This special issue of Business History Review on “Business History around the World” provides an opportunity to recognize the unique and continuing contribution of Franco Amatori, longtime head of the business history group at Bocconi University, renowned historian of Italian industry, Honorary Foreign Member of the American Historical Association, and recipient of the 2019 Business History Conference's Lifetime Achievement Award. Among his many interests, Amatori is a strong advocate of comparative approaches to business history. Amatori's commitment to a comparative analytical perspective to research can be summarized by quoting one of his favorite sentences, often repeated to those who have worked with him: “You need to know at least two things if you want to really understand one.” This comparative approach has often found expression in international business history and the comparison of business development in different nations and regions. Hence this issue, with articles on business history in China, Colombia, India, Mexico, Russia, and Switzerland, is a natural extension of an approach to the field that Amatori has long advocated.
Amatori, who was born in the city of Ancona on the Adriatic Sea, studied political science in Florence and took an early interest in comparative history. This focus developed, in part, when he received a scholarship from the Fulbright Commission to visit the United States, where he spent three semesters, in 1978 and 1979, in the individual studies program at Harvard, under the direction of historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.
Chandler, then the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at Harvard Business School, was a pioneer in comparative business history. One of his earliest books, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (1962), compared four large American companies—DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil New Jersey, and Sears, Roebuck and Company—and their decision to adopt a multidivisional system of governance.Footnote 1 In The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977), Chandler brought comparative analysis to the level of industries, looking at those that did, and did not, adopt the large horizontally and vertically integrated structures that came to define managerial capitalism.Footnote 2 Chandler’s interest in comparative history also eventually turned to internationally comparative work, as evident in his 1990 book Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, which looked at industrial development across Britain, Germany, and the United States.Footnote 3
Chandler's own interest in international comparisons was informed and encouraged by his colleagues at HBS, by the many visitors who came to Boston to work with him starting in the 1970s, and by a series of international conferences.Footnote 4 One important figure in this work was his HBS colleague Bruce R. Scott. Scott coordinated a project known as “Industrial Development and Public Policy,” in which he supervised four doctoral dissertations aimed at applying Chandler’s insights and methods across different European nations. The volumes that came from this project included Derek Channon's The Strategy and Structure of British Enterprise (1973), Gareth Dyas and Heinz Thanheiser's The Emerging European Enterprise: Strategy and Structure in French and German Industry (1976), and Robert J. Pavan's Strutture e strategie delle imprese italiane (1976).Footnote 5 In addition, the British scholar Leslie Hannah published The Rise of the Corporate Economy: The British Experience (1976), which featured a foreword by Chandler, and the Belgian economist Herman Daems coedited, with Chandler, Managerial Hierarchies: Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Modern Industrial Enterprise (1980).Footnote 6 The edited collection included essays by Hannah, the French historian Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, the German historian Jürgen Kocka, and American scholars Morton Keller and Oliver Williamson. Among the significant international conferences was the first Fuji Conference, in 1974, which took as its subject the “Strategy and Structure” of big business.Footnote 7
Franco Amatori was among the group of scholars who studied with Chandler at Harvard Business School and then helped to extend and develop comparative approaches to business history in their home countries. Returning to Italy in the early 1980s, Amatori translated some of Chandler's works, publishing, for instance, La mano visibile: La rivoluzione manageriale nell'economia americana (1981) and Dimensione e diversificazione. Le dianmiche del capitalismo industrial (1994).Footnote 8 Decades later, Amatori’s work remains true to the Chandlerian paradigm of business history when many others have turned away from writing histories of the firm.Footnote 9
Amatori at Bocconi
From the time Amatori started to teach at Università Bocconi in 1985 through to his retirement in 2019, he built Bocconi into a leading center for teaching business history. Amatori has also created significant institutions for developing the field in Italy and was among the founders of the Italian Association for Business History (ASSI). On his own and with colleagues he published major studies of Italian industry. In a 1980 article for Business History Review, Amatori spelled out his goals for transforming the historical scholarship of industrial Italy in the twentieth century, a field that up to that moment was largely dominated by labor and union history. He sought to shed light especially on the specificities of Italian entrepreneurship and what he called “the social problems of the internal organization of a firm.”Footnote 10 Because Italian industrial development had been characterized by massive state involvement, he explained, the agency of entrepreneurs had been neglected in the history of Italian industrialization.Footnote 11 By studying Italian entrepreneurs across firms, Amatori sought to redefine ideas about productive efficiency, economic rationality, and entrepreneurship within the “peculiarities” of Italian economic history.Footnote 12 In addition to his work on entrepreneurs, Amatori also completed major research studies of large Italian businesses, such as the chemical giant Montecatini, the high-end retailer La Rinascente, and the automaker Lancia.Footnote 13 With his longtime Bocconi colleague Andrea Colli, Amatori published an overview of the history of Italian industry, Impresa e industria in Italia dall'Unità ad oggi (2000).Footnote 14 With Giuseppe Berta and Colli, he launched a dictionary of Italian business leaders, an ongoing project featuring biographies of prominent individuals from the political unification of the country to 2000.Footnote 15
Throughout, Amatori encouraged a comparative approach to business history. Along with Chandler and the Japanese scholar Takashi Hikino, Amatori produced an edited collection, Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (1997). The volume included a collection of essays that chronicled the emergence of global business enterprise across more than a dozen countries and two centuries. The essays examined industrialization in these countries compared to the United States and, in so doing, sought to demonstrate the applicability of Chandlerian insights to different national contexts. The book also produced a generalizable model of big business rooted in the Chandlerian concepts of managerial knowledge accumulation and achievement of economies of scale and scope. But it also applied new concepts such as network forms of business organization, which did not conform to U.S.-style structure, thereby opening the door for what Amatori later described as furthering the Chandlerian “spirit” without insistence on a doctrinaire adherence to the “rigid text.”Footnote 16
In the second half of the 1990s, Amatori began organizing a series of international colloquia to be held in Milan. These came to be known as the “Madunina Conferences,” after the popular nickname of the golden statue of Virgin Mary at the top of the city's cathedral. Starting from the inaugural one in 1996 (focusing on state-owned enterprises, a pioneering subject at that time) the Madunina Conferences for many years brought together international scholars to present thematic or country-specific papers on general topics of primary interest for business historians.Footnote 17 Every other year from 1996 (following the model of the Fuji Conference in Japan), groups of international experts convened in Milan, debating among themselves behind closed doors for two days, presenting essays focused on national cases on specific themes. A third day was devoted to the presentation of the conference's proceedings to a qualified audience of scholars and practitioners, by means of keynote speeches given by senior scholars among those present at the colloquium. The organization of the conferences went on almost without interruption until concluding in 2017.Footnote 18
Business History around the World
Around 2000, Amatori started a new book series—published by Cambridge University Press and titled “Comparative Perspectives in Business History”—with Johns Hopkins University professor Louis Galambos as co-editor, in part to publish essays from the Milan workshops. The book series published a number of edited collections, including Pier Angelo Toninelli's The Rise and Fall of State-Owned Enterprise in the Western World (2000), which featured an essay by Amatori entitled “Beyond State and Market: Italy's Futile Search for a Third Way.” Other edited books in this series included The Global Chemical Industry in the Age of the Petrochemical Revolution (2007), The Cooperative Business Movement, 1950 to the Present (2012), The Third Industrial Revolution in Global Business (2013), and State Capitalism, Institutional Adaptation, and the Chinese Miracle (2015).Footnote 19
In particular, the second edited volume of the series became the best known. It was Business History around the World (2003), edited by Amatori and Geoffrey Jones.Footnote 20 The volume took comparative business history in a new direction, looking at comparative approaches in the field itself. The volume included chapters on the evolution of business history in the United States, in many European countries, and elsewhere. The volume also contained a separate section directly on comparative business history, with chapters on family firms, multinationals, and the dynamics of government-business relations.Footnote 21 Business History around the World set a standard in comparative business history, bringing into the discipline a growing consciousness of its global reach but also of its identity and its boundaries—and, with this, building up a scientific profile increasingly recognized by other academic fields, such as entrepreneurship, strategy, management, organizational studies, corporate governance, and international business.
Reflecting the time it was written, Business History around the World largely took a developed-nation approach, although there were pioneering chapters on both China and Latin America. The editors also noted the “growing literatures” on the business history of emerging markets.Footnote 22 The concern for business history beyond developed countries became a growing theme in Amatori's work. In 2017, the last Madunina Conference explicitly recognized the importance of the global South in the world economy. This time, the meeting—organized again by Amatori, with co-organizers Geoffrey Jones and Andrea Colli—was titled “Business History in the Age of Modern Globalization: An International Colloquium in Business History,” in order to stress the “global” comparative dimension. In the 2017 event, the United States, Europe, and Japan had a much-reduced presence, and the emphasis was on the rest of the world, including China, India, Korea, Africa, Oceania, South America, Eastern Europe, and Turkey.
In Amatori's vision, the goal of the conference was to blend historiography with history, examining business historiography in these regions, with references to the most important issues that business history has addressed. This project, embracing changes in the discipline around the world, sought to understand features of business from “emerging markets” not as anomalies but as varieties that needed to be approached in contextual terms. Exploring non-linear and even conflicting trajectories of the rest of the world, Amatori thought, would enable scholars to reevaluate their shared assumptions about the nature of businesses in more diverse contexts. In this way, the final Madunina Conference marked a special moment, promoting a more heterogeneous and multinational research agenda.
In the fall of 2019, Franco Amatori retired, just days after concluding the elective course he had taught, under the evocative title “Comparative Business History: Competition and Globalization.” The course explicitly emphasized the global and comparative dimensions in the study of modern capitalism and analysis (from the perspective of the building block of modern capitalism, the business enterprise) of “macro” issues such as convergence, growth, and development. It was a course very much appreciated by the students, who crowded Franco's classes, attracted by his informal teaching style as well as the content of the course, a popular subject among business school students.Footnote 23
Going back to Franco Amatori's often repeated aphorism quoted at the beginning, comparative research increases the value of historians’ research efforts, adding strength to the conclusions and insight to the analysis. Individually, Franco has contributed to comparative business history as much as anyone, both through his work and the networks he has forged. For all this, as well as for his many other merits in providing intellectual stimuli, research ideas, and pathbreaking scientific contributions, the whole community of business historians has to pay to Franco Amatori a tribute, praising him for his continuing dedication to our discipline. The essays in this special issue are intended to continue this work in the field of international comparative research.
