Fuori Luogo Journal of Sociology of Territory, Tourism, Technology

Editorial

Fabio Corbisiero — 2024-11-30

Multi-Locality Studies: Recent Insights and Future Pathways. Introduction to the Special Issue

Marco Alberio — 2024-11-30

Multi-Locality Studies: Recent Insights and Future Pathways. Introduction to the Special Issue

“I’d rather Live in Munich, but my Job in Stuttgart is More Attractive”. Multi-Local Living between Corporate and Spatial Ties

Lisa Garde — 2024-11-30

Previous research has shown that employees with strong corporate ties are less likely to quit. This literature implicitly focuses on people living and working in the same place. But an increasing number of employees live in more than one place, a phenomenon referred to as multi-local living. The aim of this paper is to analyse the corporate ties of multi-local employees working in Stuttgart (Germany) and how such ties influence multi-local living arrangements. The research questions are: 1) Which factors prompted multi-local employees to decide for Stuttgart and their employer? 2) How are strong corporate ties of multi-local employees shaped? 3) And which dilemmas arise from strong corporate and spatial ties to different places and how are they resolved? The study shows that the reasons prompting people to work for an employer in Stuttgart were mostly linked to Stuttgart’s regional specialisation in the tech sector, and that people initially living multi-locally focus on their career capital and future employability. However, while some feel forced to take up their current job and to live multi-locally, for example after only receiving one job offer, others voluntarily decide to take up a job far away from their other place of residence to gain new personal and work-related experience. But it becomes clear that there is a fine line between forced and voluntary multi-local living. Furthermore, this paper focuses on the corporate ties of multi-local employees and their intentions as to whether to remain in Stuttgart with their employer. Employees with low to average corporate ties tend to stay with their employers due to a lack of other job opportunities and would quit if better job opportunities arose. In contrast to the literature on mono-local employees, multi-local employees are more likely to quit, even after having developed strong corporate ties, due to strong spatial ties elsewhere. Decisions on continuing multi-local living arrangements and staying with an employer are complex, depending on the corporate and spatial ties of all household members as well as on future education and job prospects in the respective places. Thus, even strong corporate ties will not prevent employees from quitting if reasons to relocate to the other place of residence dominate. If partners are unable to decide on a common place of residence, some multi-local employees just accept the dilemma and postpone the decision.

Emotions through Photos in Qualitative Interviews with Multi-locals as a methodological Challenge

Lena Greinke — 2024-11-30

Qualitative interviews are widely used research methods. However, their potential is often underestimated and not exploited. Thus, there is the possibility to complement the interviews with "new" methods - for example, the hybrid method of reflexive photography. This method from cross-cultural studies combines interview and photography techniques. In this method, the interviewees and the scientific observers reverse their roles. Therefore, the interviewees become experts for their photos, report their intentions, and subjectively select motifs. Photos offer the possibility to quickly and technically easily capture visible information. The paper discusses the method of reflexive photography and the evaluation of the empirical materials using image interpretation.
This paper deals with the emotions of multi-locals - i.e. people who live in several places at the same time – in qualitative interviews talking about photos. Due to social and societal change, multi-local lifestyles are already a reality for many people. The district of Diepholz in Lower Saxony serves as the study area. This paper aims to determine the pros and cons of reflexive photography for emotions in qualitative interviews. For this purpose, the four basic emotions, Fear, Anger, Happiness and Sadness, are examined in more detail with the help of the Circumplex Model. The question arises to what extent photos in interviews can evoke emotions in qualitative interviews?
The results show that reflexive photography and image interpretation methods offer numerous opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, a narrative impulse for the interviews is made possible. Moreover, with the help of these methods, visible information and textual-linguistic representations of the interviewees can be collected. Through the photos, the interviewees think more deeply and reflectively. The photos triggered emotional moments in the interviews. For example, there were sad narratives about family losses and emotional highlights about friends and (grand-)children. On the other hand, there is a challenge for researchers to leave the actual interpretation of the images to the interviewees and to misinterpret images. The paper explores the emotional moments of both multi-locals and the researcher.

Multi-local Arrangements and Impact on Work-Life Balance. An International Research on Flight Attendants

Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay — 2024-11-30

Multi-locality and mobility issues have recently appeared as an important research subject. Flight attendants and civil aviation personnel are clearly amongst the main professional groups concerned with this issue of multi-locality. In our research, we analyzed the impacts of this situation and mobility on work-life balance, comparing the situation in Canada, Germany and France. Our research is based on an online survey and also on interviews conducted with cabin crews in these three countries. The research shows that the challenges in multi-locality, and multiple layovers in the specific case of cabin crews, lead to many issues as concerns workloads, working time and work-life balance, themes that are central to our research and will be discussed in this article. While the majority of flight attendants agreed that layovers are opportunities to spend time with colleagues, the fatigue levels and shortness of layovers at destination combined with the number of legs can imply that respondents are often not in the mood to socialize with the crew and mainly focus on recovering for the next flight. Regarding work-life balance, work demands were more likely to interfere with family life than the contrary. Many reported that the requirements of their work in terms of mobility and working time interfered with their home and family life, and this was put forward in the survey as in the interviews we conducted. The unpredictability of the schedule in the first years of one's career brings along a lot of child care issues for parents. Even though the flight attendants’ schedule is flexible per se, only a minority of respondents reported having a flexible schedule (7% of French; 16% of German and 40% of Canadian respondents), indicating that the flexibility is rather employer-driven than employee-driven, which has clearly different impacts. With the mobility and multi-locality issue, which is characteristic of the flight attendants’ work, this represents an important challenge for cabin crew.

3T Readings

Daniela Moisa — 2024-11-30

Exploring Multilocality: Family Transformations, Belonging, and the Challenges of Mobility - Interview with Laura Merla

Simone Caiello — 2024-11-30

Pursuing Urban Liveability with Nature-Based Solutions. A Multi-Faceted Strategy Towards Sustainability

Silvia De Nardis — 2024-11-30

In an age of high anthropic pressure on the environment, cities seek to innovate their strategies in favour of greater urban liveability. This means searching for effective solutions to ensure citizens’ well-being, health, productivity and social inclusion. Among the various ongoing trials, nature-based solutions seem to promisingly contribute to realising liveable urban contexts. Created to deal with the costs of climate change, ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss, they soon became a multi-faceted strategy via which to tackle societal challenges. This paper explores the role of nature-based solutions in addressing collective needs at an urban scale, investigating their relationships with social innovation processes and focussing attention on urban-greening solutions. It investigates the transformative potential of nature-based solutions in producing sustainable liveability and focusses on the implementation-process elements with the potential to affect policies, governance and practices. The analysis of the opportunities for a dynamic and liveable environment to create new and positive scenarios for profound mainstreaming change is included. The study deepens the case of UIA UPPER Latina, a project devoted to the urban regeneration of abandoned and degraded areas by using co-designed and self-produced nature-based solutions. It represents a pioneering experience in the European production and management of parks, being characterised by the ambition to integrate greenness with innovative services in the educational, social and economic sectors. A continuous process of collaboration between various stakeholders–in the public-private-people partnership model–gives rise to a dynamic and open community of practice that is still in progress. The results suggest that nature-based solutions can represent tools that if incorporated into an integrated and multi-level strategy, will help meet urgent needs, foster vibrant and liveable systems, activate innovative processes and stimulate awareness of sustainable transitions.

The Flaneur-as-Researcher. An Autoethnography

Giacomo Gaggiassi — 2024-11-30

Reviewing the nineteenth-century figure initially outlined by the poet Baudelaire and later codified by Walter Benjamin, the term "flâneur" is defined as the intellectual capable of getting lost in the city, pushing beyond its threshold to capture its "genius loci". In this article I discussed and reported a complete analysis of my thesis work. Once onceiving the flanerie as a research practice, I then conceive myself as a "being" flâneur and, at the same time, to conceive "its doing", identifying a methodological metaphor of the social researcher. To achieve this goal, I used my own experience, particularly focusing on my period of time in Paris, through the elaboration of autoethnography in an attempt to identify the flâneur's identity. By telling my story, I decided to speak of myself and my experience, seeking to investigate how the flâneur emerges and its related distinctive features. In particular, in addition to expressing how the practice of flânerie is discussed and experienced and what it means, I intend to focus on precisely who practices it, that is, the flâneur itself. Specifically, I asked myself: when and how does a flâneur take place? How does a flâneur or a practice of flânerie influence not only themselves but also others? Furthermore, what added value can I provide to make my experience as a flâneur more accessible? In this perspective, I intended to highlight the transition of flanerie from a macroscopic phenomenon, as a mere practice, to a microscopic phenomenon: a territorial exploration that also refers to the existence of those who practice it. This is an attempt to make this suspension, this waiting, a productive moment, in order to justify, in the eyes of the community but also to myself, my idling, in order to represent new forms of learning based on my own experience. Furthermore, since my empathetic knowledge journey in the territory strongly impacts my identity, I have conceived the condition of flanerie itself as a queer inclination. Autoethnography has allowed me to validate my experience as a flâneur, an issue that is usually not included in traditional social scientific research. Autoethnography, in fact, has made it possible to interpret and illustrate traditional concepts in the social sciences, making them accessible to those not familiar with the field, raising questions that would otherwise never have been asked.

The meaning of work: life stories and career trajectories of Ukrainian women from the domestic and home-care sector to the third sector

Giuseppe Gargiulo — 2024-11-30

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has had consequences for a segment of Ukrainian female workers who have been living for years in Naples, a city with a rooted presence of that community. The growing demand for linguistic and cultural mediators in the local third sector, linked to needs of the fleeing population, has necessarily intercepted a workforce that has been present in the area for a long time and employed exclusively in the domestic and home care sector.

Adopting the biographical-narrative approach, we have identified ten Ukrainian female workers as protagonists in the transition to the third sector with the aim of investigating those career trajectories characterized by the exit from the «domestic work trap» (Fullin & Vercelloni, 2009, p. 433). Capturing them in this phase of transition between jobs has allowed, first of all, to reconstruct the processes of creation and transformation of their courses of action also in relation to broader social phenomena. Furthermore, the continuous reference to past, present, and future - typical of the adopted approach - has allowed to shed light a posteriori on the paths of migrant workers involved in the domestic and home care sector characterized by social and work invisibility.

Following a work-oriented interpretation, in the analysis of transition from old to new employment, the interviews are mainly analysed through the three functions that work fulfils: material, expressive, and socialization. Starting from the three functions, the interviewees make sense of work, weighing the meanings attributed to them. The attributed meaning that prevails in terms of subjective relevance becomes a selecting principle that guides the sense of work choices and the purposes of profit between the material and symbolic plane. They testify, therefore, that individual work choices do not respond solely to criteria of a strictly economic nature and that economic and non-economic motivations are deeply intertwined: the daily new work experiences are an opportunity both to express one’s potential and work capabilities repressed by years of work within domestic walls and to promote renewed horizons starting from the awareness of an integration so far not successful. All mothers, it is when they talk about their children that the meaning attributed to the current work trajectory is revealed: that related to the desire to achieve greater social recognition pursued with the transition from the role of caregiver and/or housekeeper to that of social worker, which is perceived as a lever of emancipation for themselves and their families.

New Organizational Responses, Innovations and Social Impacts of Covid-19 on Third Sector organizations in Campania Region

Gabriella Punziano — 2024-11-30

Utilizing Mixed Methods and an interdisciplinary approach this article explains the main results of the NORISC-19 project that investigates the impacts of COVID-19 on Third Sector Organizations (TSOs) in Campania, Italy, highlighting their innovative responses and social impacts amidst the pandemic and ongoing Third Sector Reform. The study reveals TSOs' adaptation to digitalization, resilience, and innovative strategies to address social needs and regulatory changes. Key findings include the diverse impacts of Pandemy and Normative Reforms of the Sector on TSOs, their strategic adaptations, and the crucial role of digital transformation in ensuring service continuity and addressing emerging social challenges. The main findings prompt a broader reflection, offering insights into the nonprofit sector's adaptation during crises and contributing to more articulated reflections on a policy agenda for the future of TSOs.