Adele Bianco

• University of Chieti-Pescara

In modern society, the importance of agriculture is reduced in comparison to the past. In spite of it, agriculture is not of little importance in modern society. It is a key sector for economic development, particularly in less developed countries. Secondly, agriculture is linked to the environmental question as a climate change agent.Today technol...

This chapter aims to develop Elias’s reflections on technology and the civilising process in the light of today’s processes of digitalisation. Elias’s contribution can offer interesting indications to find a new balance with the diffusion of digital technologies. The first section of this chapter deals with Elias’s category of decivilisation (Entzi...

This paper focuses the attention on Simmel’s selected writings on women, love and gender relations. This paper is structured as follows. The first section focuses on the image of woman presented by Simmel. Although his arguments sound “old fashioned”, he gives a positive evaluation of woman. The second section is devoted to the analysis of the gend...

Riassunto: Questo contributo prova a delineare le linee di trasformazione indotte dalla pandemia del 2020 e quali siano le tendenze future. In particolare si porrà attenzione all'ambito economico e del lavoro e agli effetti sugli equilibri tra le aree del mondo in epoca successiva al COVID-19. Dopo l'introduzione, nel paragrafo n. 2 discuteremo cri...

The volume collects a selection of the papers presented at the conferences of the Italian Association for Quality of Life Studies (AIQUAV), held in Florence in 2015 and 2016. The aim is to offer an overview of the ways the Italian school of quality of life studies addresses various topics both in terms of content and quality.

Thanks to globalization a remarkable growth rate has been achieved since 1990 in some regions of the Global South and an overall Middle Class (MC) is rising. The paper aims to address the question if the per capita income and the level of consumption could be considered the key indicators to describe the rise of the MC and the improvement of the qu...

This volume provides an overview of the ways the Italian school of quality of life studies addresses well-being and quality of life, from both a substantive and a methodological point of view. It discusses various topics such as those of equitable and sustainable wellbeing, lifestyles, the organization of economy and welfare, as well as aspects rel...

This paper explores the green agriculture as a pivotal issue in the 21st century and assigns it a key role in fostering social development and sustainability. In fact, a more sustainable agriculture makes food security possible, particularly in developing countries. This study follows the following structure. The first paragraph investigates the is...

Analyzing Georg Simmel’s theory of domination and subordination as presented in his Soziologie (1908), Adele Bianco focuses on concrete case studies to derive an interpretation of globalization processes. Within sociology, domination and subordination are reciprocal. They represent constitutive modes of associated living, based on a hierarchical st...

This paper aims at analyzing the emergence of the middle classes in BRIC(S) countries. Despite the differences between the geo-cultural contexts, it is a phenomenon that goes hand in hand with extremely significant growth rates experienced by emerging economies over the last decade. Dealing with the specific characteristics of the middle classes in...

Despite its centrality, the energy problem has always occupied a relatively marginal space in social research. Many scholars are actually concentrating their attention on communication about energy issues, risk and environmental struggles tied to building energy plants. In spite of the relevance of these issues, which are also the topics of some of...

This paper aims at reconstructing and interpreting Simmel’s vision of love. According to him, love is one of the form that life takes. In this topic Simmel is therefore able to combine the themes of Lebensphilosophie with social reality. Firstly, love makes it possible for two different people to achieve a unity from diversity. That means that love...

In reviewing the work of Norbert Elias, this essay on one hand examines the way he represented building Europe as a geo-political and cultural entity, and on the other extracts elements that may help understand the present evolution of the European structure. According to Elias, building Europe was a social phenomenon that, psychologically, conform...