This article presents an empirical research on the financialization processes of manufacturing companies in Italy. We focused on the district of Brescia, one of the strategic industrial areas at national level: by considering the entire population of joint-stock companies operating in the sector (currently about 6,000), we studied the diffusion of finance-oriented management logics between 2010 and 2018. We then measured the degree of penetration of financial shareholders within the companies of the district. Furthermore, we analyzed the intertemporal relationship between ownership structures and financialization processes. To this end, we estimated a series of longitudinal models, which allowed us to investigate the tendency of companies to (i) reduce the number of employees, (ii) increase short-term financial assets and (iii) increase the incidence of financial income with respect to sales. The results show that financial logics are gradually advancing, even in a context in which family ownership and medium-small company dimension have always prevailed. Our study highlights the importance of analyzing not only regulatory and macro-institutional frameworks, but especially the organizational fields, since financialization processes are often triggered by relationships between companies and surrounding actors.
In the throes of unfolding climate disaster, we are at a planetary crossroads of profound industrial transformation. This paper argues that tackling the problem of unsustainable growth is crucial in order to mitigate the worst effects of the ecological crisis, and that proposals for decarbonisation, degrowth, and just transitions should be connected. Decarbonisation has become an urgent priority in the global climate race to reach zero emissions by 2050. However, despite increasing net zero pledges from governments, cities, and corporations, the imperative for perpetual economic growth still remains integral to global capitalism. The degrowth movement challenges the dominant paradigm of economic growth and promotes non-marketized ways of living and working, but it remains outside of mainstream economic policies and has little resonance for deindustrialized and marginalized communities. Decarbonisation faces considerable barriers due to embedded interests in fossil fuel-dependent growth. This paper examines one of the key growth obstacles to transitioning away from fossil fuels: the multiscalar problem of petrochemical lock-in, related to growing global demand for carbon-intensive plastics consumption, the use of petrochemicals in green technologies, and regional and local economic dependencies. It focuses on the emblematic case of the petrochemical town of Grangemouth in Scotland, where there is government pressure to pursue growth-led decarbonisation, and local residents and workers have started to question their dependence on fossil fuels, amidst tremendous gaps between local social and economic deprivation and petrochemical industry profits. Rather than considering the need for just transitions only after the loss of industrial jobs, visions for just petrochemical transformations need to be more proactive, speaking to wider degrowth themes of well-being, community participation, and prosperity without extractive growth.
In recent decades, local governments in Western democracies have experienced a number of significant changes in the organizational arrangements to deliver public services. The article aims at systematizing the knowledge currently available on the organizational tools to manage local public services, providing a classification of delivery arrangements that goes beyond the public-private and hierarchy-market dichotomies, trying to unpack these categories so as to take into account the most recent mixed, or hybrid, solutions that are becoming widespread. Then, the article proposes an analytical framework anchored to the conceptual categories of instrumentality and legitimacy to understand how, and under what conditions, different types of factors combine in leading local governments to choose one organisational tool for service delivery over the others. That framework is applied to two Italian municipalities (Bergamo and Livorno) in order to understand how local decision-makers combine cost-efficiency considerations with concerns on the appropriateness of policy solutions in two distinct policy areas, i.e., garbage collection and early childhood services, which should supposedly drive towards different management choices
To address systemic organizational problems with individual solutions is one of the main weaknesses of organizational and institutional processes of change. Recent scandals related to the Italian High Judicial Council (HJC) have shed light on deviant practices in the selection process of court presidents. In particular, the career system was mostly based on membership in specific organized groups within the judiciary, rather than on the professional value of candidates. This article, adopting an organizational perspective, focuses on the governance of the judiciary and on the functioning of the HJC in the selection process of court presidents. Our explanatory case study, based on many interviews to judges, public prosecutors, and experts of the Italian judicial system, aims at highlighting the «concrete system of action» (Crozier and Friedberg 1977) behind the HJC selection process of court presidents. To this end, the article proceeds as follow: 1) firstly, it describes the gap between the formal and real organization in judicial career management; 2) then, it identifies «good reasons» and systemic nodes that could explain the emergence of alternative models of governance, and 3) finally, it discusses problems related to organizational learning. In particular, the article explains why the reaction of the judicial system to the scandal has been functional for maintaining the status quo, rather than promoting real processes of organizational learning and change.
This contribution explores two queries: a theoretical probe and an empirical inference. First, there is the acknowledgement that the growth model literature, being substantive in orientation, allows for a fruitful intellectual engagement with comparative welfare research. Especially welcome is the effort of bringing macroeconomic demand and the redistributive struggles behind macro-economic management back into the welfare-work equation. Surprisingly, however, the growth-regime literature is silent on the macroeconomic importance of family demography. For the argument's sake, an alternative conjecture is envisioned. On this score, the fiscal weight of standing welfare commitments conjures up a «productive constraint» for social investment welfare reform, potentially affecting growth strategies in path-shifting ways across a widening number of EU number welfare democracies, not merely the Nordics. Finally, from the perspective of 21st century welfare provision in a knowledge economy for an ageing society, I would reframe the nostalgic lament of low growth and secular stagnation in terms of the question of «how much» growth advanced capitalist democracies actually need to sustain inclusive welfare states? Two percent will do.
The current debate on globalisation has rarely regarded the combination between government spending and cross-border barriers as a response to the political complications due to international market exposure. Accordingly, this article wonders whether those policies in affluent democracies have maintained a long-term relationship over recent decades. Two hypotheses are contrasted. The first one assumes that these policies are combined to achieve a protective balance able to address the political cleavages deriving from globalization. The persistent necessity to renew that balance implies that government intervention and cross-border barriers move together in the long run. The second hypothesis assumes that, although both policies under scrutiny can be adopted to protect the groups most damaged by global markets, they do not move together. This is essentially because the decision-making of these two protective solutions are too distant to construct and restore any protective balance. In order to test the two hypotheses, a battery of cointegration tests was estimated on a panel dataset composed of 20 OECD countries observed over the 1970-2009 period. These tests clearly indicate that government spending and cross-border barriers are not cointegrated and do not track together over time.
Over the last fifteen years, and especially, following the economic crisis, the Southern European states have introduced a large number of reforms, on the one hand, to increase their competitiveness and encourage economic development and, on the other, to rationalize the «state's side» of the welfare state, so as to reduce their public spending, as required by the austerity policies. Justice is certainly one of the state sectors which has been deeply impacted by the reforms adopted in response to the influences exercised by European Council, Commissions's Directorate.general for competition. Troika, European Court of Human Rights, and European judicial networks. The paper which focuses on labour justice in Portugal, Spain and Italy, analyses, from a quantitative point of view, the effct of this long «season of reforms» both at the macro (national) and meso level (judicial districts). This choice is driven by the desire to compare three states characterized by a high internal and external independence of the judiciary - the so-called Southern European Model - and, at the same time, to highlight the impact of different levels of organizational autonomy enjoyed by the local territories. The fundamental hypothesis of this paper is that the reforms introduced in recent years - both on the supply and demand side of justice - have, on the whole, increased the efficiency of the judicial systems, but have not been able to reduce the inequalities, in terms of citizens' opportunities to access to justice. The article, which fill a gap in the literature on these topics, discusses the variables that may explain the persistence of the territorial differences and proposes to re-define the very way of conceiving and practicing the governance not only of the justice systems, but of all the public structures.
Young people in European countries are facing increased insecurity on the labour market, given the widespreadness of flexibilisation process, having lost the safety net provided by welfare state that has characterized the generation of their parents. The way this process is enacted varies across countries: in literature is well know how institutional filters such as labour market regulation and welfare system mediate the impact of flexibilisation, shaping the opportunities context for individual decisions. This leads to consequences not only in te present, but also in te medium-term, shaping the opportunities and the representations of young people. In our paper we intend to consider in the institutional setting also the financial system. We take into account the level of inclusion of the banking system, with the particular attention to the access to credit. We have focused the credit risk assessment models used by banks in a given system, and the way by which the type of contract is assessed in the different systems: while some countries are more inclusive, other are characterized by denying the credit access to atypical workers. The possibilities to fall into debts, and specifically the devices proposed by banks to do it, are a factor that shape not only the opportunities, the strategies and the risk of vulnerability of young people facting job and income insecurity, but also their representations of opportunities and risks about their future. In this paper, the individual strategies, as well as individual meanings, feelings and representations are analysed with semi-structured interviews to 50 young people facing job insecurity in Italy, a country characterized by a low credit access. The analysis comes from Except project - Horizon 2020 program, lasting three years (2015-2018), aimed to highlight the point of view of young people whoa are experiencing precariousness.
EnglishThe official launch of the Libra project in 2019, and the subsequent troubles experienced by the project, stimulated a vigorous debate, from different perspectives, on the pros and cons of a private currency with global ambitions. This paper describes the main characteristics of Libra and locates it in a partial but clear taxonomy of the increasingly crowded field of so-called «digital currencies». In the light of the regulatory problems that will arise, this paper also aims to assess the impact of this project on a crucial feature of the economic system that helped shape the institutional structure of modernity: the power to create money. italianoPremessa. - Ascesa e caduta sdi una moneta globale. - Una tassonomia delle monete digitali. - Il progetto Libra. - Una moneta privata globale. - Il ruolo di Libra nel sistema monetario internazionale. - Conclusioni.
The paper aims to study the current transformations in trade union action by focusing on the meat processing industry in Italy, a sector characterized by a high share of atypical and subcontracted labour. Based on qualitative data collected inside two plants, the paper addresses the processes of labour force segmentation, according to axes such as employment contracts, workers’ nationality, skin colour and gender. Secondly, the paper analyses trade unions’ strategies to cope with these labour force fragmentations. By looking at the nexus between labour process and forms of organization, the paper singles out three approaches. These approaches, underpinned by unions’ understanding of labour market restructuring, epitomize different strategies to organize and mobilize labour. In conclusion, we argue that these conflicting approaches, although oriented towards enlarging unions’ membership and representativeness, actually embed, and thus contribute to strengthen, labour force segmentations in workplaces.
Within both the «Varieties of Capitalism» and the «European Social Model» streams of literature, very few contributions have discussed the features and prospects of Southern European (SE) economies as a specific type of capitalism. Some early works maintained that such features as the high proportion of SMEs in the production system, a wide diffusion of the hidden economy, a strong role of the family in welfare provision, a trade union division along political-ideological lines, the distinctive role of the state, characterised a type of political economy, or model of capitalism, which was typical of Southern Europe. But more recent literature has shown that Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece started to diverge on most of these dimensions already in the mid-1990s and that they have continued to do so even during the Great Recession. One aspect that has made these SE economies look similar, however, was their inability to provide viable answers to the challenge of globalisation. The paper shows that Mediterranean countries lacked instead the institutional conditions to follow the high road of Nordic Europe or the low road of Central and Eastern Europe consistently: their political economies were too heavily regulated to successfully compete on price with Eastern Europe and with the developing economies, but, on the other hand, they were not equipped for a type of growth based on highly-skilled human capital, innovation and high social cohesion as in the Nordic model. We will show that this low capability to grow is related to a low degree of investment in R&D and highly skilled human capital, which hinders the ability to innovate and to follow a «high road» to competitiveness.
Money has always been plural and, complice the Cambrian explosion of technological solutions, is undergoing a full-fledged process of differentiation. Orthodox positions in economic theory simply do not question its neutrality, one of the key assumptions in the economic theory of money, while heterodox economics and sociology have a solid arsenal at their disposal to better cope with the reality about money revealed by the crisis, which is simply ignored. Stemming from the traditional triad of money’s functions (means of exchange, unit of account and store of value), we recall some highlights of orthodox, heterodox and sociological theories to display the rich tools available to study the most recent relevant case studies that we classify as complementary or crypto currencies along with new monetary innovations so far known as Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and Corporate Digital Currency (CDC). The empirical variety testifies that money is not a neutral veil over economic processes, but it is a political and social construction serving a spectrum of purposes through specific monetary architectures. Different schemes allow for better or worse forms of money that reveal the true nature of money as a social relation between a creditor and a debtor, deep-rooted in an underlying community. Whether complementary or crypto, publicly or privately digital, the discussed new forms of money bear witness of a lively process of differentiation that reopens a long-lived debate about the future of money.
