Article1995

A New Phoenix?: Modern Putting-Out in the Modena Knitwear Industry

227 citations0/0 files storedAdministrative Science Quarterly

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Regional Development and Innovation Historical Economic and Social Studies Global trade, sustainability, and social impact

Abstract

Support for this research was provided by a Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute and by a research grant of the O.E.C.D.'s Office on Local Employment Initiatives. I am most indebted to Paolo Bignardi, who introduced me to the inner workings of the knitwear industry and gave generously of himself during my many visits to his home and firm, and to the Modena National Confederation of Artisans and its staff members, who offered me invaluable assistance. The Modena Camera del Lavoro, the Modena Association of Small Enterprises, the Modena Industrial Association, and Professors Sebastiano Brusco and Tiziano Bursi of the University of Modena also provided crucial help. In addition, I would like to thank Charles Perrow, who first encouraged me to study putting-out, and Marshall Meyer and three anonymous reviewers for their editorial and substantive comments. Drawing on data from the contemporary Italian knitwear industry, this paper examines putting-out, the domestic system of production, and criticisms of it in traditional theories of economic development as inherently backward and organizationally inefficient compared with large-scale production. I describe the historical putting-out system and its context and distinguish it from modern putting-out by contrasting the features of each. The paper shows that a modernized form of putting-out, composed of interlinked microfirms, is compatible with high living standards and organizational efficiency. The success of the system rests on technological and marketing factors, the presence of cohesive family units, cooperative relationships between business and community actors, and an institutional environment supportive of small, family-run firms.'

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 227 citations exist upstream.

References

1985Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness 2017The Discovery of Grounded Theory 1990Foundations of social theory 1993Making democracy work: civic traditions in modern Italy 2020Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 1996Production, Information Costs and Economic Organization 1983Structure and Change in Economic History 1987The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity

Cited by

2002Social Capital: Prospects for a New Concept 2007Modes of Network Governance: Structure, Management, and Effectiveness 1999Embeddedness in the Making of Financial Capital: How Social Relations and Networks Benefit Firms Seeking Financing 2010Dynamics of Dyads in Social Networks: Assortative, Relational, and Proximity Mechanisms 2003Networks and Economic life 2005Prospects for Organization Theory in the Early Twenty-First Century: Institutional Fields and Mechanisms

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.