The Political Economy of Small-Scale Industrialization in Twentieth-Century Italy

EVEN though social scientists began to discuss the wonders and pitfalls of Italy’s small-scale capitalism only in the late 1970s, the development of specialized clusters of firms constituted one of the basic traits of the country’s heterogeneous economic “miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s, and some of these industrial and artisanal experiences dated back decades and occasionally even centuries. By the 1970s Italy’s industrial sector exhibited a distinctive pattern of economic dispersion and spatial concentration. The average Italian manufacturing firm was much smaller than its French or German counterparts, but at the same time it was more likely to be a node in a local network in which actors specialized in different stages of the production and commercialization processes of specific items that were exported throughout the world. Variably called industrial districts, clusters, or area systems, these localized networks not only proved an extremely vital component of Italy’s economy but also presented scholars with the opportunity to reconsider a variety of important theoretical questions. The theoretical relevance of the industrial districts of northern Italy (but also of other parts of the world) stems primarily from the challenges they pose to two long-cherished assumptions about the direction and nature of modern capitalism. First, the persisting success of small-scale firms belies the predictions of a variety of intellectual traditions, which viewed the large integrated corporation as the inevitable outcome of economic evolution. Second, the difficulty of disentangling economic action from other kinds of pursuits that is characteristic of Italy’s small-scale capitalism questions the postulated emergence of an economic sphere irreducible to other forms of action. Of the interpretative traditions that have argued for the ultimate superiority of large-scale enterprise in modern capitalism, the most influential is associated with Alfred Chandler and Oliver Williamson. Chandler viewed the emergence of the large multidivisional corporation © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.