Portale di Ateneo - Unibs.it Portale di Ateneo - Unibs.it

Part I.1
Introduction
-Business History: origins and main aims
-Business History in Italy and outside
-The enterprise: a deeper definition
-The theory of the firm and the dynamic enterprise: a brief overview
Production organization before the British Industrial Revolution
-Market and enterprise in the preindustrial era
-Domestic industry, crafts, putting-out system and centralized factory
Part I.2
The first industrial revolution and the factory system
-Industrial revolution and modern enterprise
-The transition to the factory system
-Technologies and markets
-Centralized production and factory discipline
The “modern enterprise”
-Main characteristics: size, ownership and control, financial sources, organization and management
-The production process
-Distribution and sales networks
-The socio-economic impact of the first wave of industrialization
Part. I.3
The rise of “big buysiness” in the US
-Definition and origin of big business
-New communication and transport system: the key role of railways and telegraph
The growth of the firm in historical perspective: Alfred D. Chandler and “the visible hand”
-The managerial hierarchy: adapting firm’s structure to strategies
-The “first movers” and the “triple investment”
The rise of big business outside the US: a comparison
-Germany and the UK
-The latecomers: France, Russia, Japan and Italy
Organizational changes in large firms between the two world wars
-The U-form: features and problems
-From the U-form to the M-form
-Expansion strategies: the pioneers in diversification
-American “managerial capitalism”
-Europe between the two world wars: convergence and divergence
From WWII to the third industrial revolution
Industries shaped by WWII
-New industries and technologies for a new industrial revolution
-New R&D departments and the “national systems of innovation”
The decline of American hegemony, Soviet Union and hybrid Europe
-The American challenge and the first signs of decline
-The conglomerate
-Lenin and a new economic and social order: the New Economic Policy (NEP)
-From Lenin to Stalin: the GOSPLAN and the five-years plans
-Reforms after Stalin: the “production associations”
-Europe and “americanization”
-A peculiar European model: differences from the US

Part. I.4
Business History after Chandler’s works: the main opened questions
-Measuring the performance of an enterprise
-The enterprise and its context (enterprise and socio-cultural environment): cultural factors, ethics, religion, community, family, gender, education and training
-Business and institutions: the role of the State, financial markets and antitrust laws
-Other forms of business organizations: family firms, business groups, industrial districts, SMEs, cooperatives
-State-owned companies: nationalization and privatization
Part. II: The triumph of American consumer society over Europe’s bourgeois
-The service ethic: how bourgeois men made peace with babbittry
-A decent standard of living: how Europeans were measured by the American way of life
-The chain store: how modern distribution dispossessed commerce
-Big-brand goods: how marketing outmaneuvered the marketplace
-Corporate advertising: how the science of publicity subveerted the arts of commerce
-The Star System: how Hollywood turned cinema culture into entertainment value
-The consumer-citizen: how Europeans traded rights for goods