New Wave Italian Style

An investigation of the long controversy around the definition of an Italian New Wave cinema of the 1960s, this essay engages (and takes issue) with the reasons behind the critics’ reluctance to recognise its existence. After establishing a theoretical and historical framework for a transnational under- standing of the phenomenon of the European and World New Waves, it offers a reasoned analysis of the multiple industrial and artistic attempts at a generational renewal of Italian cinema that were made in Italy during the 1960s. Ultimately, the essay suggests that it would not only be appropriate, but also highly productive to reconsider the vibrant and heterogeneous young Italian cinema of the 1960s under the generational and transnational New Wave label, instead of continuing to approach the decade exclusively in the light of Neorealism.

Spanish Golden Age Poetry in Motion: The Dynamics of Creation and Conversation.

The fourteen essays of this volume engage in distinct ways with the matter of motion in early modern Spanish poetics, without limiting the dialectic of stasis and movement to any single sphere or manifestation. Interrogation of the interdependence of tradition and innovation, poetry, power and politics, shifting signifiers, the intersection of topography and deviant temporalities, the movement between the secular and the sacred, tensions between centres and peripheries, issues of manuscript circulation and reception, poetic calls and echoes across continents and centuries, and between creative writing and reading subjects, all demonstrate that Helgerson's central notion of conspicuous movement is relevant beyond early sixteenth-century secular poetics, By opening it up we approximate a better understanding of poetry's flexible spatio-temporal co-ordinates in a period of extraordinary historical circumstances and conterminous radical cultural transformation

Radical Change, Accounting and Public Sector Reforms: A Comparison of Italian and Canadian Municipalities

NPM has been generally regarded as an administrative reform for which resilience and consequences have been mainly investigated at a country level. Although accounting played a central role in NPM reforms over the last decades, how accounting change actually took place, and through what organizational dynamics, has been under-investigated. This paper adopts a new perspective, archetype theory, and looks into how intra-organizational dynamics (values, interests, power, capabilities) combine with reform processes to influence the outcome of accounting change. Evidence from Italian (disruptive process) and Canadian (sedimented process) municipalities shows that radical change is associated with specific configurations of intra-organizational dynamics.

The translation and sedimentation of accounting reforms. A comparison of the UK, Austrian and Italian experiences

Since the late 1980s, there has been a significant and progressive movement away from the traditional Public Administration (PA) systems, in favour of NPM-type accounting tools and ideas inspired by the private sector. More recently, a new focus on governance systems, under the banner Public Governance (PG), has emerged. In this paper it is argued that reforms are not isolated events, but are embedded in more global discourses of modernisation and influenced by the institutional pressures present in a certain field at certain points in time. Using extensive document analysis in three countries with different administrative regimes (the UK, Italy and Austria), we examine public sector accounting and budgeting reforms and the underlying discourses put forward in order to support the change. We investigate the extent to which the actual content of the reforms and the discourses they are embedded within are connected over time; that is, whether, and to what degree, the reform “talk” matches the “decisions”. The research shows that in both the UK and in Italy there is consistency between the debates and the decided changes, although the dominant discourse in each country differs, while in Austria changes are decided gradually, and only after they have been announced well in advance in the political debate. We find that in all three countries the new ideas and concepts layer and sediment above the existing ones, rather than replace them. Although all three countries underwent similar accounting and budgeting reforms and relied on similar institutional discourses, each made its own specific translation of the ideas and concepts and is characterised by a specific formation of sedimentations. In addition, the findings suggest that, at present in the three countries, the PG discourse is used to supplement, rather than supplant, other prevailing discourses.