The ability to 'network' between businesses and local institutions has been the subject of numerous studies and has fueled a line of multidisciplinary research which has made it possible to highlight the complexity of local systems and the interconnection between culture, economy and society. On the political-institutional side, the image of a 'virtuous' territory has been built which, through these links, strengthens its ability to create 'value' both by successfully adapting to the new complexities brought about by the neoliberal system and by exploiting the opportunities it offers. In fact, economic indicators overall show an increase in production after a succession of repeated pre- and post-pandemic crises. However, these same networks prove inadequate to effectively counter the increase in small entrepreneurs in economic difficulty. Starting from my recent field experience in Brianza, this article aims to illustrate some situations that have required the intervention of social services, but also the difficulty of these in developing intervention projects on people/families atypical with respect to social groups normally recipients of aid. Their atypicality lies in the fact that normative categories such as 'unemployed', 'poor', 'marginalized' cannot be uncritically reproduced in their regard, through which services normally develop intervention practices and ways of defining problems, before 'identification/activation of specific social networks in the area. Affected by the crisis and excluded from the benefits of the economic recovery, these subjects, central figures of the neoliberal society project, end up turning to social services when the legislative provisions to protect the business activity prove inadequate and when the family economic situation is now compromised.
Based on ethnographic research conducted between October 2021 and December 2022 on Chinese construction projects in Ghana, this paper explores workplaces and employment dynamics within Chinese state-owned construction companies in Africa. Through the ethnographic description of daily life at Chinese construction sites in Ghana, the article analyses the power relations, conflicts, and strategies of resistance existing in these working and living spaces. In particular, the paper illustrates the global and local processes and dynamics which involve Chinese stateowned construction companies operating in Ghana and explores the hierarchical power and intercultural relations that occur in these contexts. The article argues that while the global and local dynamics within which (also) Chinese construction companies operate constitute one of the reasons why Chinese companies are often represented in negative terms – by the media, the local communities, and the workers employed by them – in order to understand why they are often defined in Ghana as elsewhere as ‘the worst’ it is necessary to reflect on the peculiar intercultural hierarchical relationships that take place within them. In this regard, the long-term ethnographic research conducted at Chinese construction sites in Ghana provides a privileged point of view and angle of observation to conduct in-depth studies on these contexts and relationships.
The study analyses the construction of entrepreneurship among craft brewers, focusing on the interconnections between passion, learning, and professional trajectories in the craft economy. It aims to investigate how individuals develop brewing skills, delving into brewers’ learning and professional development and making decisions in a global context of new craft professions driven by autonomy and dedication to work. The study uses in-depth interviews, participant observation during brewery visits, festival attendance, and monitoring of social media posts. We explore individual journeys, analysing the tangible and affective dimensions of the work. We investigate the brewer's essential skills, the differences between craft and industrial beer, personal motivations, and what it means to be a ‘craftsman’.
The article proposes an analysis following a fieldwork inside an enterprise, Automobili Lamborghini (Sant’Agata Bolognese) and reflects on some public consequences of the research aftermaths. It shortly focuses on fieldwork, starting from the post-modernist debate, its outcomes, also in the Italian contest, that progressively leads to consider that the ‘fieldwork is not what it used to be’. Afterwards the case-study focuses on the construction of the fieldwork dialogue, on the industrial relations that, based on the German model so-called mitbestimmung, facilitated the researcher’s entrance and her presence in the company, even with an independent project. In addition to detecting the objective difficulty to do ethnography inside the factory, it reflects on the public outcomes that show Anthropology and HR and trade-union representatives increasingly side by side, for the dissemination of the research results. So the Lamborghini research help us to rethink the traditional splits among independent and founded-by-company research, public anthropology and public engagement, identifying useful intersection points, with an usefulness configured differently for the parties in the fieldwork, researcher and research actors.
The article explores the relationship between enterprise and territory, delving into and applying the concepts of embeddedness and affective economy to ethnographic analysis. In doing so, it examines and deepens the case study of the Italian alpine village of San Lazzaro and its Formatge , a local product for which the community is known and characterized as a tourist destination. The analysis of food stories collected among the various actors of the community focusing on this product highlights not only the deep integration between company knowledge and ideals and community horizons but also demonstrates how companies and products cannot be understood outside the community context in which they are produced and contribute to building.
