Italy today 2006. Social picture and trends

General considerations
Italian society in 2006
Economic recovery is a fact
(Signs of renewed economic vitality; Successful changes in Italy's large enterprises; Tourist business gains strenght; Socio-economic integration of immigrants: the Italian model is sound)
Systemic burdens remain
(Public expenditure is out of control and the impact is underestimated; Italy's infrastructural networks: inefficiency and high costs; Italy's educational system: a rhetorical and bureaucratic regression; Italy's welfare system - a patrobage network; New crime surge in Italian cities big and small)
Italian leadership in deep crisis
(Slowdown of social mobility has negative impact; Media obsession results in social erosion; Corporative localism and its perverse effects; Italian women: a difficult inclusion; The ambiguous of individuals in decisions concerning bioethics)
Areas of social policy
Educational processes
(New educational challenges for new Italian citizens; Langiages, fine, but what about language training?; From compulsory university degrees to compulsory Master's degrees; PC and connectivity in Italian schools: turning the goal into reality; From education to lifelong learning; Italy's school and university system)
The labor market
(New options after flexibility; Where jobs are growing; Quality as the mainspring of innovation in self-employment; Responses to fragmentation processes in banking; Women in politics: few of them share scant power)
The welfare system
(Information about health: a vast territory where few people find their bearings; Healthcare: the costs of poor planning; Individual responsibility and the imperative of beauty: media pressure on the woman's body; Waiting for termination indemnity: the slow adjustment of supplementary social security)
Territory and networks
(Development strategies in the new regional plans; Strategic planning experiences in Italy; The demographic viability of urban "second rings"; Innovating the symbols of large infrastructure; Sports and territory: another aspect of the Southern question)
Economic development and its players
(A two-sided recovery; Liberalizations and a new industrial policy: almost an illusion; Resuming growth: enterprise networks new internationalization strategies; Between torsion and fragmentation: snapshot of the industrial districts 5 years into the decade; The Italian maritime cluster: an enterprise system that creates value; The economic circuits of multi-ethnic Italy: consumption behavior and migrants' access to credit; Forms and implications of Italian households' debt)
Means and procedures
Communications and media
(Monomedia and multimedia citizens in Europe: Italy lags behind; What the media are used for; New trends in reading; Centrality and multimediality of music in daily life; Daily newspapers in Italy: poor sellers that sell a great deal)
Innovative processes
(Building digital territories; The digital South; Different innovations: ethno-business, migrants and technological landscapes; Inclusion, involvement and partecipation: e-democracy for a better quality of life)
Securuty and citizenship
(Distinguishing measures accounting to contexts; Accompanying immigration's "stage 2"; The pardon: what was done, what could have been done; Crime "moves with the times"; Near the citizens; New local approaches to managing migration phenomena; Immigration in the South, between the stabilization of presences and poor planning; Towards an Italian model of reception and integration of asylum seekers and refugees)
Appendix
Looking through figures
(Foreword; Tables)
Background
Societal self-awareness: from great goals to the emergence of spontaneous processes (1967-1971)
From the "submerged" to the "emerged" economy (1972-1977)
The pride of stability (1978-1981)
Difficult relations between society and institutions (1982-1983)
Consolidation and the need for maturity (1984-1987)
Beyond proliferation (1988-1992)
From revolutionary euphoria to an endless, wearisome transition (1993-1998) Something is moving in the enduring static nature of Italy's atomized society (1999-2002)
From the search for new exit routes to the prospect of a neo-bourgeois recovery (2003-2006)
Censis: an observer on the watch (What is Censis?).