The First World War and the social policies supporting its victims played an essential role in the development of the Italian welfare state, its spectrum of benefits, and its organization. The relief programs for millions of soldiers and their families as well as disabled veterans and survivors led to a new dimension of state intervention in the field of social policy. The influence these programs have had on the successive reforms of the post-war period is clearly visible. An obvious example are the measures to increase the employment of disabled veterans, which were precursors of the 1919 compulsory insurance against unemployment and represented the first concrete state intervention in the labor market, meant to even out some of its flaws and help particularly disadvantaged groups of employees. Another wartime legislation that inspired post-war measures was the law supporting the Great War’s widows and orphans. It paved the way for the first and most important social law of the Italian fascist regime of the 1920s: the Law on Protection of Mothers and Children. Additionally, the modernization of relief services during the war diminished the importance of traditional charitable and confessional assistance and resulted at the same time in a nationalization of social policy. This in turn brought about the bureaucratization and technocratization of welfare services throughout state departments and public agencies. The nexus between warfare and welfare, a relationship which can be identified in several belligerent countries after the Great War, was particularly evident in Italy. During the war, a pronounced process of “compensatory state building” gripped the country, with the consolidation of new social rights guaranteed by the state going hand in hand with the limitation of several political and civil rights. This paper will, based on these considerations, analyze the connections and continuities of Italy’s social legislation during the war and post-war period. It will include modernization factors and limits and contradictory developments of the Italian welfare state between World War I, the Civil War, and the rise of fascism.

Financial technology or fintech initiatives are gaining increasing global attention as instruments for financial inclusion and economic and social development. Among such initiatives, mobile-phone-enabled money transfer systems, or “mobile money”, have been particularly acclaimed for facilitating access to financial services and creating opportunities for the so-called “unbanked poor”. One of the first and most-discussed mobile money projects to date is M-Pesa in Kenya, a digital payment system which is now used by over 70 per cent of the Kenyan population across a variety of sectors including finance, commerce, education, health, and social welfare. M-Pesa is premised on a narrative of social entrepreneurship and has increasingly embraced the idea of philanthrocapitalism, promoting the logic that digital financial inclusion can simultaneously address social problems and produce profit. This paper brings together socio-legal enquiry and international political economy analysis to illustrate the institutional arrangements underpinning the development of M-Pesa and examine some of the projects built on its infrastructure. It argues that social entrepreneurship promotes a logic of opportunity rather than a politics of redistribution, favouring mobile money providers and the institutions involved in the mobile money social business over improving the lives of the intended beneficiaries, namely the unbanked poor.

The crisis of statehood in many countries has resulted in the emergence of non-recognized states that have become an intrinsic feature of the world geopolitical order. Using the concept of bordering, we study a specific type of border that was shaped in the course of state-building processes and conflicts with parent states. Some “de-facto borders” are not stable;in addition, non-recognized states often do not control all their declared territory. Looking in detail at the situation in six non-recognized republics in the post-Soviet space, we show the asymmetry of their borders with the parent state and with the external patron. Comparing the basic socio-economic indicators by regions, we conclude that non-recog-nized states still lag far behind both their parent and their patron state. Citi-zens of non-recognized republics regularly visit border areas of the patron and parent states and spend a considerable part of their income there. This can contribute to the normalization of relations between adversaries, but at the same time can perpetuate the separation between them. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly increased the barrier functions of the borders with parent states. © 2021, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. All rights reserved.

Discourse surrounding healthcare constructs physical activity to be the moral obligation of individuals for preventing illness. Commercial fitness centers are the principle places for doing physical exercise and represent a commercial and relatively standardized socio-material setting aimed at helping to create a fit and healthy body. Despite their success, fitness centers in Germany have a customer turnover rate of 25 % and often appear unable to retain their members over the long term. Why do people who were once motivated to become a member of a fitness center turn their back on it? We argue that these disengagements can be explained to a considerable extent by the non-fulfillment of latent personal expectations. The discourse on health creates manifest normative expectations which actors on the fitness market respond to by providing functional environments (supply) and by developing individual physical exercise projects (demand). Yet, the establishment of personal routines, which is an integral element of the marketized good in question, could fail in the functional setting of a fitness center – a critical moment that brings to light personal latent expectations that are usually difficult to verbalize. This paper focuses on the justification of engagement in, and disengagement from, physical activity by analyzing qualitative interviews with (former) members of fitness centers. Regimes of engagement and orders of worth are two concepts from the sociology of conventions which enable us to disentangle typical tensions in this specific socio-material setting. Our analysis provides access to user experiences that are only rarely explicitly verbalized as a critique of commercial market providers. It also allows us to reflect upon preventive health policies aimed at the promotion of physical activities.

The introduction of digital technology has sparked new debates about the value of community health workers in low-and-middle-income countries. This debate offers important insights into the conventions that are relevant in global public health. Community health workers, a workforce that was already celebrated during the 1970s Primary Health Care movement, are having a remarkable revival in recent years, and myriad actors seek to boost their impact through mobile devices. Our content analysis of the public health literature evaluating this impact reveals the centrality of attempts at reconciling equity and cost effectiveness concerns, and thus considerable normative tensions. Additionally, we find that discussions about “domestic” values such as privacy and gender roles come with a paternalistic undertone, calling for feminist and postcolonial engagement with the digitalization of community health work.

Due to the Corona pandemic, it was necessary to cancel the conference Positionality Reloaded. Dimensions of Reflexivity in the Relationship of Science and Society at short notice. At the time, in May 2020, it was quite uncertain how far-reaching the consequences of the pandemic would be. This also affected the panel discussion that we had planned in order to collect practical and application-oriented perspectives on transdisciplinarity in academics. As restrictions of traveling and gatherings on social events across the globe intensified, digital conferences gradually developed into an effective format for academic exchange. In this respect, we were thrilled when we were able to save the two-hour panel discussion Crossing Borders, Creating Together: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production on 15 June 2020 using a live video broadcast. The main questions from the conference served as a guide: To what extent do academic publications and knowledge production rely on reflexivity and self-reflection? What consequences does this have for the selfpositioning of researchers in the tense relationship between academia and society? The question of how meaningful academic activities are in society and for society correlates directly with the question of the relevance of transdisciplinary research, that is occasionally addressed as a possibility, a demand, a request, or even a necessity. While the other contributions in this collection primarily discuss these questions from a theoretical standpoint, the panel discussion was conceived as an empirical counterpart. The objective was to explore and discuss the opportunities and challenges that arise in transdisciplinary research practice from different functional perspectives: such as political and mobility research, medicine, or architecture and urban planning. For this purpose, we invited four participants, whom we will introduce below.

This article presents the current datafication processes in the field of health as a new form of health coordination. Methodologically, the conceptual foundation of the article is embedded in neopragmatist thinking and mainly informed by the "economics of convention" (EC). At the beginning, it is made clear that the datafication processes in the health system and in people's everyday lives are primarily a future vision that has high hopes for improving and controlling health. The aim of the article is to analyze the current effects of these mobilization processes and to show that with datafication processes, a new coordination mode of a digital daily health is introduced. To this end, the new form of digital daily health is being introduced. For this purpose, its characteristics are described and its relevance for coordination processes is shown. After that, the intersection between the new form of digital daily health and individual health will be analyzed. Finally, the consequences of this new health coordination form will be shown on an individual level as well as on the level of political economy of health.