Michael L. Blim – författare

The first study of its kind to be published in English, this volume offers a unique contemporary and historical analysis of postwar small-scale industrialization in central and northeastern Italy. Based on a 21-month field study undertaken by the author, Made in Italy covers a 100-year time period that encompasses the transformation of central Italy from a poor, agriculturally backward rural society into an important postwar industrial producer of export goods for the world market. Author Michael Blim challenges the widely discussed model for industrial revival proposed by Piore and Sabel in their 1984 study, arguing that forms of labor exploitation rather than technological innovation account for the central-northeastern Italian industrial success. He also challenges contemporary economic policy notions that argue that this kind of industrial success is longlasting and easily replicable in other late-developing regions, asserting instead that the petty entrepreneurial, familial character of the Italian small-scale industrial sector militates against its ultimate durability in a world dominated by transnational corporations.Blim starts from the premise that the rapid postwar economic development in the towns of central and northeastern Italy was the culmination of a century-long process of radical social change. Taking the shoe industry as an example, Blim shows how postwar entrepreneurs, accustomed to an economic system based on family enterprises, created an innovative local production system utilizing the cooperation of highly specialized firms. Although the enterprises enjoyed remarkable success, Blim demonstrates that profits depended greatly upon the exploitation of secondary labor populations, and the use of undocumented labor, facts usually ignored in other treatments of central-northeastern Italian economic development. Organized into three sections, the study first analyzes social and economic life between the Unification of Italy and the end of World War II. Subsequent chapters discuss the rise of the new industrial order and its labor process, describe the social and political consequences of postwar development, and offer the author's conclusions. Students of economic development, anthropology, and sociology will find this an important counterweight to studies that fail to assess the sometimes deleterious effects of postwar industrialization.

The world is fast becoming a global factory in which workers, entrepreneurs, and multinational corporations find themselves producing for the world capitalist market. This collection of original essays explores in concrete anthropological detail the ways that people throughout the world have been drawn into this new international labor web. Broad in scope and far-reaching in their analyses, the chapters in this book offer numerous examples of this new world order. The case studies focus on industrialization in small-scale workshops and informal work-at-home situations as well as multinational corporations. Undertaken in every continent, in core as well as peripheral regions, the studies cover the perspectives of the workers, the entrepreneurs, and the corporations.In this systematic view of the capitalization of the world economy, the contributors demonstrate how new economic linkages are being formed between world markets and small-scale entrepreneurs and home-based local producers and how late-developing regions attempt to gain economic sovereignty through the marketing of local product specialties. At the same time, the contributors' investigations provide concrete evidence of local efforts to create culturally distinct and socially equitable lives--showing how the spread of the world capitalist economy changes the everyday lives of people. They point to ways in which people use their local traditions of kinship, culture, and community to resist and shape economic change to more satisfying local ends.