Haute couture or pret-a-porter: Creating and diffusing management practices through the popular press

Management fads are increasingly a hot topic within Organization Theory. Recent articles have described the production process of fads, the role of «ideological» waves in explaining their emergence, and the development of management rhetoric supporting the fads. Despite this growing interest, management fads are seen as an outcome of the actions of Universities, business schools, and consulting firms in producing formal management knowledge; the role of the popular press, meanwhile, remains largely unexplored. Our paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the role of the popular press in producing and legitimating management fads. We argue that the popular press is a primary factor in diffusing and legitimating management fads. The popular press also represents a new laboratory for the construction of management practices. Being deeply rooted in the social context, magazines and newspapers link management practices with social acceptance, coupling management and society at large. We use both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to analyze the data. The data set consists of a collection of articles on Human Resource Management published during the last decade in leading newspapers and magazines in Italy. We suggest that the dynamics of the diffusion and popularization of management practices in Italy over the last decade represents a fair example of the processes that have taken place throughout the Western world.popular press; diffusing management practices;

Advanced composite airframe program: Today's technology

The Advanced Composite Airframe Program (ACAP) was undertaken to demonstrate the advantages of the application of advanced composite materials and structural design concepts to the airframe structure on helicopters designed to stringent military requirements. The primary goals of the program were the reduction of airframe production costs and airframe weight by 17 and 22 percent respectively. The ACAP effort consisted of a preliminary design phase, detail design, and design support testing, full-scale fabrication, laboratory testing, and a ground/flight test demonstration. Since the completion of the flight test demonstration programs follow-on efforts were initiated to more fully evaluate a variety of military characteristics of the composite airframe structures developed under the original ACAP advanced development contracts. An overview of the ACAP program is provided and some of the design features, design support testing, manufacturing approaches, and the results of the flight test evaluation, as well as, an overview of Militarization Test and Evaluation efforts are described

Majorana Quasi-Particles Protected by Z2\mathbb{Z}_2 Angular Momentum Conservation

We show how angular momentum conservation can stabilise a symmetry-protected quasi-topological phase of matter supporting Majorana quasi-particles as edge modes in one-dimensional cold atom gases. We investigate a number-conserving four-species Hubbard model in the presence of spin-orbit coupling. The latter reduces the global spin symmetry to an angular momentum parity symmetry, which provides an extremely robust protection mechanism that does not rely on any coupling to additional reservoirs. The emergence of Majorana edge modes is elucidated using field theory techniques, and corroborated by density-matrix-renormalization-group simulations. Our results pave the way toward the observation of Majorana edge modes with alkaline-earth-like fermions in optical lattices, where all basic ingredients for our recipe - spin-orbit coupling and strong inter-orbital interactions - have been experimentally realized over the last two years.Comment: 12 pages (6 + 6 supplementary material

The phenomenon of the gender gap among gifted students: the situation in Italy based on analysis of results in mathematics competitions

This paper deals with the gender gap phenomenon as displayed by Italian students participating in mathematical competitions-gifted students. In particular, the results obtained by the entire student population participating in district competitions from 2017 to 2020 were analysed. The combined analysis of the competition results and of the final questionnaire allowed us to highlight and deepen possible causes of the gender gap. It has been observed that girls underestimate themselves, sometimes giving up participating in competitions. Particularly, during the upper secondary school years, increasingly fewer girls choose to attend mathematical competitions. Analysing the results, although the percentage of correct answers between the two genders is fairly similar, the rate of girls who prefer not to answer to avoid mistakes is higher than that of boys

Governo del territorio e pianificazione spaziale

Per insediarsi e convivere stabilmente le società umane organizzano e controllano lo spazio. Devono cioè distribuire le attività e gli edifici che le accolgono, distinguere i luoghi destinati alle attività private da quelli destinati alle attività comuni, consentire gli spostamenti, regolamentare la costruzione di edifici e infrastrutture. Da sempre lo strumento usato per l'organizzazione e il controllo dello spazio è il piano. La pianificazione spaziale è dunque il sapere tecnico che elabora gli strumenti e le modalità di configurazione dello spazio: modelli insediativi, piani, parametri e regole d'uso del suolo, progetti. Il governo del territorio - espressione che dal 2001 ha sostituito il termine "urbanistica" nella Costituzione italiana - è il processo decisionale col quale il potere politico assegna i diritti d'uso e di trasformazione del suolo, servendosi della pianificazione spaziale. In un tempo d'incertezza e, per molti aspetti, di crisi della cultura della pianificazione spaziale, accademica e professionale, questo manuale mette in evidenza le ragioni e le funzioni sociali, economiche e istituzionali dei piani e dei sistemi di governo del territorio, e ne descrive criticamente caratteri e contenuti attraverso l'esame di casi italiani e stranieri, antichi e recenti. Il manuale è articolato in quattro parti. Con un termine tradizionale, le prime due potrebbero definirsi "fondamenti" perché trattano le questioni su cui si fondano il governo del territorio e la pianificazione spaziale. La terza parte affronta i temi e i metodi tecnici della pianificazione spaziale; la quarta le forme istituzionali e le pratiche di governo del territorio a diverse scal

Wilson Fermions and Axion Electrodynamics in Optical Lattices

The formulation of massless relativistic fermions in lattice gauge theories is hampered by the fundamental problem of species doubling, namely, the rise of spurious fermions modifying the underlying physics. A suitable tailoring of the fermion masses prevents such abundance of species, and leads to the so-called Wilson fermions. Here we show that ultracold atoms provide us with the first controllable realization of these paradigmatic fermions, thus generating a quantum simulator of fermionic lattice gauge theories. We describe a novel scheme that exploits laser-assisted tunneling in a cubic optical superlattice to design the Wilson fermion masses. The high versatility of this proposal allows us to explore a variety of interesting phases in three-dimensional topological insulators, and to test the remarkable predictions of axion electrodynamics.Comment: RevTex4 file, color figures, slightly longer than the published versio

Emerging Bosons with Three-Body Interactions from Spin-1 Atoms in Optical Lattices

We study two many-body systems of bosons interacting via an infinite three-body contact repulsion in a lattice: a pairs quasi-condensate induced by correlated hopping and the discrete version of the Pfaffian wavefunction. We propose to experimentally realise systems characterized by such interaction by means of a proper spin-1 lattice Hamiltonian: spin degrees of freedom are locally mapped into occupation numbers of emerging bosons, in a fashion similar to spin-1/2 and hardcore bosons. Such a system can be realized with ultracold spin-1 atoms in a Mott Insulator with filling-factor one. The high versatility of these setups allows us to engineer spin-hopping operators breaking the SU(2) symmetry, as needed to approximate interesting bosonic Hamiltonians with three-body hardcore constraint. For this purpose we combine bichromatic spin-independent superlattices and Raman transitions to induce a different hopping rate for each spin orientation. Finally, we illustrate how our setup could be used to experimentally realize the first setup, i.e. the transition to a pairs quasi-condensed phase of the emerging bosons. We also report on a route towards the realization of a discrete bosonic Pfaffian wavefunction and list some open problems to reach this goal.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figure

Entropy-driven enhanced self-diffusion in confined reentrant supernematics

We present a molecular dynamics study of reentrant nematic phases using the Gay-Berne-Kihara model of a liquid crystal in nanoconfinement. At densities above those characteristic of smectic A phases, reentrant nematic phases form that are characterized by a large value of the nematic order parameter $S\simeq1$. Along the nematic director these "supernematic" phases exhibit a remarkably high self-diffusivity which exceeds that for ordinary, lower-density nematic phases by an order of magnitude. Enhancement of self-diffusivity is attributed to a decrease of rotational configurational entropy in confinement. Recent developments in the pulsed field gradient NMR technique are shown to provide favorable conditions for an experimental confirmation of our simulations.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure