The choice made in this book is to address the issue of small businesses in Italy, on which there is extensive discussion, understanding this business as an essential component of civil society and distinguishing it from the commonly understood forms of self-employment. Small businesses and craft businesses, which I will define below, are nothing more than a part of the industrial forest and services that shape the Italian manufacturing sector alongside large and medium-sized businesses; social constructs, the latter, profoundly different from small and artisan businesses and also from self-employment, which is exercised with the ownership of the means of production but without being an employer and which therefore is not an enterprise.
I think it is essential, in this introductory section to a text that is the result of not a few efforts, that I clearly state the proposed interpretative thesis and that I also find well expressed in the interviews I built with a series of very small and small entrepreneurs who I believe they are representative, in a qualitative sense, of the cultural world of the company being studied.
There is undoubtedly a powerful and varied analytical research work on small businesses in Italy. In my opinion, the most fruitful exponent of this happy analytical will is undoubtedly Andrea Colli, who, in his fine works, has effectively described and offered an analytical framework for historiographical research on this type of enterprise.
My thesis underlines - very differently from all the other interpretations - the constitutively pre-economic, social, anthropological character of the very small and small business. More than an economic actor, it is a living witness of the agrarian past and of the upward social mobility of the lower classes of society, in the sense in which Theodor Geiger understood this trial. Naturally, it has instruments of economic regulation of the rational and instrumental logic which it cannot fail to possess operating in a capitalist society, and is therefore overdetermined by the achievement of profit. But it is the way, the context, the relational forms with which it achieves this profit and builds that same instrumental logic that make it profoundly different from the average and large company.
My thesis, in fact, is that the very small business, the artisan business, is closer to a community than to an organic society. Tönnies comes before Durkheim and the difference in role that founds the modern social division is not present in it except in a minimal part: the one that allows this very special social construct to win the competition, to live and survive. But it is mechanical solidarity that wins over everything: it is the continuity of the family as an oikos, as an economic and biological unit at the same time; and all of this – which is nothing more than anthropology – creates its own specificity, the specificity of the very small business, of the artisan business. I go further. I maintain that all of this is the reason for its success and not, as most do, for its mortality.
How many large companies have died and how many medium ones are struggling to live as they are to die? This unknown form of enterprise lives and continues to live and grow as a representation of the quantity of stars that the economic firmament, all over the world, possesses, as I have demonstrated in my more general work than the one I am presenting here. It is based on the person and therefore on trust, on the inexhaustible flexibility of which individuals and families are capable despite a thousand mistakes. And this is because from time to time there is a sort of homeostasis with the market and politics together that our social construct forms and reforms between the economy and the vital worlds. That's why it doesn't grow. Because it is established before and outside the market. It certainly acts in the market, but it defends itself from it if one pays attention to its personal and family constitutiveness: it wants to preserve itself. Of course it can grow, but then it is no longer a very small artisan business or small business. It is another thing, another economic and social construct. It becomes based on the role, on the prevalence of delegation and therefore of an order of roles independent of people, as Alfred Marshall taught us in his brilliant prescient works. This is why my book stands outside the prevailing vulgate. Noble and inspired by good intentions but far from reality and science. It is not necessary to grow to live and to make profits and not even globalization in the world crisis refutes my thesis. Indeed, the fact that this specific social form continues to live and operate in the interdependence of economies and technologies, changing for what it needs to survive, shows that it is in this otherness that lies the secret of the vitality of the artisan and small business compared to the other forms of life of the organizational populations which in multiple guises constitute the vital bacteria of the amniotic fluids of modern capitalism. In fact, it is about life, about social life. Despite all the terrible crises. This will be discussed in this book.
In this assumption that interprets the company as a founding element of civil society, I follow the teaching of Adam Ferguson, an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and historian, commonly considered one of the founding fathers of economic sociology. His An Essay on the History of Civil Society, of 1767, remains an inescapable point of reference. Men reach the stage of "civil society" thanks to the rise of agriculture, which determines the birth of laws: in fact, the birth of agriculture is followed by that of private property, which is protected by laws. From this interweaving of property and law arises the modern enterprise thanks to the personal action of the entrepreneur. Civil society is the network of social relations that unfold starting from the constitution of private property, of which the company is the social manifestation from an organizational point of view. The small entrepreneur is therefore first and foremost the owner of his means of production and the creator of contractual hierarchical relationships, whatever their dimensional scale, and it is starting from this intertwining between ownership and the ability to organize the techniques and personal subordinates that the entrepreneur reveals his personality and finds his social position.
The Italian Civil Code is very clear in this regard: Art. 2082 – An entrepreneur is anyone who professionally exercises an organized economic activity (articles 2555, 2565) for the purpose of producing or exchanging goods or services (articles 2135, 2195 ).
Art. 2083 – Small entrepreneurs are direct farmers of the land (articles 1647, 2139), artisans, small traders and those who carry out an organized professional activity mainly with their own work and that of family members (articles 2202, 2214, 2221).
To these civil law references must be added the reference to art. 230-bis which regulates the family business, which is created whenever a family member of the entrepreneur works continuously in the family or in the same business. In fact, the family business received protection for the first time in 1975 with the reform of family law. What is essential is to understand the difference, which very often is not obvious, between entrepreneur and self-employed person. Self-employment is defined by art. 2222 of the Civil Code, which indicates as a self-employed worker the one who undertakes to carry out a work or service for a fee, mainly with his own work and without the bond of subordination towards the client. Unlike the subordinate worker, the self-employed worker assumes an obligation of results and not of means: that is, he does not undertake to make his workforce available for a certain time, but guarantees the achievement of certain results. Consequence of a different nature is that the self-employed worker carries out his activity with mainly his own means and not the client's, and with full discretion as to the time, place and methods of the service. Therefore, he does not have bonds of subordination towards the client, who does not have the managerial, control and disciplinary powers typical of the subordinate employer. In any case, the self-employed worker may be obliged to comply with the limits and conditions contained in the contract. Due to the fact that he owns his own means of production, the self-employed worker bears marked resemblances to the small or very small entrepreneur, but the resemblance remains and not the identity because he lacks the organizational nature of the company's functions, which specifically and distinctively the latter with respect to all other forms of manifestation of human activity.
Underlining this is important everywhere, but first of all in Italy. In fact, our country has a very high number of entrepreneurs. If, in 2010, only those who employed more than two workers were defined as entrepreneurs, there were 257.000 of them in Italy. But if we include in the category of entrepreneurs, on the other hand, those who employ even a single worker, we arrive, in the same year, to consider as many as 1.524.000 people entrepreneurs, expanding the audience of this social class in an extraordinary way. Meanwhile, on the same date, individual self-employment numbered 3.800.000 people, contributing to making Italy a country in which self-employment or self-employment properly understood, whether or not it belongs to the proprietary petty bourgeoisie, profoundly characterizes the structure social of the country. The very recent reworking of the ISTAT data carried out by Ivana Fellini regarding the «composition of employed persons by position in the profession (percentages of 2010)», from which I quote the figures referred to here, tells us that of the «overall employed» 74,8% are counts among employees, while 25,2% are self-employed, a figure made up of: entrepreneurs 1,1%; freelancers 5,2%; self-employed 15,3%; cooperative members 0,2%; family helpers 1,6%; collaborators 1,4%; occasional workers 0,4%. It will immediately be noted that there is, therefore, an area of continuous transmigration between self-employment and self-employment, on the one hand, and entrepreneurial work, on the other, and that therefore all the statistical conventions are essential if we want to give a quantitative evaluation to the social dimension of the small business and of the petty bourgeoisie who own and manage it. In this work I will strictly adhere to the sphere that I have defined above as small business and artisan business in order to interpret and make people understand the essence of the phenomenon.
It is precisely out of a need for greater understanding that I wanted to include in this work, which is descriptive but with strong interpretative values, some excerpts from the interviews I mentioned at the beginning. In order to have full knowledge of the entrepreneurial world that we have evoked here, it is necessary to start from the symbolic universe of the entrepreneur person. I have tried to do it in an inductive way, that is by reporting, through discursive passages, what in my opinion are the most salient meanings that can be drawn from the interviews themselves, trying not to lose anything of the colloquial character of this ethnographic document which I deem important for complete my study with a degree of significance appropriate to the topic.
Finally, let me say that the texts really speak for themselves and that any comment from me would have been really superfluous. The lesson that I have drawn from this ethnographic work and that I hope those who will read this book will also learn is the high degree of self-reflexivity, self-awareness and culture, not only industrial, that the protagonists of the world of very small and small businesses possess and of which there is too little knowledge. If this knowledge were adequate among political decision-makers, certainly the institutional weight of this world could positively influence, much more than it does today, the destiny of our country.
After long years of work as a researcher, trainer and independent director in large companies in Italy and abroad in continuity with my university commitment, I have only been dealing with small companies for fifteen years, above all writing about them and getting to know them "on the ground". I thought it was too early to try my hand at such directly specific work. Alessia Graziano del Mulino told me that I could write a book on small business for the Bologna publishing house; she and therefore she is the first person I have to thank. But some seeds had already been sown in the field of my cultural journey. A turning point in my intellectual formation, in fact, occurred thanks to the opportunity that Gianfranco Origgi offered me to study a small business ethnographically, sharing the daily work of all its players for months. From that experience arose my Persona e impresa. A case of corporate ethnography: Pino Varchetta and Francesco Novara (my late – with Franco Momigliano – Olivetti master) wrote about it and said so well that I was encouraged to continue my reflections.
But it is Cesare Fumagalli who, in these years of discovery of a new world, with "his" craftsmen, has been my Virgil and I can never thank him enough for this, as well as for the humanity and wisdom he has instilled his teaching.
Finally, this book would not have been written without the great work, which must be recognized academically, by Luigi Vergallo, to whom we owe the third chapter.
