Industrialisation, social reproduction and education : the experience of Italy's northeast and Malta in the second half of the twentieth century

Abstract

Writing in 1998, as he referred to post-war industrial development, Michael Porter categorised two sets of chapter headings for his The Competitive Advantage of Nations: on one side, ‘American post-war dominance’, ‘stable Switzerland’, Sweden faced with choices, a need for ‘renewing German dynamism’, and ‘the slide of Britain’; on the other, ‘the rise of Japan’, ‘emerging Korea’ and ‘surging Italy’. The surge in the competitive advantage of the Italian economy that led to rapid growth, according to him, was propped by exports from numerous small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and the most successful amongst them were organised in clusters. Although large Italian firms also exported, these were not operating in sectors where Italy was most successful, such as in textiles and apparel, household appliances, furniture, lighting, and ceramics. The latter sectors were populated by the clusters of SMEs, geographically delimited, and many of them mono-sectoral (Porter, 1998, p. 422). Sabel (2003), who along with Piore, in 1984, had proposed a ‘second industrial divide’, with a craft-based industrial paradigm taking over from the dominant post-war mass production paradigm, described these successful Italian clusters as industrial districts (IDs). With Piore, he identified IDs as representative of the new, craft-based paradigm. Picking up from early writings by Bagnasco, Becattini, Bellandi and Brusco in Italy, Sabel re-iterated how ID firms forming part of regional (as against national) economies, previously surviving on subcontracting deals, had become finished goods producers. They were no longer market shy and subordinate to mass production companies.