Politics and Rhetoric of Italian State Steel Privatization. A Gramscian Analysis

The globally spreading privatization wave that occurred in the 1990s deeply changed the structure of economic institutions worldwide. This turmoil overturned not only economic institutions, but shared cultural and societal institutions as well. This book is the result of an investigation into the history of the privatization of the steel industry in Italy, completed between 1994 and 1995. It explores the history of the Italian steel industry by looking at the interplay of local intertwined interests, political relations, and ideological formations that characterized an idiosyncratic hegemonic historical bloc. Rather than stigmatising this pattern as the legacy of a dysfunctional provincialism, the authors mobilise Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to explain how the Italian privatization process unfolded to accommodate economic pressures, political interests, and ideological constraints of a hegemonic social group, or aggregation of social groups. Thus, in reconstructing the privatization of Italian steel, this book proposes a hegemony theory of privatization and, more generally, describes a model that explains how political and cultural dynamics give rise to idiosyncratic local variations in globally spreading policies.