Grassezza e obesità nei giornali italiani: una questione di rappresentazioni

Our contemporary society still sees the fat body as a problematic issue. This refusal originated as a racist control practice and developed as an esthetical and medical problem, resulting in the stigmatization and discrimination of this marginalized social group. Drawing on a corpus of about 157,000 words, the present study aims to shed light on how journalistic language might play a role in reinforcing prejudices towards fat people and, consequently, their stigmatization. The corpus contains 305 articles on fatness and/or obesity that were taken from six Italian newspapers representing different political leanings. The analysis is based on three main research questions: which frames are used to represent fat people in Italian newspapers? Do women get a particular treatment when talked about in relation to fatness/obesity? Do the articles employ any stigmatizing discourse strategies? Results show particular emphasis on the medical aspects of fatness/obesity, in terms of consequences on fat people’s health due to their lifestyle choices, with little to no consideration of societal responsibility around weight stigma. There is also evidence of women being talked about more than men in connection with this topic, especially with regards to their duty to appear in a certain way and their responsibility as mothers. Furthermore, articles display a vast amount of stigmatizing discourses, that go from offensive referential and predicational strategies, to an explicit mockery of fat people. In conclusion, the journalistic discourses on fatness/obesity analyzed in the present study show problematic traits possibly affecting fat people’s quality of life and should be examined more extensively as to establish a generalizing pattern by taking a larger set of data into account.

Circumplex Model to analyze the impact of emotions on decision-making processes in innovation management

Group work allows participants to pool their thoughts and examine difficulties from several angles. In these settings, it is possible to attempt things that an individual could not achieve, combining a variety of abilities and knowledge to tackle more complicated and large-scale challenges. That’s why nowadays collaborative work is becoming more and more widespread to solve complex innovation dilemmas. Since innovation isn’t a tangible thing, most innovation teams used to take decisions based on performance KPIs such as forecasted engagement, projected profitability, investments required, cultural impacts etc. Have you ever wondered the reason why sometimes innovation group processes come out with decisions which are not the optimal meeting point of all the KPIs? Has this decision been influenced by other factors? Some researchers account part of this phenomenon to the emotions in group-based interaction between participants. I will develop a literature review that is split into three parts: first, I will consider some emotions theories from an individual perspective; secondly, a wider view of collective interactions theories will be provided; lastly, I will supply some recent collective interaction empirical studies. After the theoretical and empirical gaps have been tackled, the study will additionally move forward with a methodological point of view, about the Circumplex Model, which is the model I used to evaluate emotions in my research. This model has been applied to SUGAR project, which is the biggest design thinking academy worldwide.