Abstract
This chapter illustrates some fundamental elements that may explain the origin of the great number of family business in the area of Brianza in the region of Lombardy (Italy). Reher’s concepts of strong family ties, catholic social activism and land tenure constitute the terrain in which families were able to turn the working skill of their members into economic capital. Yet, the legacy with this recent past is continuously revisited in contemporary family businesses in Lombardy to reproduce a public imagery of themselves that rather emphasizes motivations and behaviours profoundly rooted in the realm of the natural world, such as in the expressions ‘it’s in our blood’ or ‘it’s in our DNA’. Through these biological metaphors, they communicate an important message regarding their own culture to themselves as well as to their interlocutors.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, I discuss the findings stemming from my ongoing research on entrepreneurship and labour in the industrial districts of the Brianza. Fieldwork is being carried out in the Monza district and the southern parts of Como and Lecco districts.
- 2.
I am grateful to the editor of this book, Tobias Koellner, for his insightful comments and bibliographic suggestions (including Brumann’s quotation).
- 3.
One recent attempt to grasp the differences between European countries and regions has been provided by Gruber and Szoltysek in their patriarchy index, ‘which departs from the often value laden, monolithic and ideologically determined discourse of Western feminism’ (Gruber & Szołtysek, 2016: 5).
- 4.
In Brianza, this system of farm tenancy underwent several contractual transformations in the nineteenth century. The sharecropping arrangements were set in a way that the tenant families had to produce food for their own subsistence and produce surplus for the landowner, resulting in very marginal production for the market, where the produce consisted mainly of the surplus given to the landowner. In the second half of the eighteenth century, especially between 1770 and 1780, wheat prices increased substantially in Europe, and as the demand for this cash crop and other products of agriculture kept rising, such arrangements were rapidly supplanted by a new contract, the ‘mixed grain rent’ (contratto misto a grano), which gave the owner greater discretionary power. Such a contract maintained the sharecropping system with respect to the production of grapes, silk cocoons and other obligations, but introduced the payment of a rent in kind, that is, wheat, a crop that was notoriously subject to large fluctuations in price and in quantity due to market demand and climatic conditions (Ghezzi, 2007).
- 5.
Still widespread today all over northern Italy, the former were made up of various buildings, the rooms for the household members, the haylofts and the outhouses; the latter were less complex square constructions enclosing a courtyard.
- 6.
Besana Brianza, Carate Brianza, Agliate: all located in the administrative districts of Monza and Brianza.
- 7.
While in the mid-1800s, according to Jacini (Jacini, 1857), there was one proprietor for every eight inhabitants in Lombardy (i.e. 350,000 proprietors and an average land size of 3.27 ha); at the end of the Second World War, the ratio was as low as one proprietor for every 2.6 inhabitants. Land was owned by 2,286,591 proprietors, of which only 606,982 were individual owners; the average size of the land was 0.96 ha per proprietor or 2.52 ha per property (Bonato, 1954).
- 8.
From a comparative perspective, it is interesting to note that in contemporary Russia, Orthodox priests took on a similar function, but brought together businesspeople and political actors (Koellner, 2012).
- 9.
The first subscribers to the cooperative bank in the town of Carate were 28 male family heads, all residing in this town: 15 peasants, 6 wageworkers, 6 artisans (1 mason, 1 carpenter and 4 weavers) and 1 costermonger. The parish priest and another peasant man acted as legal witnesses to the subscription procedures. I found the original text of the deeds (dated 29 April 1903) regarding the constitution of the bank in a file retrieved from the Historical Archive of Carate.
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Ghezzi, S. (2023). The Legacy of the Past in Business Families of Northern Italy. In: Koellner, T. (eds) Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20525-5_9
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