This dissertation focuses on the experience of childlessness, which is an increasing one across European Countries. Namely, it deals with the socio-economic drivers and consequences that distinguish the life of childless individuals from that of parents. Mirroring each phase of a hypothetical individual lifecycle, it starts by analysing how intentions to be childless are later realised their realizations (Chapter 2). It then goes on to investigate the individual and contextual determinants of childlessness and how they have changed over time (Chapter 3 and Chapter 4). Last it considers the consequences that childlessness might induce in adulthood and later life (Chapter 5). This is done by combining demographic and sociological perspectives in a joint interpretative framework. Overall the thesis shows that both economic contraints and individual values has a role in determining the choice of a childless life, and highlights how these decisions are taken in contexts where a purality of macro factors interacts in moderating the indivdidual risk of being childless. Understanding the drives to childlessness is relevant also when interpreting the potential effects that being childless has on the life of individuals. All in all, the study shows that the consequences of being childless also depend on how people came to be without children.

The foundations of this work of research derived by the demonstration that the health is conditioning of a multiplicity by factors, the control of which is not exercised by the only health care system. Health inequalities, representing one of the most unjust and severe inequitable forms because health is one of the pre-conditions in order to live out fully individual life. Health inequality constitutes one of the worst scandals of our time, especially in developed and democratic countries. The theme of health inequalities is a subject beloved to the sociology, because their analysis allows, either to observe the social dynamics, either to understand as the social differences are distributed between the individuals within the society, especially with the current global economic crisis. The main objective of this study is, using comparative analysis, identify and distinguish the inequalities in health in the relationship between social conditions, risk factors, territorial context and state of health of the population, in two European countries (France and Italy), in order to understand their dynamics and as the territorial context affects the inequalities of health of individuals. Through a transnational approach this research project identifies differences and similarities between the two case studies. The results from our analysis, demonstrate the existence of "unexpected" similarities between groups of French and Italian people, despite different characteristics of social welfare and health systems.

This dissertation examines contemporary intergenerational inequalities and life chances, centering on how social origin shapes today’s labor market achievements. The overarching question guiding this work is whether the recent structural and institutional shifts impacting the stability and security of work-life trajectories have fostered greater equality of opportunity, reinforced existing disparities, or even generated new ones. The research unfolds through four empirical chapters, each engaging with the broader theoretical framework, and employing and developing advanced methodological approaches. The first chapter delves into the repercussions of macro-level institutional transformations on work-life trajectories in Germany and the UK, revealing country-specific nuances in exposure and economic penalties associated with accumulated employment instability across birth cohorts. The second chapter broadens the perspective by revealing that family background significantly influences exposure to income and earnings volatility across the lifecycle, over and above the levels of individuals’ resources, with institutionally driven variations between Denmark, Germany, and the United States. Moving to specific life course junctures, the third chapter illustrates how flexibilization-driven inequalities during the school-to-work transition interact with intergenerational social inequalities, in Italy more than in Germany. This research highlights that only Italian workers from advantaged family backgrounds manage to offset occupational penalties resulting from unstable labor market entry. The final chapter, focusing on the UK labor market and using an experimental design, unveils significant discriminatory tendencies favoring candidates with high-status backgrounds, intersecting gender, and parenthood. Through these empirical contributions, this dissertation advances our understanding of evolving intergenerational inequalities, emphasizing the importance of adopting a life-course perspective for a comprehensive analysis.

La tesi si inserisce nell'ambito dell'animato dibattito politico e scientifico in merito alle misure volte a supportare i soggetti più deboli nel processo di inclusione socio-lavorativa. Al centro della riflessione si situano i cambiamenti che hanno caratterizzato il mercato del lavoro negli ultimi trent'anni e le politiche di welfare sviluppate a livello nazionale e comunitario per rispondere ai nuovi rischi e bisogni dei cittadini. In particolare, si approfondiscono le politiche del mercato del lavoro, cioè tutte quelle misure e quei servizi finalizzati a supportare i lavoratori in difficoltà occupazionale. La lettura proposta è volta a comprendere il significato delle azioni di politica del lavoro, alla luce dei cambiamenti introdotti dalle riforme degli ultimi anni. Si parla oggi di politiche attive del lavoro, di occupabilità, di responsabilizzazione degli individui, di personalizzazione degli interventi e, sul fronte degli attori che governano e gestiscono il sistema, di concertazione e di sinergia pubblico-privato. Nella seconda parte della tesi sono proposti due studi di caso, il modello lombardo e il modello danese di politiche del lavoro, che presentano logiche di intervento e orientamenti differenti, pur in presenza di situazioni occupazionali simili, caratterizzate da ridotti problemi di disoccupazione e da elevati tassi di partecipazione al mercato del lavoro. / The thesis is positioned within the political and scientific debate regarding the measures aimed to support the vulnerable people in the social and employment integration process. The study in depth concerns the changes of the labour market of the last thirty years and the welfare policies developed on national and European level to meet new citizens requirements. In particular, the thesis is focused on the labour market policies, which include measures and services supporting people with employment difficulties. The analysis concerns the new trends in labour market policies, the Italian model, the actors who govern the system and the types of measures (vocational guidance, vocational training, employment services, etc). The second part of thesis explores two cases, Lombardy and Denmark labour market policies models, with the analysis of different labour market problems and the various strategies to improve social cohesion and integration for disadvantaged people.

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Most exogenous developmental models have not provided satisfactory results in indigenous settings. The resulting development policies have contributed to the expropriation of indigenous territories and to the indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources, that have led to a generalized worsening of indigenous peoples’ living conditions. The expression “development aggression” has been coined to describe the violation of indigenous individual and collective rights during development processes that have been imposed top-down rather than shared and implemented with the communities involved. Against this background, several studies have pinpointed the role of indigenous entrepreneurship in sustaining endogenous development processes. Due to the low number of empirical studies supporting this proposition, this research aims at contributing to the debate, claiming that community enterprises are an effective vehicle for an indigenous self- determined process of development. More specifically, these grassroots entrepreneurial initiatives appear able to sustain an indigenous conception of well-being that has recently entered the Latin American debate on development. This conception, named buen vivir, emphasizes the importance of indigenous culture, the natural environment, and collective well-being. Based on a multidisciplinary approach that draws on entrepreneur- ship, economic sociology, anthropology, and development studies, the re- search combines theoretical and empirical approaches. An ethnographic study has been carried out in the first half of 2012 and has investigated sixteen self-managed community enterprises that have been founded by indigenous Mayan communities in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The fieldwork has been based on in-depth semi-structured interviews, as well as direct observation and analysis of secondary sources. The focus is on identifying the enabling factors that have supported the emergence of these enterprises and the impact they have had on improving indigenous peoples’ well-being. The main findings pinpoint the existence of some enabling factors for the emergence of community enterprises in the indigenous context, that have to be found in the indigenous cultural resources on which they are based, in the linkages they hold with social movements, and in the situation of social and economic stress of the context in which they are embedded. The research has also highlighted that in the context ana- lyzed community enterprises maintain some specific characteristics: they have a civic origin, thus they are not externally driven; they pursue a plurality of goals, which are not only social and economic, but also political, cultural and environmental; they have a participatory governance, based on equality among members and on democratic principles; and an entrepreneurial dimension that is explicitly aimed at pursuing social objectives through the continuous production of goods or services. These four characteristics explain the contribution that community enterprises can offer in supporting alternative approaches to development, where local communities are actors of their own development processes.

La tesi ha l'obiettivo di comprendere quale sistema di nuovi valori, aspirazioni e norme sociali, rispetto all'ideologia delle sfere separate, orienta l'agire di neogenitori in coppie dual precarious e con quali conseguenze dal punto di vista soggettivo, tanto nella quotidianità quanto lungo il corso biografico. Il lavoro di ricerca adotta un approccio sociologico di tipo interpretativo e si articola su tre fuochi di analisi specifici: gli assetti culturali e normativi influenti nei processi di sense-making tra famiglia e lavoro, le pratiche quotidiane di boundary-work fra gli ambiti di vita e i processi decisionali lungo le esperienze biografiche. La tesi fa luce su come i meccanismi, allo stesso tempo pratici e culturali, collocati in contesti familiari, strutturali e culturali specifici, concorrano, talvolta in modo conflittuale e talvolta attraverso taciti processi di adattamento, ad innovare e, per altri versi, a riprodurre i modelli egemoni di conciliazione famiglia-lavoro.

Through a cyberethnographic informed approach applied to a mature Free and Open Source Software video game collective this research addressed a central issue in contemporary information age: the increasing place taken by users in creating and maintaining innovative public goods thanks to the distributed carrying capacity of the Internet. The empirical work is based on an ethnographic immersion in the field and on interviews and it is theoretically informed by Actor-Network Theory and integrated with insights coming from Action Nets.

The thesis contributes to the explanation of two well-documented phenomena: the strong decline in fertility rates and the parallel increase in female labour market participation which occurred in the last decades in most OECD countries. The argument is studied by means of a European comparison and an in-depth analysis of the Italian case. An innovative aspect of the work is the combination of cultural and structural explanations. In fact, the main argument of the thesis is that cross-national differences and the puzzling Italian and Southern European pattern of low fertility and low female labour market participation should be understood as stemming from the interplay between different factors, related to a structural – Welfare Regimes and the Economic Theory of the Family – and a cultural theoretical framework – the Second Demographic Transition and the distinction between “strong” and “weak” family systems. In detail, the thesis shows empirically how both women’s opportunity-costs and households’ economic resources as well as family values and preferences are useful to understand fertility and female labour market participation behaviours. ILFI (Indagine Longitudinale sulle Famiglie Italiane, 1997-2005) data have been used to demonstrate how individual- and household-level mechanisms, connected with social stratification, underlying the transition to parenthood and female labour market participation around childbirths are coherent with the Italian familialistic institutional setting. Italy is an interesting case not least because of its strong regional heterogeneity, which concerns also the family formation process. Adopting an epidemiological approach, ILFI and IARD data on the condition of youth (2004) are exploited to show how the regional heterogeneity in family behaviours within Italy, such as the lower age at parenthood and the higher fertility rates in Southern regions in the selected cohorts, may be largely explained by differences in family values. This first hint suggesting the role of culture on demographic behaviours is developed further in a comparative setting using EVS (European Values Study, 1990-2008) data. The latter allowed to assess directly the importance of values and attitudes for women’s labour market participation and fertility decisions in 15 European countries. Finally, the comparison between the different paths followed by Italy and the Netherlands in the last thirty years is discussed as an example of how changes in the institutional settings in order to foster work-family reconciliation are deeply embedded within wider processes of social change. Based on the developed theoretical framework and the results of the mentioned empirical analyses, the author attempts to integrate different streams of the literature and presents an argumentation about the complex interplay between interests, ideas and institutions underlying fertility and female labour market participation trends and patterns.

La tesi affronta la questione delle motivazioni che possono spingere la persona a donare gratuitamente il proprio tempo a favore di un’organizzazione di volontariato. Tanto la tematica del nonprofit quanto quella della motivazioni al lavoro (che costituiscono i due punti focali dell’elaborato) sono trattati in un’ottica multidisciplinare presentando una breve rassegna dei principali contributi di studiosi afferenti ad ambiti scientifici eterogenei. Nell’ultima parte del lavoro viene presentata una ricerca condotta su 292 volontari della provincia di Monza e Brianza provenienti da tre associazioni di volontariato diverse per ambito di intervento e target di riferimento: ABIO, AUSER, Protezione Civile. Tramite un questionario, costruito partendo dallo studio di Carpenter e Myers (2007), si è analizzata la rilevanza di diverse categorie motivazionali che, secondo le precedenti ricerche condotte, possono avere una qualche influenza sulla scelta di essere un volontario (e di continuare ad esserlo): l’altruismo puro e impuro, la reputazione, la carriera, la socialità, la propensione al rischio e al risparmio, la religiosità, la familiarità, l’essere stato invitato esplicitamente da amici e conoscenti. L’ultima parte presenta i risultati dell’analisi dei dati da cui si evince la presenza di fattori self-oriented ed other-oriented che sostengono ed alimentano l’impegno prestato dai lavoratori non retribuiti . / This thesis deals with the volunteers's motivations and their effort in NGO. Through a survey we have analysed some motivational variables which could have a certain influence on the decision of being a volunteer. Referring to previous researches on this topic, We have inquired into: altruism and impure altruism, reputation , career, social concerns, risk, religiosity , familiarity , having been expressly invited by friends.