In this paper an evaluation study of a public programme that financed a regional network of 157 youth centres in the South of Italy was presented. A theory-based evaluation model was adopted to explore the causal links between different kind of participation experiences. Evaluation questions focused on three main issues: the empowerment perception of the team during the management of the centres; the empowering effect of participation in the organization of the youth centre; and the decision making abilities of the young people involved. After an exploratory study, an on-line structured questionnaire has been administered to all the centres. New youth centres appear as striving to become sustainable enterprises. However, there is a common difficulty to integrate day to day management and sustainability strategies. This difficulty is lower when project leaders participated in the design of the centres together with other young people. Thus, results confirmed that participation in the design was an empowering experience. However, this study warns against some unwanted effects of the participation. For instance, participation processes was a form of decorative consultation for half of the cases. Therefore, empirical evidence suggests further research to focus on the creation of stable participation structures inside the centres to avoid the risk of participation processes without a real effect on decisions.

Discourse plays a crucial role in determining how both persons and communities shape social reality and attribute meaning to experience (Edwards, 1997). This potential is mostly evident when the contended object of discourse is history itself, which is a peculiar area of the cultural mind. Hence, the discursive management of the collective tends to generate interpretations which in turn might mould personal and social identities. Sharing the spirit of the ‘‘innovations’’ brought about by cultural psychology (Valsiner, 2009), the present paper is intended to highlight how institutional and public discourses communicate different degrees of responsibility for the history of their own national group and, at the same time, how individuals construe historical identities with different degrees of guilt towards past events. Through a qualitative approach—the ‘‘diatextual analysis’’ (Mininni, 1992, 2001, 2005)—this paper proposes to investigate the rhetorical strategies adopted on occasion of some important commemorative events by the institutional spokesmen, as well as by the public opinion, to elaborate both positive and negative histories of their ingroup.

Vocational guidance represents an educational opportunity that involves the incoming students in the analysis of the variables that support the choice of university course, and professors in identifying the most appropriate educational and organizational proposals in relation to personal and social characteristics of freshmen. University can use these best practices of guidance to promote a greater participation of students to university life.???

The validation of non-formal and informal learning has been part of the European Union political agenda since 2001. The paper presents the results of an action-research project about how the University can reconcile considerations of the strategic value of non-formal and informal knowledge in the perspective of lifelong learning. Specifically, the paper focuses on the Lifelong Learning Centre provided by the University of Bari (Italy) to migrant people and funded by the European Fund for the Integration of non-EU immigrants (EIF).. The paper analyses assumptions, approach, outputs and outcomes of the CAP centre conceived as a form of career guidance to help immigrants to actively shape their life course.

A 5 recent perspective proposed by cognitive linguistics allows overcoming the traditional trend by confronting the special rhetorical strength of metaphor with its evident argumentative nature. In such a direction the psycho-semiotic approach frames each human event of sense making within the notion of diatext, underlining the dialogical tension between “text” and “context” of enunciation. 10 Metaphor is a relevant resource of diatextual analysis since it opens unexpected views on the mysterious procedures that translate claims of meaning into discursive modes suitable to specific situations. A corpus of empirical evidences, collected within the organizational context through narrative interviews, allows better understanding of the creative power of metaphors.

According to the traditional mainstream perspective in organizational research, organizations are conceptualized as environments basically oriented toward the production of goods and services and/or to the implementation of the skills mastered by their operators. However, according to a narrative approach to organizations, workplaces – as well as organizations in general – could be conceived of as discursive constructions, that is, as social spaces where a thick network of narrations and discourses are informally produced and “packaged,” thus shaping and featuring the most authentic dimension of organizational identity. Therefore, in order to capture the actual ethos of an organizational context, researchers should be ready to disentangle the network of collective narrations and discourses which is shaped through and by the shared and/or contested/negotiated practices of accounting. In line with such premises, the paper analyzes a corpus of empirical evidence, collected within the organizational context through focus group discussions, in an attempt to show how discursive and narrative cues actually work as yeast for the self, even within a critical moment of transition, such as organizational change, which challenged cohesion and stability of both organizational and individual identities.

Positive Psychology has recently attempted at “enlarging the paradigm”, explaining the understanding of the human experience of the world. By contrast, for Critical Psychology, “enlarging the paradigm”, means moving away from an individualist conceptualisation of the psychological. The present paper aims at “redistributing the Psychological” toward directions already marked by cultural and discursive conceptions of human experience. Within a trans-disciplinary frame, labelled as Psycho-semiotics, Diatextual Analysis has been adopted to investigate the rhetorical modes used by socially excluded enunciators (drug users, immigrants, atypical workers, elderly people and some categories of churchgoer) to elaborate their own experience of well-being through affective labour and self care.