Culture and Management in Italy: Tradition, Modernization, New Challenges

The chapter explores and discusses the peculiarities, historical roots and main features of italian management. The relationship between culture and management in Italy is quite complex. The main reason for this is the complexity of Italian culture itself. Italian society is characterized by an extremely high degree of diversity, in terms of local traditions, resources, languages, attitudes, values. In many ways, Italy looks more like a “community of communities”, than like a homogeneous culture. In this chapter, however, we try to identify some of those social and cultural elements that, more than others, seem to have significantly influenced the way Italian companies are organized and managed. Specifically, we focus on three important aspects: the role of the central State in the historical development of the Italian economy, the wide diffusion of family-owned and family-managed enterprises, and the economic relevance of the “territory”, that is, the geographical proximity of firms and their reference to local communities.