In search of the enabling factors for public services resilience: A multidisciplinary and configurational approach

This paper investigates public services' (PSs) resilience during turbulent times, such as COVID-19, to contribute to relevant academic calls that aim at identifying which combination of factors might lead PSs to develop resilient approaches during crises, despite them suffering from intrinsic management and organizational flaws. Therefore, we adopt fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis on 19 resilient Italian PSs and we test for possible effective configurations of enabling factors emerging from a literature review of: Crisis Management, Resource-Based View, Organizational Theory, Stakeholder Theory, Digital Innovation Management, which typically the main PSs' flaws are intercepted in. Our results show that the three configurations of enabling factors for resilience stem from human-based and continuous learning processes to be addressed through knowledge-based adaptive approaches. In this way, our research proves its usefulness by providing a set of insights to PSs' practitioners on the need to invest in collaborative learning processes that, by combining specific enabling factors, might innovatively mitigate the typical PSs' managerial and organizational flaws during crises. © 2023

SEeD for Change: The Systemic Event Design Project Applied to Terra Madre Salone del Gusto for the Development of Food Communities

In the contemporary era, food plays a key role in balancing environmental, social, and economic balances, not only due to its primary identity as a resource that nourishes living beings and the planet but also through the processes triggered by stakeholders who act at the internal local food systems. In the latter, an orientation towards sustainability is increasingly urgently required, capable of achieving a widespread creation of shared value. In this scenario, the International Slow Food Association operates, which also, through the Terra Madre Salone del Gusto initiative, coordinates communities and events located throughout the world on the theme of "good, clean and fair" food. This article aims to analyze, through the lens of the systemic approach, the interesting and multifaceted impacts of this event, as an opportunity to disseminate and contagion of ideas, attitudes, and behaviors around the themes of sustainability and biodiversity, but also as a moment of consolidation and creation of relationships between and within local food systems and local communities. The research project presented, entitled "SEeD for Change", was coordinated by the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo with the University of Turin and helped to focus on the actors, relationships and contexts that actually and virtually hosted the event: places in which through a common and shared language, change has been generated.