective, sensitive yet sustainable systems and has been validated according to international guidelines. All the methods developed herein proved to be suitable for the analysis of the compounds under investigation and may be useful tools in medicinal chemistry, pharmaceutical analysis, within clinical studies and forensic investigations.

Enhancing Workers’ Well-Being. Scientific and social relevance of managing stress in the workplace

Purpose. Despite work-related stress is one of the most studied topic in organizational psychology, many aspects as for example the use of different measures (e.g. subjective and objective, qualitative and quantitative) are still under debate. According to this, in order to enhance knowledge concerning which factors and processes contribute to create healthy workplaces, this thesis is composed by four different studies aiming to understand: a) the role of relevant antecedents (e.g. leadership, job demands, work-family conflict, social support etc.) and outcomes (e.g. workplace phobia, absenteeism etc.) of work-related stress; and b) how to manage psychosocial risk factors in the workplace. The studies. The first study focused on how disagreement between supervisors and their employees on leadership style (transformational and transactional) could affect workers well-being and work team variables. The second and third study used both subjective and objective data in order to increase the quality of the reliability of the results gained. Particularly, the second study focused on job demand and its relationship with objective sickness leave. Findings showed that despite there is no direct relationship between these two variables, job demand affects work-family conflict, which in turn affect exhaustion, which leads to absenteeism. The third study analysed the role of a new concept never studied before in organizational settings (workplace phobia), as a health outcome in the JD-R model, demonstrating also its relationship with absenteeism. The last study highlighted the added value of using the mixed methods research approach in order to detect and analyse context-specific job demands which could affects workers’ health. Conclusion. The findings of this thesis answered both to open questions in the scientific literature and to the social request of managing psychosocial risk factors in the workplace in order to enhance workers well-being.

Institutional Processes and Discursive Strategies: Rhetoric and Vocabulary Analysis of CSR and Sustainability

The candidate tackled an important issue in contemporary management: the role of CSR and Sustainability. The research proposal focused on a longitudinal and inductive research, directed to specify the evolution of CSR and contribute to the new institutional theory, in particular institutional work framework, and to the relation between institutions and discourse analysis. The documental analysis covers all the evolution of CSR, focusing also on a number of important networks and associations. Some of the methodologies employed in the thesis have been employed as a consequence of data analysis, in a truly inductive research process. The thesis is composed by two section. The first section mainly describes the research process and the analyses results. The candidates employed several research methods: a longitudinal content analysis of documents, a vocabulary research with statistical metrics as cluster analysis and factor analysis, a rhetorical analysis of justifications. The second section puts in relation the analysis results with theoretical frameworks and contributions. The candidate confronted with several frameworks: Actor-Network-Theory, Institutional work and Boundary Work, Institutional Logic. Chapters are focused on different issues: a historical reconstruction of CSR; a reflection about symbolic adoption of recurrent labels; two case studies of Italian networks, in order to confront institutional and boundary works; a theoretical model of institutional change based on contradiction and institutional complexity; the application of the model to CSR and Sustainability, proposing Sustainability as a possible institutional logic.

Speed, legislatures and international treaties: Evidence from Mercosur

What causes faster or slower procedures in the parliaments when considering international treaties? This question motivates the current research, which aims to understand how the nature of coalitions influence the duration of the legislative processes. For this, the analysis covers all the treaties signed by Mercosur between 1991 and 2021 and the internalisation processes in four member states (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay). It observes how long each parliament took to approve the treaties and which was the effect of political and economic variables. A mixed-methods approach was adopted for the empirical research, combining Survival Analysis, Qualitative Comparative Analysis and Process Tracing. While the quantitative work investigates all the cases, the qualitative study illuminates the enlargement of Mercosur, with in-depth analysis of the Paraguayan approval of the Venezuelan and Bolivian accessions. This study provides important insights into the role of national legislatures in the Latin American regionalism, concluding that the government-opposition cleavage drives the parliamentarians’ behaviour on the topic of regional integration. The study also contributes to the field Mercosur studies with the characterisation of the treaties ratified domestically, by undertaking a longitudinal analysis at the 30th anniversary of the bloc.

Mainstreaming of Nature-Based Solutions for the mitigation of hydro-meteorological hazard: governance analysis of a socio- technical change

The Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) concept and approach were developed to simultaneously face challenges such as risk mitigation and biodiversity conservation and restoration. NBSs have been endorsed by major International Organizations such as the EU, the FAO and World Bank that are pushing to enable a mainstreaming process. However, a shift from traditional engineering “grey” solutions to wider and standard adoption of NBS encounters technical, social, cultural, and normative barriers that have been identified with a qualitative content analysis of policy documents, reports and expert interviews. The case of the region Emilia-Romagna was studied by developing an analytical framework that brought together the social-ecological context, the governance system and the characteristics of specific NBSs.