Andrea Pitasi

A portrait of Italian visual sociology

Part one is a brief history of Italian Visual Sociology. Andrea Pitasi sketches his main hypothesis: as a complex middle range theory, visual sociology might become a specific discipline. The theoretical concepts and proposals to create it are summarized in the conclusion. In part two, Patrizia Faccioli deals with the Italian sociological mainstreams conception of visual sociology. From this perspective, visual sociology is considered a methodology, which the author affirms as an incomplete point of view. On the basis of her experience of research, she assumes that visual sociology may also be a paradigm which she sketches as a phenomenological paradigm of visual knowledge

Hypercitizenship and the Management of Genetic Diversity: Sociology of Law and the Key Systemic Bifurcation between the Ring Singularity and the Neofeudal Age.

This article is essentially theoretical and is focused on the allocative function of the legal systems to attract/reject different capitals according to their procedures to shape norms and laws. This function of the legal systems is pivotal in our times as humankind is facing a systemic and evolutionary bifurcation between the heideggerian Gegnet of a strategic, high speed convergence (i.e., Singularity) among robotics, informatics, nanotechnologies, and genetics (RINGs)—which will reshape human life in terms of its life quality styles and standards especially regarding health and environment matters, and the so called Neofeudal Scenario (NS) supported by those for whom the Industrial Model failed and the only way to save humankind and its environment would be a kind return to a Medieval life style based on a slow pace of life and austerity. This article provides an overview of the most important and recent international references regarding the two alternatives of bifurcation and describes a potential paradigm shift inside the systemic approach to reframe the conceptual map of global change through a systemic epistemology of the sociology of law.

The communication strategies of the globalized individual

This paper develops and summarizes a six year (1993–1999) theoretical research into the communication strategies of the globalized individual. These strategies are described through a macro‐micro linked approach. This approach takes root in the socio‐cultural changes of the European scenario from the end of the 19th Century (decline and fall of the Empires) up until present day (the age of globalization). The macro interpretation key of the history of European identity emerges from a three‐step evolution beginning with propaganda, passing through persuasion and then approaching facilitation as macro communication style and strategy whose target is the globalized and multimedia individual. But how does this globalized and multimedia individual perceive and construct his/her meaning from the overwhelming amount of information (which is essentially noise for him/her)? My answer is that the age of facilitation (in which it is very easy to find information but hard to find some that is meaningful) can be strategically useful for those individuals whose approach to sensemaking takes root in four crucial features: constructivism, hedonism, relativism and pragmatism, all of which compose the CHRP pattern for sensemaking. CHRP states that each individual constructs and reconstructs his/her sense and meaning from the media world according to the self‐referential codes of his/her evolutionary conscience.

Communicating Intangible Value. The Case of Contemporary Art

The aim of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon of dematerialization of art, which is increasingly evident. This phenomenon of increasing abstraction is emerging in complex evolutionary systems of communication in multiple forms (from the presumed real economy to finance, from human resources management to the expansion of intellectual capital formalized in trademarks, patents, licenses, copyrights, etc.,). The abstraction of contemporary art reflects a complex phenomenon that can be defined as hypercitizenship in the sense that the levels of observational and operational expertise required for a system to evolve autopoietically are increasingly sophisticated in terms of the four characteristics featuring hypercitizenship: cosmopolitanism, entrepreneurship, scientificity and social autonomy, as compared to the specifics of the art system.

A facilitative agenda setting for the evolutionary strategies of the XXI century

What kind of communication management strategies are more adequate in the age of risk, chaos, complexity and unpredictable chancemaking? Revising and systemizing the fundamental six concepts of communication and the main strategies of the past, propaganda and persuasion, and of the present, as facilitative campaigns, the paper offers an attempt to discuss the role of chancemaking, risk, nonlinear thinking, magic and creative chaos (rhizome) as a chance to develop what Ervin Laszlo defines the evolutionary strategy for the 21st century. This research project is systematically illustrated in a paradigm of strategic communication which describes the main features of the propaganda campaigns, of the persuasion campaigns and the facilitative agenda settings and of the social, cultural, economic, psychological and historical scenarios in which they emerged. Moreover this work sketches out—as the third variant—the facilitative communication management as the strategically most adequate for the evolutionary strat...