Behavioural patterns and geographical location of voluntary organizations in Italy (265)

Theme Track: Environment and Sustainability - Programs and Strategies

Authors:
Lori, Massimo ; Moreschi, Barbara

In a former paper an association between geographical location and structural forms of the Italian voluntary organizations was tested and two patterns of development were found by a cluster analysis. The first pattern was the Northern pattern. It implied, for the organizations settled in the regions following this pattern, similar starting condition in relation either to the high number of organizations and of volunteers or to the maturity of the organizations. Moreover they showed similar behaviour regarding the relative high degree of specialization. The second pattern was the Southern pattern that showed characteristics opposite to the Northern pattern. The organizations settled in the regions following the Southern pattern, started working in places where organizations were few and rather young and volunteers were few as well. Moreover they often operated diversifying their activities both in the field of activity and in the supply of social services. As a result, the hypothesised association between geographical location and structural forms of the organizations worked quite well, even if there were some problems for some eccentric regions. Within this context and to evaluate the goodness of this result, a deeper analysis is developed in this paper. First of all the data is updated by those referring to 1999 (instead of 1997) and the population is now composed by 15,000 organizations. Secondly, the technical constraint imposed by considering a little number of objects (the 20 Italian regions) in the data matrix has been removed by taking into account the Italian provinces (103): more than two patterns of behaviour are found and other kind of geographical similarities are shown. Thirdly, some other indicators concerning social and economic factors are introduced in the analysis. This is done in order to provide a link between empirical findings and theoretical frameworks able to give some hints for a more comprehensive understanding of the patterns envisaged.

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