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Italian animal advocacy is extremely divided and fragmented: in this article, we focus on its political dimension. Based upon prior studies, we expected the Italian animal advocacy archipelago to be clustered into three strata: old welfare, new welfare, and animal rights. Quantification of our survey (704 respondents throughout Italy) instead indicated a dichotomy between the animal rights area and both types of welfarists, particularly in terms of ethical values and localization on a progressive/conservative political axis. However, when we used qualitative interviews to probe the views of Italian animal advocates in greater depth, we detected a greater fragmentation and identified four ideal types of activism, defined as follows: political animalism, anarchist animalism, anti-political animalism, and moderate animalism. These ideal types are separated primarily along two dimensions: relationship with neo-liberal societal and economic structure, and degree of intersectional approach with other social movements. In the conclusions, we also offer general reflections on the coexistence of lobbying and protest, the phenomenon on NGOization, and the influence of individual activism and frame personalization on contemporary social movements.

Since 2011 youth movements have staged large protests in African countries for presidential term limits. These have been discussed as struggles against de-democratization. Looking at the movements Y'en a marre in Senegal and Balai citoyen in Burkina Faso we argue that these protests were just as much triggered by socio-economic grievances linked to a corrupt patronage system. Indeed, corruption has been a major issue for both campaigns. We ask how the movement leaders linked the fight against corruption with their struggle against third term amendments in a way that sparked mass mobilization. We use the framing approach as our theoretical framework and show that a framing based on the concept of citizenship enabled both movements to link the issue of corruption to the issue of presidential term amendments and at the same time create a sense of agency in the constituency. This explains at least partly why both Y'en a marre and Balai Citoyen succeeded in their mobilizing efforts.

In the educational research, most of studies considered the quality of students life, focusing on several variables (Soresi et al., 2012; Tomyn and Cummins, 2011). Despite of it, there isn't evidence about the adaptability to future career as a mediator between integration at school and students satisfaction. This paper contributes to literature in two ways: first it explores the role of career adaptability as a mediator, and this represents an innovative topic because the concept and the operationalization of the career adaptability are recently developed, secondly, it can enhance the knowledge about educational research on career adaptability. This knowledge can be used by teachers and practitioners to improve promotion and prevention focus as useful strategies in scholar retention. The aim of the study is to explore the mediating role of Career adaptability on the relationship between scholar and social integration and students satisfaction, which is considered a positive outcome related to learning achievement, scholar performance and educational progress. Participants were 407 students from public high schools in the South of Italy. Findings evidenced that Career Adaptability mediated the relationship between the social integration but not scholar integration,and students overall satisfaction. Implications for educational practice and limitations of the study are discussed.

The problem of inter-industry comparison of financial ratios of publicly traded Japanese and Chinese firms is addressed. This problem is very important because Japan and China have respectively the world's second and third largest economy, the trade volume between them is very large and many investors are searching for Japanese and Chinese investment opportunities. The most familiar methods for comparing financial ratios are MANOVA and MDA. When used for analyzing financial data, these methods have many shortcomings. We use an alternative method that does not require any stringent assumptions and that is particularly suitable for financial data because it is very robust against skewness and heavy tailness, takes into account the possible difference in variability as well as the dependence among the financial ratios. Recent data about the most familiar valuation ratios have been analyzed. It is found that industry sectors of Japanese firms are generally more different than those of Chinese firms. In general, with few exceptions, the difference between industry sectors is high. The most different financial ratio and the lest different one are respectively the price to sale ratio and the price to earnings ratio for both Chinese and Japanese firms.