Scaling violations beyond the leading order

The authors are concerned with the explicit construction of a method which generalizes beyond leading order the simple probabilistic interpretation of leading scaling violations. The results obtained in this language allow to predict the evolution with the variation of external invariants not only of 'space-like' processes, where the off- shell partons starting the hard interaction have space-like four momenta, like in the case of deep inelastic scattering or Drell-Yan, but also of 'time-like' processes, like the one-particle inclusive e /sup +/e/sup -/ annihilation, where the partons acting in the fragmentation functions have 'time-like' off-shell invariant masses. (9 refs).