ILPC 2026

Alessia Contu^1, Marco Zurru², Barbara Barbieri²

¹Management Department University of Massachusetts, Boston – USA; ²University of Cagliari – ITALY

alessia.contu@umb.edu; zurru@unica.it; barbara.barbieri@unica.it

The financial and economic crisis has had a clear global dimension. In Italy one of its dire consequences which is also evident in other European and in Latin American countries, has been the increased number of firm shutdowns. Since 2008 about 82000 firms have declared bankruptcies (Cerved, 2015); and many more have closed down their activities. It is in such a scenario of crisis that we have witnessed the emergence of workers-recovered firms.

In this paper we analyse the Italian situation showing the key similarities and differences between the Italian context and experiences with the well-known cases in Latin America. Our comparison centres on Argentina where the phenomenon of the empresas recuperadas has significant proportions and has been well documented (e.g. Vieta, 2015).

In Italy the phenomenon was already present in the 80s as a result of the crisis of Fordist system that invested the Milan-Genoa-Turin ‘industrial triangle’. At present there are about 252 (Vieta et al. 2015) workers’ recovered firms mostly located in Centre-North regions.

The contribution of this paper is to highlight the fundamental and discerning role the institutional environment plays in Italy and the opportunities and challenges this opens up in relation to a number of questions on local economic development, and organisational and managerial dilemmas and options.

A key point of distinction we highlight in our study is how in Italy there is an institutional terrain that facilitates and supports workers’ recovered firms. Zooming in on the legislative framework (based on the Marcora Act n. 49, 1985) we show how this creates the conditions that allow workers to become owners of the firm. The expectation is that such institutional framework facilitates the re-constitution of the firm as a solid economic, productive actor. This would include fruitful relationship with banks and investors with access to credit flows and options for consolidation and growth, for example through investments in technologies and human resources. We explore if and how such expectations are realised by focusing on the actual practices and experiences of reconversion of Isolex a chemical firm in the north of Sardinia. The company shutdown occurred in 20xx and his 30 workers have recovered the firm and are currently continuing production. Using the normative instruments of the Lega Nazionale delle Cooperative,  Cooperazione Finanza Impresa (CFI) and  Fondo mutualistico della Lega Coop (Coopfond) workers initiated  a process of by-out which ended up with the transformation of the company into a workers cooperative governed with principles and practices of self-management.

Our study overall opens up a number of reflections and fruitful research questions on the following areas:  1. Identification of differences between workers-buy out and the empresas recuperadas; 2. Exploration and explanation of territorial heterogeneity and it diverse conditions of possibility in the uptake and diffusion of practices of recuparation 3. Analysis of governance, managerial and organizational dilemmas faced by recovered firms.