ABSTRACT
In Italy, policies and services devoted to persons with disabilities, particularly those with cognitive disabilities, are still characterised by institutional segmentation and are focused on the medical model and therefore on rehabilitation, rather than on social participation, despite the formal ratification of the UNCRPD in 2009. This chapter analyses the pandemic impact by focusing on daily services, as a central service of welfare disability policy, and investigating if the pandemic has strengthened the dominant medical view, or if it has been an opportunity for a more integrated (social and health services) provision of services for people with disabilities, particularly with cognitive disabilities, and their families. Data on two regional case studies show severe differences in implementing national regulation to manage the pandemic at regional level. The difficulties experienced by both families and healthcare and social professionals are similar in the two regions, but the different organisational system concerning social and health care services outlines contexts with different rights. © 2023 Alice Scavarda and Angela Genova. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The chapter presents the similarities and the differences between the different case studies reported in the book and suggests some conclusion on the impact of COVID-19 on policies and practices devoted to persons with cognitive disabilities from a macro, meso and micro point of view. The COVID-19 surveillance regime has made people with disabilities, and particularly with intellectual ones, even more invisible, since their rights have been consistently under-represented in the different national contexts. Persons with intellectual disabilities have been considered objects of protection and this overprotective stance turns into an increasing process of institutionalisation, segregation and familiarisation of care. The COVID-19 surveillance regime has brought into light the limits of the implementation of the UN Convention and of the EU Strategy, but the book and the emerging epistemic community, in the framework of public sociology, contribute to support the rights of all persons, with or without disabilities, in public welfare policies in Europe. © 2023 Anjali Ghosh and Eleni Koutsogeorgou. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The introduction presents the pandemic context as the new sanitary surveillance regime that has even more affected persons with disabilities. This book focuses on welfare disability policy, services and practices for and with people with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic time, examining the period between Winter 2020 and Spring 2022. A pandemic is a time when changes are accelerated, forcing the emergence of new solutions. The pandemic has called for innovation and reform in all disability welfare policies to overcome increasing and changing social needs. Despite the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the European Strategy 2021-2030, the impact of the pandemic has been different in each country according to the features of each national policy framework and local responses. Nevertheless, the European policy framework is the context and the benchmarking reference for the analysis carried out in this work. This book develops a sociological analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on policies, services and practices in several European contexts adopting a public sociology perspective. Moreover, the book looks at supportive and self-help activities implemented during the pandemic to answer the needs of the persons with disabilities. By collecting these data, the book outlines and develops the concept of a community of practices as a group of people that share a concern for something they do and learn how to do it better by interacting with each other on a regular basis. Then the structure and the methodological choices of the book are presented. © 2023 Angela Genova, Alice Scavarda and Maria Światkiewicz-Mośny. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Welfare policies for persons with disabilities have been strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and this introductory chapter provides the theoretical background to the book. Definition, data and main European policies about disabilities are outlined. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) is the key pillar of disability policies in European countries. In line with a Disability Studies perspective, COVID-19 health surveillance regime has been a challenge in the implementation process of the UNCRPD, highlighting the role of lay knowledge and community of practices in managing everyday challenges for persons with disabilities and their families, and therefore their potential role in becoming part of epistemic communities to support the policy making and implementation process of the UNCRPD. © 2023 Angela Genova, Alice Scavarda and Maria Światkiewicz-Mośny. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Disability Welfare Policy in Europe:Cognitive Disability and the Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic analyses the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on persons with cognitive disabilities and their families, including its effects on education, employment, social and health care services. © 2023 Angela Genova, Alice Scavarda and Maria Światkiewicz-Mośny. Individual chapters © 2023 The authors. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The Emergency Care Unit (UPA) has the purpose of being a place of rapid assistance to primary and medium cases. However, during the covid-19 pandemical period, the administration of inputs and supplies represented challenges for management. The shortage of equipment and health professionals may have been caused by the pandemic, butit could also have been influenced by management. This paper analyzes how the problems with the supply chain in UPA interfere in health services. This article seeks to analyze, through qualitative research of CNES data, whether there were problems with the supply chain in the UPAs and whether supply chain risk management can contribute to better management (SCRM) of emergency healthcare establishments. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
The paper presents the results of two qualitative research studies, based on semi-structured interviews, carried out during the phase 1 of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the aim of analysing the effects of the reorganisation of the life trajectories, due to the confinement, on the mental health of working parents with preschool and school-age children. The lockdown is deemed as an extreme case of familialism, which exacerbates the lack of systemic parenting support, a characteristic of the Italian welfare state. While before the pandemic parents faced highperforming parenting and working models, homeworking and online teaching have made the management of their different roles even harder. This situation has negatively impacted on the mental health of the interviewees, while in parallel reducing parents', particularly mothers', sense of guilt related to the lack of time devoted to their children. Results suggest the need to consider parenting as a social issue, to be addressed with universalistic but also gender specific policies. © 2021 Franco Angeli Edizioni. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The paper presents the results of two qualitative research studies, based on semi-structured interviews, carried out during the phase 1 of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the aim of analysing the effects of the reorganisation of the life trajectories, due to the confinement, on the mental health of working parents with preschool and school-age children. The lockdown is deemed as an extreme case of familialism, which exacerbates the lack of systemic parenting support, a characteristic of the Italian welfare state. While before the pandemic parents faced highperforming parenting and working models, homeworking and online teaching have made the management of their different roles even harder. This situation has negatively impacted on the mental health of the interviewees, while in parallel reducing parents', particularly mothers', sense of guilt related to the lack of time devoted to their children. Results suggest the need to consider parenting as a social issue, to be addressed with universalistic but also gender specific policies. © 2021 Franco Angeli Edizioni. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The paper illustrates the results of a qualitative study conducted in Italy during the lockdown, and aimed at investigating the consequences of remote work on work-life balance and gender inequalities in the division of paid and unpaid labor within heterosexual couples. Drawing from 20 online in-depth interviews with 10 heterosexual couples, the paper highlights the expansion of work over other domains, which worsened with remote work. Even if for some interviewed men it was an occasion to experience a more involved fatherhood, for the majority of them a rethinking of their commitment in paid work is inconceivable. Conversely, mothers are more keen on considering job requests as negotiable and perceive a pervasive interference of work on family life, while their husbands often claim that childcare activities may reduce their productivity. Remote work does not allow the redefinition of the working models and does not improve the work-life balance of interviewed couples, which is still considerably unbalanced towards job, with a limited space and time for individual activities. Moreover, remote work, even in this unprecedented extreme situation, does not modify gender normative roles within domestic domain and thus it reproduces and sometimes exacerbates gender inequalities with women trying to balance their double role and fathers expanding the time devoted to work. © 2020. All Rights Reserved.
ABSTRACT
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is 1) to investigate the effects on the crucial Industry 4.0 technological innovations that interact between the real and virtual worlds and that are applied in the sustainable supply chain process;2) to contribute to the identification of the opportunities, the challenges and the gaps that will support the new research study developments and 3) to analyze the impact of the Industry 4.0 technologies as facilitators of the sustainable supply chain performance in the midst of the Coronavirus (COVID-19). Design/methodology/approach: This research is performed through a bibliographic review in the electronic databases of the Emerald Insight, the Scopus and the Web of Science, considering the main scientific publications on the subject. Findings: The bibliographic search results in 526 articles, followed by two sequential filters for deleting the duplicate articles (resulting in 487 articles) and for selecting the most relevant articles (resulting in 150 articles). Practical implications: This article identifies the opportunities and the challenges focused on the emerging Industry 4.0 theme. The opportunities can contribute to the sustainable performance of the supply chains and their territories. The Industry 4.0 can also generate challenges like the social inequalities related to the position of the man in the labor market by replacing the human workforce with the machines. Therefore, the man-machine relationship in the Industry 4.0 era is analyzed as a gap in the literature. Therefore, as a way to fill this gap, the authors of this article suggest the exploration of the research focused on the Society 5.0. Also known as “super-smart society,” this recent theme appeared in Japan in April 2016. According to Fukuda (2020), in addition to the focus on the technological development, the Society 5.0 also aims at the quality of life and the social challenge resolutions. Originality/value: This article contributes to the analysis of the Industry 4.0 technologies as facilitators in the sustainable supply chain performance. It addresses the impacts of the Industry 4.0 technologies applied to the supply chains in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it analyzes the research gaps and limitations found in the literature. The result of this study can add value and stimulate new research studies related to the application of the Industry 4.0 technologies as facilitators in the supply chain sustainable performance. It can encourage the studies related to the COVID-19 impacts on the sustainable supply chains, and it can promote the research development on the relationship among the man, the machine and the labor in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.