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The circulation of practices: Americanizing social relations at the Cornigliano steel plant (Italy), 1948–1960

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This article examines the evolution of social relations in the Italian steel mill at Cornigliano, near Genoa, during the 1950s. Built with funding from the Marshall Plan, the mill was the subject of a number of initiatives aimed at establishing a system of industrial relations based on the contractual and consensual ‘American model’. The transfer of industrial equipment and management tools was used by American authorities to put pressure on Italian players to accept the imported model. But these management techniques tended to lose their identity when they were implemented in the local context. The militant interpretation of ‘human relations’ by Italian managers involved in the anti-communist battle within the factory significantly contributed to the downsizing of the operational dimension of these techniques. The introduction of job evaluation depended less on institutional constraints and more on the internal dynamics of the plant, which allowed for the redevelopment of autonomous relations between man...