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Italy his approach, social movements are conceived as networks of relationships that connect informally a multiplicity of individuals and organizations, which share a distinctive collective identity and interact around public conictual issues. But, once more, even in the 1990s the most famous work about social networks in Italy is the study conducted by the American sociologist Robert Putnam. In constructing his theory of social capital, this well-known scholar has devoted a great deal of attention to Italian institutions and the daily function of social networks. According to his assumptions, the performances of local institutional actors are strongly affected by the different degrees of civicness, intended as the civic involvement of persons, associations, and institutions in terms of diffusion of trust, solidarity, and tolerance. Putnam describes this as the main reason for the persisting gap between southern and northern Italy in terms of development. In the early 2000s, a growing attention to the sociology of science and technology (STS) has interested Italian sociology. In this context, Federico Neresini has used actor network theory (ANT) to study the forms of public negotiation of science, in some case studies as the debate about human cloning in Italian mass media discourse. Finally, in the same period, Internet social networks have received strong public attention. In the last three years, the penetration of Web social networks in the daily life of Italians has been so rapid that in 2010, Italy was the fourth nation in the world in terms of the share of time (six hours per month) spent on membercommunity Websites. The main result of the research, conducted by SWG Institute on a sample of Italian Web users, is that social networks have replaced television in its function of background noise media: 75 percent of respondents declare to be always connected to social networks, leaving them in the background of their activities. In particular, Facebook has substantially reduced the audience of newspapers and television and modied the forms of political participation of Italian people: 54.6 percent of Italian users devote a signicant part of his or her political involvement to the political groups hosted by the social network, while 42 percent substitute Facebook activities to the time usually spent in reading books and newspapers.
Vincenzo Romania University of Padova

Italy
In Italy, social networks analysis (SNA) has developed as a proper methodological and theoretical approach, but not before the 1980s. However, studies on social networks began in the 1950s. Italian social research has dealt with several main topics in this eldwork: community ties, inequalities, civicness, mobilization, and online social networks. Probably the most famous work on social networks in Italy remains the research about the amoral familism in southern Italy, published by the American sociologist Edward C. Baneld in 1958. Studying a little village, Baneld explained the backwardness of the community through the inability of villagers to act together for a common good, due to their strong intrafamiliar ties. The work has provoked strong reaction in the Italian scientic sphere, and many scholars have viewed Banelds work as prejudicial. During the 1970s and 1980s, an important part of social network studies has focused on Italian internal and external migrations. Applying different data collection techniques in her 1981 study of a little community of immigrants from Calabria to northern Italy, Fortunata Piselli demonstrated how cultural change and emigration have not weakened but strengthened the bondages between emigrants and stayers, enforcing the social cohesion of the community. The same work of Piselli is a rst example of a consolidated tendency of Italian sociology to the qualitative study of social networks. From the 1990s, applying and developing the proper quantitative and qualitative techniques of SNA, Italian researchers have focused mainly on the role of networks in producing and reproducing social inequalities and on the forms of mobilization of social movements. In particular, Ferruccio Gambino, Enzo Mingione, and Flavia Pristinger in the early 2000s studied the role of social networks in the invisible reproduction of elites in northeastern Italy. In a similar way, Maria Bianco has applied SNA to the study of relational dimensions of social stratication and mobility among classes in her mid-1990s research, focusing on the dynamics of class closure. In the 1990s, Antonio Mutti dealt with the dimension of neighborhood in the urban space, while Emanuela Abbatecola inquired about the role of relational networks in the reproduction of gender inequalities. In the same period, Mario Diani conducted an important research activity about Italian ecological movements, considering them as social networks. After

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More than 150,000 jubilant fans ocked to Italys Circus Maximus, once the scene of Roman chariot races, to watch the 2006 FIFA soccer nals on giant screens. Italy won its fourth World Cup, defeating its longtime rival France 53 in Berlin, Germany, on July 9.

See Also: Economic Networks; Facebook; Intercultural Networks; Social Capital. Further Readings Abbatecola, Emanuela. The Networks of Relationships in the Reproduction of Inequalities and Gender Differences. In Inequalities and Differences, edited by Gian P. Cella. Milan, Italy: Guerini and Associates, 1999. Baneld, Edward C. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. New York: Free Press, 1958. Bianco, Maria L. Classes and Social Networks. Resources and Strategies of the Actors in the Reproduction of Inequality. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino, 1996. Bianco, Maria L. and Eve Micheal. The Two Faces of the Capital. Sociologia del Lavoro, v.73 (1991). CENSIS. Eighth Report Censis/UCSI Communication (2009). http://www.censis.it/277/372/6697/6935/6956/69 57/content (Accessed February 2010). Chiesi, Antonio M. The Network Analysis. Milan, Italy: Franco Angeli, 1999.

Della Porta, Donatella and Diani Mario. Social Movements. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Diani, Mario. The Concept of Social Movement. Sociological Review, v.40 (1992). Diani, Mario. Green Networks: A Structural Analysis of the Italian Environmental Movement. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. Gambino, Ferruccio, Enzo Mingione, and Flavia Pristinger. Distances and Links. Rome: Carocci, 2003. Mutti, Antonio. The Good Neighbor. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino, 1992. Neresini, Federico. Public Communication of Science and Risk: The Case of Mad Cow Disease. In Science Negotiated, edited by Guizzardi Gustavo. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino, 2002. Piselli, Fortunata. Kinship and Migration: Change and Continuity in a Community. Torino, Italy: Einaudi, 1981. Putnam, Robert D. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.