2001, Da Capo Press. Davvero molto interessante, e di ampissimo respiro. Non lo conoscevo e lo consiglio.
A second cultural change associated with postwar economic growth came from the increase in “entrepreneurial” activities. Entrepreneurship is an intangible quality, often associated with small business and individuals’ willingness to establish new businesses. This was particularly important in Italy, where much growth came from new or expanded family businesses, but was less visible in France, Great Britain and West Germany, whose economies were overshadowed by large enterprises. Big business could take risks, but in practice the gamble taken by a professional manager presenting a project to a board ofdirectors could never be the same as that taken by an individual starting out on his own.
Many of those who set up in business did not do so by choice. Sometimes, as in the case of the pieds noirs in France or those whose lack of education excluded them from state employment in Italy, entrepreneurship reflected a lack of more comfortable opportunities, and the willingness to take economic risks often came from precisely the kind of irrational thinking that planners deplored. The desire for independence and obsession with quality that made families set up new enterprises in the “dynamic” northern Italian fashion industry might also encourage a "backward” Breton peasant to stay on his land. The capacity of each economy to produce entrepreneurs was linked to national cultures in curious ways.
.
