Business history

The course intends to offer a historical contextualization that allows translating the vague theoretical representations - that have often been made of entrepreneur and enterprise - in real and concrete protagonists of the economic and social life of the modern development. The objective is, therefore, to grasp, thanks to an inductive approach, the complexity of the evolution of business and entrepreneurship from the first pre-industrial organizational forms until the twentieth century. The ideas and elaborations of business theories are gradually reviewed and adapted through a reciprocal process of correction and proposition, conducted both on the basis of the dialectical relationship with contemporary social, institutional and technological factors, and on the basis of the reconstruction of the links between micro and macro dynamics, related to the wealth of the nation.

At the end of the course, students are expected to be able:
- to have a good commando of the concepts and main interpretations of business history;
- to understand and evaluate, through a comparative approach, the role of national and international contexts in conditioning and determining, over the last two centuries, the main characteristics and types of enterprises (and entrepreneurial choices), as well as their evolutionary dynamics;
- to reflect on the role of different national contexts in providing opportunities and/or placing constraints on the action of businesses and entrepreneurs;
- to carry on a critical analysis of entrepreneurial choices and decision-making processes in relation to inertia and traditions, technological factors (or limits), and short or long term crises;
- to identify and evaluate the critical hairpin bends in the paths of development of a company, the multiple positions of the State towards it, and the strengths or critical points represented by the workforce;
- to argument along the space-time axis the importance of business and entrepreneurship for economic growth and as institutions able to overcome the constraints imposed by technology and the market;
- to reflect on the role of different national contexts in providing opportunities and/or placing constraints on the action of businesses and entrepreneurs.