Università Roma Tre

Large, highly integrated companies are generally seen as the economic institutions which best represent the capitalist system: for this reason the main focus of the course will be to analyse the structure of these companies in different time periods. It is, nonetheless, worth remembering that the numerous economic structures and competitive conditions that have arisen over time in the West have led to the appearance of a variety of different types of company. With this in mind, the first part of the course will look at various general themes within economic history from the first industrial revolution to the end of the last century, in order to provide a general frame of reference within which to place the evolutionary process of modern industrial companies. The second part of the course will include a detailed investigation of twentieth century companies, with the aim of tracing a comparative profile of the forms of economic development that characterised Western capitalism in different time periods; finally, we will use the example of specific companies to further understand the situation in Italy, a country which has been seen as representing the different ways of understanding and doing business within the context of economic development in the twentieth century. This will allow us to reflect upon current theories of Italy’s ‘decline’, and upon the country’s future prospects.
The following themes will be covered during the course:
• Modern economic development and the paradigm of the ‘industrial revolutions’
• Businesses and the evolution of the socio-cultural environment: contexts and institutions
• The evolution in scale and structure of businesses: family companies, managerial companies and company groups.
• Company management and governance: organisation, work and advances in techniques.
• The rise and fall of public companies.
• Industrial concentration and corporate groups in twentieth century Italy.
• Business and government in Italy, from the birth of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) to privatisation policies.
• The scale of companies: big businesses v small and medium companies.
• Technological innovation and work in Italian industries during the last decades of the twentieth century.
• The fourth capitalism: scale and distribution; physiognomy; internationalisation; organisational structures

Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Franco Amatori, and Takashi Hikino (editors), Big Business and the Wealth of Nations, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, Massachussets, 1997.

Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin (editors), The Oxford Handbook of Business History, New York, Oxford U.P., 2008.