Piccole imprese grande Bologna? Spazi della produzione e culture del lavoro autonomo nel bolognese fra anni Sessanta e Settanta

The everlasting idea of a «great Bologna» shapes, during the «economic miracle» years, local political and administrative action that put the city at the midst of a economic region made by industrial expansion. With the aim of studying socio-political implications of industrialization during the 1960s and 1970s, this research’s aim is to weave three separate level of analysis: a) the process of socio-economic transformation during those decades with the purpose of understanding the general features – in terms of economics, dimensional, spatial – within it extra-local connections; b) the role played by the Italian Communist Party (PCI), as local hegemonic actor, while developing a specific territorial political economy, seen in respect to other local actors (Chamber of Commerce and National Artisans’ Federation, CNA) and in the complex dialectics between party’s center versus Emilian periphery; c) the study of specific trajectories of subjective and individual patterns as a way to give complex historical perspective otherwise collapsed within a well established narrative usually concerned in emphasizing continuity and inner coherence instead of crafting a specific place for aporias and historical cleavages. Against this established narrative , the research criticize the category of «Emilian model» as a precise ideological formula which continues to have strong influence in present time. Furthermore, by using a framework shaped into three different topics – professional identity, cultural-political belonging, autonomy research –, the dissertation aims at redefine a non-ontological ‘labor culture of self-employment’ as an attempt of shed lights on aporias and contradictions within its problematic relationship with Third Italy’s narrative of small entrepreneurship.