Academic literature on the topic 'Conglomerate corporations – Italy – History'

Abstract In this article, we examine how executives in Italian family-owned firms use their corporations’ histories to associate particular moral discourses of cultural values, responsibility, and authenticity with the “Made in Italy” brand. These links render Made in Italy a national brand – a brand representing all goods produced in Italy and an “authentic” national treasure. Through an analysis of Italian executives’ oral narratives, this article explores how collective identities are constructed in interview settings and how Made in Italy emerges through the various stances that these managers take regarding certain topics. We focus on the ways Italian executives align their corporate narratives, family histories, and brand identities with circulating ideologies on the significance of Made in Italy. By looking at how Italian managers enact Made in Italy as a national brand with collective responsibilities, this article contributes to recent research on narrative discursive practices in the corporate world.

Abstract In 1949, two executives at the Hungarian subsidiary of the U.S. conglomerate International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), Robert Vogeler of the United States and Edgar Sanders of Great Britain, along with five Hungarian nationals, were arrested, tortured, given peremptory trials, and imprisoned for espionage and economic sabotage. This article reexamines the case in light of the diplomatic efforts to secure their release. The case needs to be understood in the context of U.S. intelligence agencies’ policies during the early Cold War. Numerous organizations that were not necessarily well coordinated embarked on intelligence-gathering and a variety of covert operations, some of which were undertaken with the cooperation of multinational corporations such as ITT. Vogeler and Sanders were indeed guilty of many of the charges leveled against them, and their ordeal was significant because it revealed the ineffectiveness of Cold War policies to influence behavior behind the Iron Curtain during the Stalin era.

In the 1970s, Italy's economy grew faster than all in the industrialized world but Japan's. Its growth rates of up to 5 percent, although lower than in the 1960s, compared favorably to the relatively flat figures from Britain, Germany, and the United States, most strikingly in the two years after the second oil shock of 1979. Following its first “economic miracle” in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote The Economist, Italy's “second, lesser miracle” was how the country continued to thrive in the 1970s despite a “bumbling bureaucracy,” ineffective governments, high inflation and public debt, terrorism, and “the left-wing unions’ greedy, if understandable, reaction to the headlong development of the 1960s.” Italy's rapid growth was all the more impressive in light of the ongoing economic stagnation of the South and a general crisis in the big corporations of Lombardy and Piedmont, which had been dragged down by high oil prices, recession abroad, and indexed wages.

Au début de la période moderne, l'Italie du centre et du nord était fortement urbanisée et elle se caractérisait par la dominance d'un système corporatif urbain puissant et profondément enraciné. Il faisait obstacle à toute expansion de manufactures purement rurales; des activités industrielles rurales apparaissent cependant dans les territoires où, grâce à une structure institutionnelle particuliére, la campagne n'est pas directement soumise à une ville ou encore au moment où les corporations urbaines commencent à perdre de leur pouvoir. Certaines de ces manufactures rurales, surtout celle de la soie, deviennent extrêmement importantes dans les étapes préliminaires au processus d'industrialisation. Mais les régions de l'ltalie du centre et du nord, où naissent ces formes de proto-industrie rurale, ne semblent avoir connu ni croissance de la population, ni cette dégradation sociale que postulait l'une et l'autre Franklin Mendels dans sa ‘theorie de la protoindustrialisation’.

The subject of the study is the constitutional regime of the independent city of Fiume during the authoritarian rule of Gabriele D’Annunzio (September 1919 — December 1920). His power was based not on legal norms, but on the will of the commander known as the prophet (vate) or the leader (duce), supported by the strength of his army. Nevertheless, in September 1920, D’Annunzio proclaimed the Charter of Kvarner — the constitution of the small state, which never came into force. The author analyzes its provisions using the formal-dogmatic approach, pointing to the modernity and originality of its regulations: gender equality, guarantees of social rights, protection of work, secularity of education, society divided into corporations, elements of direct democracy, division of powers between legislative chambers, and a lack of the head of state. Constitutional institutions are presented with consideration of the history of Fiume, studied by the historical approach. The author concludes that D’Annunzio did not belong to the fascist movement, but was rather a rival of Mussolini, with a different vision of the state and methods of rule. His Charter of Kvarner can therefore be seen as a concept for the new Italy. At the same time, the commandant was a forerunner of the methods of communicating with society which were later used by the leaders of totalitarian states.

The subjugation of Northern Estonia to Swedish rule in 1561 is described in all general presentations of history, yet by and large, the course of events has not been traced in newer research. This period of history is very remarkable in three aspects. First of all, it was important for Sweden’s political history because over the course of the subsequent hundred years, Sweden became a major power in the Baltic Sea region, in reference to which the expression dominium maris Baltici is used. Secondly, the events of 1561–62 were of local importance because they led to the demise of the State of the Livonian Order in Livonia, which also meant the end of the Middle Ages in that region. The third viewpoint concerning the effect of these events to constitutional law is perhaps even more important. They started the transformation of previously unitary Sweden into a European conglomerate state where in addition to the motherland, there were other distinctive parts with different rights, so called provinces. Only a part of this chain of events will be examined in this study, namely the visit of the Swedish envoys Klas Kristersson Horn, Hans Larsson Björnram and Herman Bruser to Tallinn from March to June of 1561 and the events following this visit after the coronation of the king in Stockholm towards the end of the summer. There is abundant source material related to the deliberations (correspondence, presentations, documents verifying privileges, descriptions of oral conversations) and part of it has been published, but there are many loose ends in this material, first and foremost in regard to questions related to constitutional issues. A completely new picture of the history of the birth of Sweden as a great power emerges as a result of the careful reading of the sources. Unlike later developments, to a great extent the initiative came from Tallinners themselves. Their vision was affected both by the fear of Russia and by the wish to use the opportunities offered by trade with the east. Complete concord prevailed in these matters between the Tallinners and Sweden’s young king Erik XIV. The Harju-Viru knighthood and the nobility of Järvamaa followed the example of Tallinn’s senior magistrates and town council. The vote with acclamation that took place in Tallinn, where the participants chose “with hand and mouth” the king of Sweden as their ruler, was of central importance. This was followed by detailed consultations, where Horn, Björnram and Bruser in accordance with their authorisation agreed to the existing privileges of the corporations. Two separate “acts of recognition” (Huldigung) took place in Tallinn on 4 and 6 June 1951, the content of which was typical in the case of the declaration of the sovereign as ruler. The central elements of these ceremonies were the oath of allegiance and the affirmation of the ruler, ecclesiastical ceremonies and various kinds of expressions of joy. After this, a delegation from the knighthood and the city travelled to Sweden, but they were late (perhaps for diplomatic reasons) for the king’s coronation celebrations held in Uppsala in June of 1561. In this way they did not have to take the oath of allegiance the same way as the Swedes. The final phase of the events took place in audiences with Erik XIV in Stockholm as well as its surrounding area. The promises and the written oaths taken in Tallinn were reviewed on the basis of Sweden’s legal expertise and even though the Swedes were not always satisfied with them, the king affirmed them all the same. He was emphatically benevolent and even approved the privileges presented by the delegations without reading them, asking only whether there was not anything in them contrary to natural law. Thus the privileges of both the knighthood and the city were approved in Norrköping on 2 August 1561. The Riksradet (Council of the Realm) did not participate in making the final decisions and the king also did not request any recommendation from the Riksdag (Sweden’s parliament). Instead, he relied on the permit that Riksdag had already granted to Gustav Vasa in the summer of 1560 “to set foot in Livonia”. The reason as seen from Sweden for incorporating Tallinn and its surrounding region was undoubtedly primarily mercantile. Several features of the policy of Erik XIV, and the selection of envoys (Horn and Björnram) from among persons who knew Russian trade the best, are indicative of this. Yet other reasons also had their effect, for instance state security and the ruler’s ambition and vanity. On the whole, Sweden’s path to becoming a great power can be explained on the basis of the complexity theory and especially the path dependence featured in this theory, where decision-making is limited to the path that has previously been selected. The distinctive feature of the events that took place in Tallinn was the fact that they had the strong support of the city’s inhabitants and that very little military force was used, while on the other hand money was spent liberally to pay for both bribes and awards.

Abstract. Since its massive expansion under Sultans Selim I (1512–20) and Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66), the Ottoman Empire extended from the Algerian shores to Georgia in the Caucasus and from Hungary in the heart of Europe to Yemen on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Albeit in a long decline thereafter, the core of this multi-cultural conglomerate survived into the early twentieth century before it finally disintegrated during and right after the First World War. Throughout these five centuries, the Ottomans deeply influenced these heterogeneous countries, creating or enabling a rich and multi-faceted cartographic heritage within its realms and the gradually breaking away regions in Europe, Asia, and Africa.For many Ottoman (era) cartography is synonymous with navigator and geographer Ahmed Muhyiddin Piri (1465–1553), better known as Piri Reis and the interactions between early modern Ottoman mapmakers and their European colleagues. The International Cartographic Association’s Commission on the History of Cartography, however, believes that the Empire’s later periods, especially the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hitherto for many themes and regions has not received the warranted attention.Therefore, the Commission in 2019 invited abstracts for its 8th International Symposium on “Mapping the Ottoman Realm: Travelers, Cartographers, and Archaeologists”, to be held on April 21–23, 2020 in Istanbul, under its old name Constantinople until 1922 the capital of the Ottoman Empire. As the conference title (see banner above) and the Call for Papers indicated, the symposium encouraged submissions not only on regional topographic mapping by locals and foreigners, but also and – at least to my knowledge – for the first time on the mapping of archaeological sites, landscapes, and excavations. Eventually, a total of 38 presentations passed a rigorous vetting. When presenters and delegates were eagerly looking forward to stimulating exchanges at the conference and technical visits, the sudden spread of Covid-19 forced to call off the symposium just five weeks before the opening reception. At the time of going to press it is planned to catch up on the postponed symposium by a workshop linked to the 30th International Cartographic Conference in Florence (Italy) in December 2021 - the pandemic permitting!As it became evident that the staggered waves of the pandemic would not allow a timely rescheduling of the symposium, the decision was taken to maintain as much as possible the momentum and call upon the authors to develop their presentations into full papers. Eventually, eleven author (teams) submitted fully developed papers which are contained in this book. Although the scope of the papers by time and region stretches from sixteenth century Hungary to twenty-first century archaeology of Ottoman Jaffa, you will notice that in many papers some of the content links to the content in at least one other paper, convincingly making clear the interconnectedness of interdisciplinary cartographic research especially into nineteenth and twentieth centuries of Ottoman (era / regions) cartography.Although the pandemic prevented the 8th International Symposium on the History of Cartography from personally congregating on the Bosporus, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the German Archaeological Institute, Istanbul Department, and there our local organizing partner Prof. Dr. Andreas Schachner, archaeologist and head of the department’s library, for setting up what would have been a memorable conference.Further, I want to thank the reviewers and the authors for going through the production process of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography’s first venture into Open Access publication. We hope that you enjoy reading the papers, will find them useful in the pursuit of your own research, and – last but not least – consider joining yourself the Commission’s future workshops or conferences.Please stay updated by either joining us or regularly checking our website: https://history.icaci.org/

The International American Studies Association is dismayed to see the explosion of anger, bitterness and desperation that has been triggered by yet another senseless, cruel and wanton act of racialized violence in the United States. We stand in solidarity with and support the ongoing struggle by African Americans, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, migrants and the marginalized against the racialized violence perpetrated against them. As scholars of the United States, we see the killing of George Floyd and many before them as acts on the continuum of the history of the powerful committing racialized violence against the powerless in the United States from before the birth of that country to the here and now of the present day. This continuum stretches from the transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of the indigenous population, the denial of rights and liberties to women, through the exploitation of American workers, slavery and Jim Crow, to the exclusion and inhumane treatment of the same migrants who make a profit for American corporations and keep prices low for the U.S. consumer. As scholars of the United States, we are acutely aware of how racialized violence is systemic, of how it has been woven into the fabric of U.S. society and cultures by the powerful, and of how the struggle against it has produced some of the greatest contributions of U.S. society to world culture and heritage. The desperate rebellion of the powerless against racialized violence by the powerful is in turn propagandized as unreasonable or malicious. It is neither. It is an uprising to defend their own lives, their last resort after waiting for generations for justice and equal treatment from law enforcement, law makers, and the courts. In too many instances, those in power have answered such uprisings with deadly force—and in every instance, they have had alternatives to this response. We are calling on those in power and the people with the guns in the United States now to exercise their choices and choose an alternative to deadly force as a response to the struggle against racialized violence. You have the power and the weapons—you have a choice to do the right thing and make peace. We are calling on U.S. law makers to listen and address the issues of injustice and racialized violence through systemic reform that remakes the very fabric of the United States justice system, including independent accountability oversight for law enforcement. We are calling on our IASA members and Americanists around the world to redouble their efforts at teaching their students and educating the public of the truth about the struggle against racialized violence in the United States. We are calling on our IASA members and Americanists around the world to become allies in the struggle against racialized violence in the United States and in their home societies by publicizing scholarship on the truth, by listening to and amplifying the voices of black people, ethnic minorities and the marginalized, and supporting them in this struggle on their own terms. We are calling on all fellow scholarly associations to explore all the ways in which they can put pressure with those in power at all levels in the United States to do the right thing and end racialized violence. There will be no peace in our hearts and souls until justice is done and racialized violence is ended—until all of us are able “to breathe free.” Dr Manpreet Kaur Kang, President of the International American Studies Association, Professor of English and Dean, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, India;Dr Jennifer Frost, President of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, Associate Professor of History, University of Auckland, New Zealand;Dr S. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Associate Professor, Department of American Culture and Literature, Hacettepe University, Turkey;Dr Gabriela Vargas-Cetina, Professor of Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mexico;Dr Paweł Jędrzejko, Associate Professor of American Literature, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland;Dr Marietta Messmer, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Groningen, The Netherlands;Dr Kryštof Kozák, Department of North American Studies, Charles University, Prague;Dr Giorgio Mariani, Professor of English and American Languages and Literatures, Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies, Università “Sapienza” of Rome;Dr György Tóth, Lecturer, History, Heritage and Politics, University of Stirling, Scotland, United Kingdom;Dr Manuel Broncano, Professor of American Literature and Director of English, Spanish, and Translation, Texas A&M International University, Laredo, USA;Dr Jiaying Cai, Lecturer at the School of English Studies, Shanghai International Studies University, China;Dr Alessandro Buffa, Secretary, Center for Postcolonial and Gender Studies, University of Naples L’Orientale, Italy;

This article draws upon interviews with work-at-home (WAH) agents who did technical support for DirecTV between 2009 and 2016. Satellite television technical support workers comprise an important node in maintaining the flow of television content as it is distributed by corporations, like DirecTV, through complex and often fragile technological conditions. Using interviews, trade press, and online employee forums, I outline the history of DirecTV’s WAH call center work and employment conditions, and its dissolution after the merger with AT&T. This research intervenes to demonstrate the ways in which WAH television technical support work is an ambivalent form of distributive media labor, at once feminine and immaterial, while also creative and essential for television distribution. This article also demonstrates how technical support work is influenced by current precarious and digitally converged working conditions, surveillance tactics, and media conglomerate mergers and structures.

Markus Friedrich’s volume illustrates the diversity of archival practices in late medieval and early modern Europe. Large institutions associated with royal courts served as models, but archives “had a variety of local . . . causes and manifestations” affecting an increasingly large proportion of the population “on multiple political and social levels” (p. 48). Merchants and municipalities, churches and monasteries, and corporations and rulers all maintained records. The Birth of the Archive is a praxis-oriented study of the history of European archives circa 1200 to 1800, concentrating on developments in Italy, France, and various German-speaking principalities. It looks at how archives in those regions adapted to different contexts and how they functioned over time. Markus Friedrich, a professor of early modern history at Hamburg University, indicates that although a comparative, worldwide study of archival history would be highly desirable, his current investigations do not extend beyond Europe.

Defence date: 21 December 2007
Examining board: Prof. Luciano Segreto, Università degli Studi di Firenze ; Prof. Patrick Fridenson, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris ; Prof. Giovanni Federico, EUI Department of History and Civilization (HEC) ; Prof. Bo Stråth (supervisor) EUI HEC/Robert Schuman Centre
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses

Los grupos económicos constituyen una forma empresarial diversificada de alcance internacional. Los grupos predominan en Asia y América Latina. En gran parte del siglo XX, Chile ha transitado por modelos de política económica contrapuestos: la ISI y el neoliberalismo. En base a lo anterior, es relevante examinar los cambios experimentados por la economía chilena y su relación con los grupos económicos en cuanto controladores de las principales unidades productivas, comerciales y/o financieras del país. Si bien, existen aportaciones que describen a los grupos de empresas existentes en un año específico, se echa en falta indagaciones que profundicen en la evolución de largo plazo de los grupos en conexión con los esquemas o modelos económicos en el periodo considerado (1938-1988). De este modo, en la presente tesis doctoral, se examina la trayectoria de los grupos económicos en el transcurso de la ISI (1939-1973), y la fase económica neoliberal durante el gobierno militar (1974-1988). Como pregunta de investigación se plantea la siguiente interrogante: ¿Qué elementos contribuyen a explicar la evolución (expansión, declive o desaparición) de los principales grupos económicos chilenos a lo largo de la industrialización sustitutiva de importaciones y el modelo neoliberal? En la estrategia metodológica, el análisis de los grupos económicos en el largo plazo se organizó mediante cinco cortes temporales, considerando a los ocho mayores grupos económicos en cada año. El corte temporal de 1938 es elaborado para este trabajo en base a fuentes primarias; 1958, es un corte temporal reformulado de Lagos (1960); 1970, es complementado a partir de Garrretón y Cisternas (1970); 1978,es un corte temporal basado en Dahse (1978); 1988, corte temporal realizado para esta investigación según fuentes primarias. A partir de los datos corrientes, se analiza en valores reales en dólares deflactados según el índice de precios EE.UU. con año base 1988. Se examina el tamaño real y envergadura de los grupos en la economía (PIB y stock de capital); evolución de la rentabilidad financiera (ROE). Se analiza además tipo de control, periodo formación, trayectoria de cada grupo, ponderación stock de capital productivo, grado diversificación por rama del portafolio. Como hipótesis de investigación que orienta este trabajo, determinamos que el estado general de la demanda, contemplando la demanda efectiva en el mercado doméstico y la demanda internacional, contribuye a explicar los niveles de rentabilidad obtenidos por los grupos económicos en el largo plazo. Además, como una segunda hipótesis de investigación conocimos que en grupos económicos con actividad dominante, la trayectoria descendente del ciclo industrial o de producto en donde se desenvuelve su empresa (s) líder (es) es un aspecto relevante para determinar el declive o desaparición del grupo. Se determinó que el ciclo industrial o de producto contribuye a explicar la desarticulación o disolución del grupo. En estos casos, los grupos no superan las complejidades de su segmento de actividad dominante desaprovechando las ventajas de en la reducción de riesgos que brinda la diversificación “no relacionada. La focalización de capitales y capacidades en un determinado segmento productivo se encuentra en la base del fenómeno. Asimismo, se determina en esta investigación que el proteccionismo es un acontecimiento de largo plazo que antecede a la industrialización sustitutiva de importaciones y se refuerza a lo largo de ella. La protección es solicitada por el gran empresariado organizado en la Sociedad de Fomento Fabril (SOFOFA). En la ISI, los grupos participan de la industrialización. Se logra sustitución en bienes de consumo no durable y gran parte intermedios. Asimismo, la concentración económica, es una estructura de largo plazo de la economía chilena. Los grupos económicos se localizan en mercados disímiles, sin competir entre sí, a excepción del segmento financiero y la pesca orientada a la exportación. Por último, los grupos económicos de mayor envergadura en cada periodo se ajustan o adaptan a tendencias de la política económica y a los incentivos imperantes en cada fase de la economía chilena (1938-1988). Los grupos empresariales en la producción de bienes intermedios mercado inter-industrial o abocados a la demanda externa en nichos de mercados con capacidad de superar las problemáticas y fases críticas de la economía, tanto a finales de la ISI como en el neoliberalismo, persistirán en su liderazgo entre los principales grupos económicos del país.