Oral sources and business culture

The interest in oral sources of Centro per la cultura d’impresa dates back to 1993. Back then, the Centro took part in the organization of the meeting “...) together with ASSI Foundation, Umbrian ISUC and Provincia di Arezzo. The proceedings of the meeting were published some years later in the volume Fonti orali e storia d'impresa: atti del seminario nazionale Arezzo, 15 ottobre 1993, a cura di Renato Covino, Milano-Soveria Mannelli (Cz), Centro sulla storia dell'impresa e dell'innovazione Rubbettino Editore, 2000, which was a first effort of describing the state-of-the-art of business studies through oral sources. In 1995, the Centro started a research on small business, together with API Milano and with the collaboration of renowned scholars such as Duccio Bigazzi, Giovanni Contini, Giampaolo Gallo, Carolina Lussana, Sandro Lecca, Fabio Mugnaini, Mauro Magatti, Giuseppe Paletta, Cristina Papa.
As an outcome of this first stage of work, about ten testimonies were collected, and some of them were used by Giovanni Contini in his documentary Famiglia e impresa (Family and business), first shown on January 30th, 1996, during the event La memoria dell’impresa ( The memory of business).
After this first experience, the Centro developed a wide range of research projects aimed to investigate business in all its various aspects.
The world of small business was studied through a research work on the bakers in Milan, on the craftsman’s niche job and on a large sample of shopkeepers. As far as small and medium business are concerned, then, a set of interviews to entrepreneurs in mould business was carried out. The case studies on Bassetti and Olivetti concerned the world of big business. Several testimonies were then obtained from stock exchange agents, and the great amount of documentation collected under Roberta Garruccio’s coordination took to a significant scientific outcome.
Also other researches made use of oral sources in order to study business associationism, cooperative enterprise, and policy development within Milan Chamber of Commerce. However, the link with business associations is way stronger than it can appear from these few descriptive lines. As a matter of fact, many of the above mentioned research works were started with the collaboration or even due to an explicit demand of such bodies.
During the last years, the method of the open interview to significant and coherent samples of economic actors has become the usual one in our Association, and it is suggested each time a research work can take advantage of it.
On the other hand, the methodologies drawn out from the technique of oral sources help the Association to find new ways of enhancement, like the documentary movie and the web, that can exploit the expressive potentiality of a video-interview better than the traditional book can do.
The Centro aims to create an audiovisual archive of local economy within the wider project of a territorial economic archive.

Within this project, it cooperates with the Archivio di Etnografia e di Storia Sociale (AESS) of Direzione cultura of Regione Lombardia (Archive for Ethnography and Social History of the Cultural Dept. of Regione Lombardia) and coordinates the project Luoghi della tradizione e del lavoro (Places of tradition and work).

Dal 1995 ad oggi hanno preso parte ai progetti di raccolta di interviste, alcuni collaboratori del Centro (Ginevra Battistini, Maria Chiara Corazza, Gianluca Dilda, Roberta Garruccio, Alberto Grassani, Giovanna Gulli, Fabio Lavista, Carolina Lussana, Giuseppe Paletta, Francesca Ronchi, Giulio Sapelli, Andrea Strambio, Sara Talli Nencioni, Sara Zanisi) e alcuni partner esterni: Giancorrado Barozzi (ricercatore), Angelo Bendotti (Ismec Bergamo), Guido Bertolotti (ricercatore), Duccio Bigazzi (Università degli Studi di Milano), Giovanni Boninelli (archivio della cultura di Base del Comune di Bergamo), Giovanni Contini Bonacossi (Soprintendenza archivistica della Toscana, studioso di storia orale), Renato Covino (Università degli studi di Perugia), Ruggero Eugeni (Università cattolica di Milano, semiologo), John Foot (University London College), Mimmo Franzinelli (storico), Andrea Greco (giornalista), Simonetta Grilli, (Università di Siena, antropologa); Agostina Lavagnino (ricercatrice), Luca Malavasi (Università cattolica di Milano, semiologo), Renata Meazza (Regione Lombardia), Fabio Mugnaini, (Università di Siena, antropologo), Cristina Papa (Università degli studi di Perugia, storica delle tradizioni popolari); Bruno Pianta (Regione Lombardia), Elisa Piria (ricercatrice), Giancarlo Sartini (sociologo), Nevina Satta (Università cattolica di Milano, semiologo), Rossella Schillaci (ricercatrice), Simone Tosoni (Università cattolica di Milano, semiologo), Fabio Tamburini (giornalista), Paolo Volontè (Università cattolica di Milano, sociologo).