Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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Sanctuaries, statues and relics continue to attract devotees. A spectacular example is the
blood alleged to have come from Saint Januarius, patron of Naples, which liquefies on
three commemorative occasions each year in the presence of eager spectators.
The celebration of the local patron saint provides an annual focus for community
identity and collaboration: in the South many saints’ days have been moved to summer
when emigrants can return on holiday and participate. Simultaneous celebrations are
often organized by concentrations of emigrés abroad. Since patron saints intercede with
Mary, Christ and God on behalf of their human supplicants, they provide a spiritual
model for relations between human patrons and clients. Like earthly patrons, they are
expected to perform: those who fail to respond to prayers, entreaties and gifts may be
replaced without compunction.
Further reading
Carroll, M.P. (1992) Madonnas that Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the Fifteenth
Century, London: Johns Hopkins Press.
Galasso, G. (1982) L’altra Europa (The Other Europe), Milan: A. Mondadori (religious practice
and belief in Southern Italy).
Orsi, R.A. (1985) The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1850–
1950, New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
Tentori, T. (1976) ‘An Italian Religious Feast: The Fujenti Rites of the Madonna dell’Arco,
Naples’, Cultures 3 (1): 117–40.
DAVID MOSS
Patroni Griffi, Giuseppe
b. 27 February 1921, Naples
Director and playwright
As playwright, Patroni Griffi’s work ranges from wordy pedestrian realism to the broad
vivacity of the Neapolitan comic tradition. Artistic director of Rome’s Teatro Eliseo since
1978, Patroni-Griffi is best known as a meticulous theatrical director, balancing close
attention to text, design and performance. He has mounted prestigious works of high
literary calibre, both within and outside the Italian tradition, by such playwrights as
Goldoni, Brecht, Alfieri, T.S.Eliot, Chekhov, Jean-Paul Sartre and Alberto Moravia. His
revival of plays by fellow Neapolitan Raffaele Viviani, and his staging of Pirandello’s
metatheatrical trilogy, using the same actors and exercising a strong and consistent
directorial vision, have especially served to establish his reputation. His cinematic
direction of half a dozen films, including film versions of two of his own plays, has been
more sporadic and uneven in quality.
WILLIAM VAN WATSON
Entries A–Z 601
Pavarotti, Luciano
b. 12 October 1935, Modena
Tenor
Pavarotti won the international competition at the Teatro Reggio Emilia in 1961 and
made his debut as Rodolfo there in the same year. His international career developed
swiftly, with operatic performances at Covent Garden in 1963 and tours of Australia
(1965) and the USA (1968). Acclaimed for his robust, energetic style, he became
particularly identified at this time with the roles of Edgardo, Tonio (The Daughter of the
Regiment), Cavaradossi and Arturo (I puritani (The Puritans)), and was often partnered
with Joan Sutherland. Pavarotti’s prominent international reputation increased as a result
of his involvement in Italy’s 1990 World Cup festivities. Together with José Carreras and
Placido Domingo, he appeared in a gala concert that was billed as ‘The Three Tenors’,
and his performance of Puccini’s Nessun dorma (None Shall Sleep) was adopted as the
official anthem of the tournament. His showmanship and flair ensure his continued
popular appeal, but musical connoisseurs may prefer, perhaps, to remember him by his
notable recordings of the 1960s and 1970s.
Further reading
Kesting, J. (1996) Luciano Pavarotti: The Myth of the Tenor, trans. S.Hay, Boston: Northeastern
University Press (an examination of the mass marketing of the Pavarotti ‘phenomenon’).
Pavarotti, L. and Wright, W. (1995) Pavarotti: My World, London: Crown Publications (Pavarotti’s
own story).
JOHN KERSEY
Pavese, Cesare
b. 9 September 1908, Santo Stefano Belbo; d. 27 August 1950, Turin
Novelist, poet, translator and essayist
One of the century’s most prolific authors, Cesare Pavese influenced subsequent
generations of writers even though his activity as a writer was cut short by suicide. Early
in his life, he read extensively from the classics and from contemporary authors,
developing an intense interest in American film and literature. Between 1930 and 1943,
Pavese translated novels by Anderson, Faulkner, Lewis, Melville, Stein, Joyce, Dickens,
Defoe and others, and was one of the first Italian intellectuals, with Elio Vittorini, to
appreciate the influence of American culture in Italy. In 1936, while Pavese was confined
to Brancaleone Calabro for allegedly helping the communist underground, Lavorare
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stanca (Hard Labour) was published, a collection of poems whose narrative structure was
influenced by Walt Whitman’s free verse. During the war Pavese became an editor for
Einaudi and in 1941 published his first novel, Paesi tuoi (The Harvesters), a book
considered to be an early example of literary neorealism. Although sym pathetic to the
cause of the Resistance, Pavese did not join the partisans, an omission that haunted him
after the war. Instead, he wrote a number of short stories that were published in the 1946
collection Feria d’agosto (Summer Storm) and, posthumously, in Notte di festa (Festival
Night).
At the end of the war, Pavese joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and returned
to work for Einaudi where, as one of the chief editors, he introduced the work of Carl
Jung and Károlyi Kerényi on ethnography to the Italian public, and helped promote the
writing of Italo Calvino and Beppe Fenoglio. Between 1945 and 1950 Pavese wrote at a
feverish pace: among the books that Einaudi published in those years are Il Compagno
(The Comrade), Pavese’s only outspokenly political work, and La casa in collina (The
House on the Hill), the anguished reflections of an intellectual’s plight during the
Resistance which is frequently considered his best novel. Yet, it was only with La luna e i
falò (The Moon and the Bonfires), published a few months before his death, that Pavese
finally achieved both critical acclaim and financial success. The end of his short-lived
relationship with American actress Constance Dowling—the last in a long list of amorous
failures and the subsequent bout of chronic depression led Pavese to commit suicide in
August of 1950. After his death, Einaudi continued to publish Pavese’s manuscripts. The
most important was the diary Il mestiere di vivere: 1935–1950 (The Burning Brand:
Diaries 1935 1950), which remains the clearest documentation of a generation’s struggle
to reconcile its aversion to fascism with its populist aspirations as the country returned to
democracy in the postwar years.
Further reading
Lajolo, D. (1983) An Absurd Vice, trans. M. Pietralunga and M.Pietralunga, New York: New
Directions (a somewhat idealized biography that includes a useful bibliography of Pavese’s
work).
O’Healy, A. (1988) Cesare Pavese, Boston: Twayne Publishers (a general introduction to the life
and works of Pavese).
Pavese, C. (1990) The Moon and the Bonfires, trans. D. Walder, Milton Keynes: Open University
Press (most recent translation of what is often regarded as his most accomplished novel).
— (1979) Hard Labor, trans. W.Arrowsmith, New York: Ecco Press (Pavese’s early collection of
poetry which is still considered among his highest achievements, especially in Englishspeaking
countries).
— (1961) The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935–1950, trans. A.E.Murah, New York: Walker.
VALERIO FERME
Entries A–Z 603
Pazienza, Andrea
b. 23 May 1956, San Benedetto del Tronto (Ascoli Piceno); d. 16 June 1988,
Montepulciano
Cartoonist, visual artist
A veritable legend among Italian cartoonists, Pazienza often claimed to have begun
drawing at the age of eighteen months. What is certain is that, in the early 1970s, while
still in high school in Pescara, he participated in various artistic activities and exhibited
numerous paintings and drawings with the Convergence collective. In 1974 he enrolled in
the DAMS (School of Art, Music, Spectacle and Dance) at the University of Bologna,
soon becoming involved in the student movement which would explode into the tragic
events of 1977 (see Radio Alice).
In 1977, together with fellow cartoonists Filippo Scozzari, Stefano Tamburini and
Tanino Liberatore, he initiated the magazine Cannibale whilst having his first of his Le
straordinarie avventure di Pentothal (The Extraordinary Adventures of Pentothal)
published in the prestigious Alter-Alter (see Linus). In 1978 he began collaborating on
the satirical journal, Il Male, and by the time it had folded in 1981 Pazienza had already
co-founded a new illustrated magazine, Frigidaire, in whose pages the wicked, sharp-
nosed Zanardi first made his appearance before spreading to the pages of AlterAlter and
Comic Art. He had also designed numerous album covers and film posters, including a
memorable poster for Fellini’s La città delle donne (The City of Women).
In 1985 he moved to the small Sienese town of Montepulciano and a year later
married Marina Comandini. From 1986 onwards, as well as continuing many of his
previous collaborations, he also contributed to Tango, the new satirical supplement of the
PCI daily, L’Unità, as well as designing the Agenda Verde for the ecological group
Legambiente (see environmental movement) and posters for Amnesty International.
However in June 1988, at his home at Montepulciano, a heroin overdose would give
the lie to what had been one of his favourite and oftenrepeated maxims: ‘La pazienza ha
un limite; Pazienza no!’ (Patience has a limit but not Pazienza).
Following his untimely death at the age of only thirty-two, the town of Cremona
instituted the Centro Fumetti Andrea Pazienza (Andrea Pazienza Centre for Comic Art)
to commemorate his art and memory, and in 1997 Bologna hosted a huge retrospective of
his work, much of which has now been made available on CD ROM.
Further reading
Benvenuto, M. (ed.) (1997) Andrea Pazienza: l’antologia illimitata (Andrea Pazienza: the
Unlimited Anthology), CD ROM, Profile Multimedia and Ponderosa Arte (a digital multimedia
journey through his life and works; includes two complete versions of Le straordinarie
avventure di Pentothal and Gli ultimi gioni di Pompeo).
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Pazienza, A. (1992) Sturiellet (Short Stories), Montepulciano: Editori del Grifo/La Nuova
Mongolfiera (a good collection of some of Pazienza’s best shorter pieces).
GINO MOLITERNO
Pazzi, Roberto
b. 18 August 1946, Ameglia, La Spezia
Professor, poet and novelist
A native of Liguria, Roberto Pazzi has elected to live and work in Ferrara. After several
collections of poetry, in 1985 he published his first novel Cercando l’imperatore
(Searching for the Emperor), which was critically acclaimed both in Italy and abroad and
received the prestigious Campiello Prize. There have followed a number of other novels,
including La principessa e il drago (The Princess and the Dragon) (1986), La malattia
del tempo (The Illness of Time) (1987), La stanza sull’acqua (The Room on the Water)
(1991) and Incerti di viaggio (The Hazards of Travelling) (1996). Pazzi’s fiction is
characterized by an evocative treatment of time whereby the historical past is suspended
in an atemporal present, thus provoking loss and disruption of both collective and
individual memory. While successfully continuing to write poetry and fiction, Pazzi also
contributes to a number of magazines and newspapers.
FRANCESCA PARMEGGIAN
PCI
The PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano, or Italian Communist Party) was founded in 1921
through secession from the Socialist Party. Outlawed by the Fascist regime in 1926, it
played the leading role in the Resistance in 1943–5 and became the largest communist
party outside the Soviet bloc and China by the mid-1970s. In 1991, still a major force in
Italian politics, it dissolved itself. The Party’s history shows many paradoxical features. It
declared national redemption as its mission, although its most loyal following was
concentrated in a few regions of central and north-central Italy; it pursued the dictatorship
of the proletariat, but found more members and voters in the middle classes than among
industrial and agricultural workers; it was committed to defending the weak and the
powerless, but attracted greater support in the rich heartlands of the Third Italy than in
the poor regions of the South; and it proclaimed the value of democracy while remaining
highly undemocratic in its internal organization and hostile to mass culture. Even these
idiosyncrasies, however, did not enable it to find the distinctively ‘Italian route to
socialism’ sought by its most influential postwar leader, Palmiro Togliatti. Nevertheless,
the Party did play an essential role in establishing Italy’s postwar democracy in the late
Entries A–Z 605
1940s, in defending it against terrorism in the 1970s and, generally, in promoting the
ideals of social justice and equality.
Inventing the new party and the new Italy, 1944–7
Returning to Italy from Moscow in 1944, Togliatti declared that the PCI must become a
mass democratic party rather than the semiclandestine revolutionary sect created by
Leninist ideology and Fascist persecution. Sixty thousand sections and factory cells were
established, and Party membership rapidly rose to almost two million. Collaboration with
Catholic and socialist leaders during the Resistance was extended into postwar
government coalitions with the DC and PSI. In pursuit of national reconstruction and
Party legitimacy, Togliatti was prepared to sacrifice class interests and communist ideals
to the maintenance of government unity. His strategy, for which he claimed the
intellectual authority of party founder, Antonio Gramsci, enabled Italy to replace the
monarchy with the Republic, adopt a new constitution and deal with the Fascist legacy
without paralysing conflict. But for many Party faithful, the PCI made too many
concessions to the Church and conservative interests; and radical members continued to
believe that the Party’s popularity and Resistance armoury could—and should—have
been used to force through a social revolution. In 1947, however, under Cold War
pressures, the PCI was first ousted from government and then defeated in the 1948
elections. Tainted by association with Soviet communism, the Party was never again
regarded as a legitimate partner in power.
The long march through the institutions, 1948–79
Defeat encouraged the PCI to expand its presence in Italian society. Party influence was
spread through a daily newspaper (L’Unità), a journal Rinascita and a publishing house
(Editori Riuniti), by strong ties with trade unions (the CGIL), the major women’s
organization (UDI) and co-operatives (National League of Co-operatives), by the setting
up and maintenance of intellectual centres (Gramsci Institutes) and recreational
associations (ARCI) and by annual festivals (Festa dell’Unità). These cultural networks
remained firmly under the control of the PCI leadership (see Amendola; Berlinguer;
Ingrao; Napolitano; Pajetta), enabling the Party to increase its vote at each election
between 1948 and 1976 and thus to play an essential role in negotiating government
legislation. Despite the emergence of a hostile extraparliamentary Left in 1968–9 and
the internal dissent of il manifesto, the Party actually gained from the accompanying
prolonged wave of industrial, social and cultural conflict. In 1975 the PCI came to power
in every major Italian city, and in the national elections of 1976, one in three Italians
voted communist. Profiting from widespread dissatisfaction with scandal-ridden DC
governments incapable of reforming Italy’s archaic institutions, the PCI also benefited
from its ‘historic compromise’ proposal, from its willingness to acknowledge middle-
class and even employer interests and by its gradual detachment from Soviet influence.
However, the Party’s seemingly unstoppable advance towards power went no further,
culminating simply in support for the ‘national solidarity’ DC-government of 1977–9.
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Several factors account for the check. The need to combat high inflation and
terrorism associated the Party with unpopular conservative policies; municipal
responsibilities forced inexperienced local Party leaders to neglect politics in favour of
administration; implementing the ‘historic compromise’ alienated many local branches
from national policy; and the murder of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978
removed the Party’s leading DC interlocutor. In 1979, the PCI abandoned the pursuit of
an alliance with the DC and openly criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, thus
definitively eliminating—without obvious replacements—the Party’s national and
international policy co-ordinates.
Wandering in the wilderness, 1980–91
In the 1980s, the organization and ideology which had earlier been so effective in
mobilizing support for the PCI proved a serious liability. The Party’s autocratic structure
and class rhetoric made it unattractive to Greens (see Verdi), feminists or civil
libertarians; its lingering suspicion of ‘American’ mass culture denied it much appeal to
youth or the consumption-oriented middle classes, who preferred the PSI under Craxi; its
lasting fondness for state control put it out of step with enthusiasms for ‘market forces’
and resurgent European integration; and the decline of Italy’s industrial working-class
and trade union movement drained a traditional reservoir of support. Party membership
not only fell by 20 per cent between 1977 and 1989, but it also aged rapidly: by 1990, the
average age of a PCI member was fifty-two, and one in four members was a pensioner.
The Party’s electoral support fell as inexorably in the 1980s as it had risen in earlier
decades, signalling a policy vacuum and a loss of any clear political identity or social
vision for the Left. Claims to stand for a new public morality failed to impress voters or
to halt the spread of corruption. Even before communism collapsed on a global scale after
1989, therefore, the last leader of the PCI, Achille Occhetto, had determined to transform
its name, organization and ideology. Although the PCI was still easily the second largest
party and was supported by one in four Italians, Occhetto pushed through his proposal to
dissolve it at the Party’s Twentieth Congress in 1991. A small minority created a new
party to preserve the name and symbol of communism, but the larger successor
organization, the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), used the leaders, organization and
support which it had inherited from the PCI to win power in 1996 as the leading force in
the Ulivo coalition of centre left parties.
Further reading
Bull, M. (1991) ‘Whatever Happened to Italian Communism? Explaining the Dissolution of the
Largest Communist Party in the West’, West European Politics 14 (4): 96–120.
Hellman, S. (1996) ‘Italian Communism in the First Republic’, in S.Gundle and S.Parker (eds), The
New Italian Republic: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to Berlusconi, London: Routledge (clear
summary of changing PCI strategies and the issues they raised).
Kertzer, D. (1980) Comrades and Christians: Religion and Political Struggle in Communist Italy,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (anthropological description of communism and
Catholicism in working-class Bologna).
Entries A–Z 607
Sassoon, D. (1992) The Rise and Fall of West European Communism 1939–48’, Contemporary
European History 1 (2): 139–69 (examines the impact of the Cold War on the development of
communism, comparing Italian and other European experiences).
DAVID MOSS
PDS
A transitional post-communist party, the PDS (Partito Democratico della Sinistra, or
Democratic Party of the Left) inherited most of the leaders, members and political culture
of the PCI but was destined to give way to a broader left-wing formation less constrained
by the PCI inheritance.
After a fifteen-month spell as La cosa (The Thing), in which the name, ideology and
structure of the new party were widely debated at the grassroots, the PDS was formally
established in February 1991. Achille Occhetto was elected leader but a significant
minority of true believers headed by Armando Cossutta, who refused to jettison
communism, left to form Rifondazione Comunista. Uncertainty about the PDS
programme, open conflict between its factions and diminished activism on the part of its
falling, if still substantial, membership of 700,000 led to severe punishment at the
national elections in 1992: the party achieved only 17 per cent of the vote, as against the
26 per cent won by its predecessor in 1987. Nonetheless, the PDS provided three
ministers in the new Ciampi government, although they resigned after three days when
the Chamber of Deputies (see Parliament) refused to waive the parliamentary immunity
of the PSI leader, Bettino Craxi, under investigation for corruption on a grand scale.
Despite its success in getting many of its candidates elected mayors at the local elections
of 1993, the coalition in which the PDS was the dominant member was decisively
defeated by the Polo della Libertà, headed by Silvio Berlusconi, in the national
elections of 1994. Achille Occhetto resigned, to be replaced by Massimo D’Alema who
narrowly defeated Walter Veltroni for the position of general secretary.
In the next elections in 1996, D’Alema paid much greater attention to the arts of
coalition building and tactical voting, assembling a thirteenparty formation (named
l’Ulivo or Olive Tree) around the PDS. His skill paid off in an unexpectedly decisive
victory, and the PDS became the leading party in the Prodi government. However, the
party failed to attract new voters, the electorate being largely put off by the party’s
evident continuity in personnel and style with its communist past. At the Second
Congress in February 1997, therefore, D’Alema proposed a radical solution: that the
PDS, along with its smaller partners under the Olive Tree, dissolve itself into an inclusive
social democratic formation. D’Alema’s proposal carried the day, and consequently in
February 1998 the PDS was transformed into a broad grouping of former communists
and socialists called the Democratici di Sinistra (the Left Democratic Party). In homage
to this unity, a pink rose replaced the hammer and sickle in the emblem of the new group.
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Further reading
Baccetti, C. (1997) Il Pds, Bologna: Il Mulino.
Bull, M.J. (1996) ‘The Reconstitution of the Political Left in Italy: Demise, Renewal, Realignment
and Defeat’, in R.Gillespie (ed.), Mediterranean Politics, vol. 2, London: Pinter.
Gundle, S. and Parker, S. (eds) (1996) The New Italian Republic: From the Fall of Communism to
the Rise of Berlusconi., London: Routledge.
Kertzer, D. (1996) Politics and Symbols: The Italian Communist Party and the Fall of Communism,
New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
DAVID MOSS
peasants
At the time of Italian unification in 1860–1, agriculture was the predominant form of
economic activity in the peninsula, with 90 per cent of the population engaged in it. For
post-1860 Liberal Italy, the peasantry, both because of its allegiance to a Catholic church
opposed to unification and its rootedness in traditional communitarian ways, represented
the main impediment to forming a strong national identification, and the potential reserve
army of clerical reaction and anarchistic revolutionism. Fascist policy sought to
‘nationalize’ the peasants through propaganda, while keeping them on the land or settling
them in the colonies. In the 1943–5 Resistance, most peasants in the centre and north of
Italy concentrated on survival, limiting their active participation to withholding food from
enforced collections and supplying the black market, on which most of the urban
population came to depend.
In 1945, peasants still comprised almost half the working population of the country.
Their relationship to the land was highly differentiated geographically: in the northwest,
parts of the northeast, and the Marches, there were mainly small family farms, only
marginally viable, and tenanted farms. In Tuscany, Veneto and parts of Puglia, most were
sharecroppers; in the Po Valley, and in the South they were generally agricultural
labourers, usually landless. The wartime experience of survival strategies, and the long
tradition of management of family resources by small farmers and sharecroppers,
provided an apprenticeship in microeconomic management which enabled a critical
proportion of the sharecroppers and small proprietors of the central and northern regions
to make the transition, during the economic miracle, to participation as independent
producers in small and medium-sized industry, particularly in the ‘industrial districts’ of
the Third Italy. The younger generation of peasants moved directly into paid
employment in such industry, the women often as home-workers, while maintaining their
links with the family holding.
In the South, however, where agricultural production in 1945 was still concentrated
upon the great estates, unemployment often approached 40 per cent and the only solution
for many was emigration. In the absence of the culture, infrastructures and internal
market needed for industrialization there was little development of entrepreneurial
attitudes. From 1944, repeated mass occupations of uncultivated lands prompted postwar
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governments to introduce piecemeal agrarian reforms, followed in 1950 by the Cassa per
il Mezzogiorno (Southern Development Fund). The aim was to create a class of
independent, prosperous peasant farmers with access to roads, irrigation works and a
clean water supply, but the Cassa was essentially a paternalistic technocratic organization
inspired by a universal model of large-scale development with little reference to the local
conditions and cultures of the peasantry.
This attempt, over three decades, to rescue the South from economic
underdevelopment largely failed. There was a mass exodus of adults of working age to
northern industry, and, especially after the creation of the EEC in 1957, also to other
countries in Europe. Agricultural jobs fell by 60 per cent, in spite of a doubling of
agricultural production due to improved technology and applied crop science. The
relative failure of the attempt to implant industry and enterprise emerges clearly from the
disparity between the increase in new industrial jobs: two million in the North as against
only 370,000 in the South. The relocation of millions of peasant migrants to the bleak
suburbs of the northern cities, where they competed for unskilled work in factories and
sweatshops, left the South severely drained of enterprise and easy prey to corruption and
organized crime. More significant still, however, was the corresponding scissorseffect in
relation to small businesses: while in the North during this quarter-century, artisan family
firms employing fewer than ten people rose by 25 per cent, in the South they fell by 20
per cent. While the number of employees in these small and medium manufacturing firms
rose by 70 per cent in the centre and North, in the South there was no increase at all,
clearly signalling the inability of the southern economy and its workforce to respond to
the market challenges of an unprecedented period of rising demand.
A particularly significant feature of this development was the absence of any large-
scale internal migration from the South to the ‘Third Italy’, compared with the massive
flow of almost three million unskilled southerners to the established factories of the
‘industrial triangle’ in the northwest by 1963. The recruits to the small and mediumsized
industries of the Third Italy came from urban hinterlands where, for generations,
extended peasant family farms had long had economic links with the towns through
piecework done at home and local seasonal employment. Generations of low and
discontinuous wages, compensated by the capacity to survive by collective effort and
coupled with comparable generations of flexible manual skills and human resources
management within the family productive unit, were the basis for a selfpropelling
advance into industrial forms of production. Such peasant families were already an
integral part of the ‘moral’ as well as the material economy of the town-dwellers with
whom they shared the industrial district, which thus avoided the additional external social
and administrative costs of taking in large numbers of migrants from other parts of Italy.
The strong local political cultures of these areas also supported the spread of the
micro-capitalism of the family enterprise though the micro-capitalists, for their part,
continued to vote, even at the height of the Cold War, for those who proclaimed
anticapitalist doctrines at election times. The economic strength of these industrial
districts lay in the flexibility which stemmed directly from the structural characteristics of
the family firm, which could set wages and conditions without reference to national
norms laid down by authority or in collective bargaining, and invest in new technology
from high rates of saving involving sacrifices of living standards. In the period of the
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