Sono sette i ricercatori dell'Università degli studi di Bergamo presenti nella World's Top 2% Scientists, la classifica degli scienziati con il più alto livello di produttività scientifica.
Nel ranking del 2022, elaborato dall'Università di Standford, in collaborazione con Elsevier, compare il prof. Silvio Vismara, docente di Finanza Aziendale presso il Dipartimento di Scienze Aziendali, focalizzato in particolare sulla finanza imprenditoriale e sulla finanza digitale.
Progetti di Ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale – Bando 2022
Principal Investigator: prof. Roberto Lusardi
Team di ricerca: prof. Micol Bronzini, Università Politecnica delle Marche; prof. Enrico Maria Piras, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento).
Sociologists are contributing considerably to the debate on the pluralism of techno professional knowledge (knowledge through science) and on how the relationship between episteme and doxa is being redefined. The notion of “epistemic community” has been proposed to indicate the “network of knowledge-based experts or groups with an authoritative claim to policy relevant knowledge within the domain of their expertise” (Eyles, Robinson, Elliott 2009, 2). Within an epistemic community, actors share the definition of the problem, develop a strategy to solve it, and possess or develop the technical and scientific expertise to support the legitimacy of their proposal. There is a growing interest in deepening how the process of generating, discussing, and applying knowledge within epistemic communities is developing in various fields. ECHOES investigates the practices of knowledge production and circulation within epistemic communities, the performative dimension of professional expertise, and its organizational and professional implications. These dynamics will be addressed empirically through a case study concerning the development of medical expertise and the production of medical knowledge during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Italy. In a scenario dominated by extensive debates within scientific and professional communities and policy-making agencies, both professional relationships and medical practices went through processes of reconfiguration, which also involved diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. One of the most emblematic cases in Italy is represented by the use of a “therapeutic packet” around which a network of physicians (both specialist and general practitioners) has developed, advocating its clinical efficacy in home treatment in the early stages of SARS-CoV-2 infection, the so-called “early home care network”. The main objective of the study is to follow and to reconstruct the genesis, structuring, and formalization of this network and its relationships with professional and institutional contexts and public opinion. We will investigate how this network of physicians has acted as a proper epistemic community (beyond being a community of practice), as an alternative to the network that is institutionally recognized. We will analyze the daily practices, communication dynamics, and institutional interactions that have developed within and around this network of doctors and the artifacts they have produced. The main expected result is the development of a mid-range theory able “to produce accounts that are both faithful to the world that researchers experience and adequate to intervene in the issues of the day” (Hine 2007, 653). Toward this aim, we will draw on the Biography Of Artifacts and Practices methodology (BOAP), a research design developed within STS that “combines ethnographic and historiographic methods including the collection of documents, in-depth interviews and record of field observations” (Hyysalo, Pollock, Williams 2019, 10).
Principal Investigator: prof. Stefano Tomelleri
Team di ricerca: prof. Luca Mori (Università degli studi di Verona); prof. Ercole Giap Parini, Università della Calabria.
Abstract: The research is focused on the complex relationship among resentment and social justice. As it has been said, contemporary western societies can be basically interpreted as resentment societies (Mishra 2017). Populistic waves slap forcefully the bases of democratic life with the result that the social ties seem to be progressively weakened. Nevertheless, resentment can’t be unilaterally conceived as a disruptive and disintegrating emotion. As research in the field of emotions has shown, social sentiments are ambivalent phenomena full of many different potentials (Barbalet 1998). What we would point out is that, in the experience of resentment, beside hatred and desire for revenge, one could also find a quest for change, justice, and social improvement. One of the most important question emerging from the scientific literature on resentment is how and when resentment as a pathological destructive social force (hostile resentment) can prove to be a constructive social force and promoter of social development and social justice (prosocial resentment). The question is which factors can free resentment from his vindictive obsessions and can turn it to more inclusive and developmental forms of request. At the theoretical level, the research wants to deepen the notion of resentment trying to point out its constitutive elements and mechanisms of formation. Our idea is that resentment is both collective and individual phenomena triggered by tension between egalitarian desires, which are fiercely competitive, and growing structural inequalities (Scheler 1912). Coming to the empirical part of the research, it will try to enrich our theoretical analysis through a qualitative and comparative methodologies. Our methodological choices are oriented to study resentment from a biographical perspective. To capture the different phenomenology of resentment and its causes, we are going to gather life histories from inhabitants of our three regions of competence (Lombardy, Veneto, and Calabria). To investigate empirically how resentment could be interpreted as a generative condition of collective actions and identities, we have planned to add to the biographical perspective, the one set up by case study and action research. The aim here is to pay attention to two examples of collective form resentment (one related to hostile resentment the other one to prosocial resentment), trying to work out the dynamics of aggregation, identity building and their strategies social legitimation. Finally, this part of the research will be dedicated also to understand the role of membership in changing personal perception of resentment. Finally, the results of our empirical research will be used to elaborate a psychosocial test aimed at detecting the types of social resentment shown by groups and individuals. The tool could be used by institutions and policymakers to understand the nature and the lines of development of those protests eventually taking place in their territories.
Responsabile di unità locale: prof. Giuseppe Pedeliento, al fianco della prof.ssa Daniela Andreini e del prof. Federico Mangiò
Team di ricerca: prof.ssa Silvia Biraghi dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano; Daniele Dalli dell'Università degli Studi di Pisa; in veste di Principal Investigator la prof.ssa Annamaria Tuan dell’Università degli Studi di Bologna.
Abstract: With platform economy becoming a hegemonic model in market exchanges (Srnicek, 2017; VanDijck, Poell and De Waal, 2018), consumers are now getting used to the idea of receiving items ordered online in hours and not days, and companies are pressured to move toward an instant delivery-of-everything world. This trend, pushed by Covid-19, has created a new business environment in which large, global, multi-sided platforms are competing with local, small scale initiatives. Even if large multi-sided platforms (e.g. Amazon, Deliveroo, Glovo) allow small and medium businesses to grow, they are criticized for the huge quantities of packaging used, undignified working conditions, impersonal standardized digital interface, increased transportation’s usage and emissions. Some platforms have recently started to change the last mile delivery toward more sustainable solutions. For instance, they use cargo-bikes and low impact solutions offered by express couriers (e.g. Bartolini, TNT), typically used by local platforms. Moreover, they are questioned for their disproportionated power as gatekeepers and for the exploitation and asymmetries they create against local suppliers (Khan, 2018). Local delivery platforms may have the unprecedent opportunity to overcome these drawbacks. Nevertheless, an overall framework still lacks for guiding the design and management of local platforms in developing a new competitive positioning, in which local resources are protected and promoted in the interest of local stakeholders (suppliers, consumers and the local community) in order to compete with larger platforms. The aim of the BUMOLDS project is to define a prototype of a local delivery platform that creates value by promoting and leveraging local resources while meeting local stakeholders’ needs. Local delivery platforms are poised to generate profits at scale as they actively integrate multiple impacts on the society and the environment and put consumers at the core of their business model. Thus, local platforms differentiate from large ones, as they focus on environmental and social value drivers, and purposefully distance themselves from logistics, convenience, and other operational value drivers. Therefore, the BUMOLDS project addresses the following question: Which characteristics should a business model for local delivery platforms have to respect the environment and the society while putting the relationship with local stakeholders at its focus? BUMOLDS has at its core the ability to bring business and local society together while competing with big online platforms which drain resources from the local context. In doing so, it integrates suppliers’ determinants to adopt a local delivery platform; consumers’ willingness to use local delivery platforms and their expectations in terms of habits, attitudes, and product and services choices; the ability to integrate and promote relationships with consumers, suppliers, employees, and other local stakeholders.
Responsabile di unità locale: prof. Lorenzo Migliorati
Team di ricerca: prof. Massimo Pendenza, Università degli Studi di Salerno (Principal Investigator); prof.ssa Laura Leonardi, Università degli studi di Firenze; prof. Vincenzo Romania, Università degli studi di Padova.
The aim of the research is the issue of the transformation of material and symbolic boundaries of social solidarity, broadly understood as social ties and the formation of a unitary subject in the context of the crisis generated by Covid-19. By means of a
longitudinal analysis of the Italian context, covering the time span from the beginning of the pandemic (ca. December 2019) until the planned termination of the research, the object is to understand whether and how a potentially traumatic event, Covid-19, has generated forms of inclusive solidarity. In other words, comprehension of the pandemic resulting in the generating of a common judgment of fairness, reciprocity and justice.
The originality of the research consists in analysing the potential transformation of Covid- 19-related events, widely considered disruptive to social solidarity at national and European level, into resources for strengthening national and European identity and inclusive solidarity.
The impact of Covid-19-related events on social solidarity are analysed by reconstructing the genealogy of the social representations related to the pandemic on the basis of a precise analytical sequence involving three Lines of Inquiry [LI]: LI1) the analysis of the trauma-carrier groups - i.e. the collective subjects: local spontaneous committees, informal neighbourhood groups, third sector associations, activists and human rights movements, professional organisations, trade union, trade and industry representatives - which have suffered the most from the negative consequences of Covid-19 and have made claims for government compensation; LI2) the analysis of how the representations of suffering and the claims of these groups have been discussed and re-elaborated in the public media sphere by political-institutional, information and intellectual-academic actors, starting from the beginning of the pandemic until 2024 (first year of the research); and, finally, LI3) the analysis of whether and how national public opinion has been influenced by such debate. Several scenarios are hypothesised. Covid-19: 1. has generated the maturing of a feeling of inclusive solidarity at national level or alternatively, has sharpened the internal fractures of national identity according to traditional (territorial, class, generational) and/or new lines of division; 2. has produced forms of nationalist/populist, territorial (North/South Europe) closure or even forms of scepticism and disinterest on the part of Italians towards everything that happens beyond their national borders; or, again, 3. has led to the maturing of an inclusive transnational solidarity, that is a greater adhesion of Italians to the European project. It goes without saying that Research as a whole has a major impact on the advancement of scientific knowledge and the policy implications of its findings.
Digitization and the inclusiveness of entrepreneurial finance
Team di ricerca: prof. Silvio Vismara (Coordinatore di unità locale), prof. Michele Meoli (università degli studi di Bergamo), Massimo Colombo (Politecnico di Milano).
Abstract: This project investigates how digitization impacts the functioning of entrepreneurial finance ecosystems. We aim to understand whether, to what extent and how digitization makes entrepreneurial finance ecosystems more inclusive, facilitating access to entrepreneurial (both seed and scale-up) finance by female and ethnic entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs located far from great metropolitan areas. First, we investigate the effect of digitization on the matching between entrepreneurs and investors. We compare the investment decisions of "crowd" investors, that populate digital financial channels, with those of professional investors, and investigate how the behavior of these two categories of investors is influenced by the identity of entrepreneurs (i.e., minority entrepreneurs versus male and white entrepreneurs). Second, we examine how digitization influences the sequences of digital and traditional financial channels used by entrepreneurs, and their long-term impact. We are especially interested in investigating whether female, ethnic and geographically remote entrepreneurs leverage digital financial channels (crowdfunding) to subsequently obtain finance from professional investors. We will also investigate the effects of specific financial sequences on firms' long-term performance, as reflected in their ability to scale operations through rapid sales and employment growth and go through a successful exit through an IPO or an acquisition.