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Olivetti, a journey to create a new business culture

The Grand Tour of the USA of the 1920s behind many innovations in the Ivrea-based company

 

Business and organisation of the factory as an uninterrupted flow of material and immaterial relationships and transitions. Business as community. These concepts were dear to Adriano Olivetti, ideas recalled and reaffirmed many times and on many occasions. It is also a worthwhile endeavour to read the contribution of Sabrina Fava (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore) on “Adriano Olivetti. Un approccio pedagogico al lavoro” (Adriano Olivetti: a pedagogical approach to work) which recently appeared in Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica – Journal of Theories and Research in Education to better understand these aspirations.

The author investigates one of the particular aspects of Olivetti’s human and entrepreneurial venture: his ‘educational trip’ to the United States in 1925 and its links with some of the initiatives that would later characterise the entrepreneur’s activities.

Fava relates that Olivetti began to consider strategic company organisation and human resource training choices precisely during his Grand Tour of the United States, when he analysed American production systems in search of effective solutions to overcome workers’ alienation in labour by rethinking the Taylorist production system and overturning the cliche that profit must come first.

Those months gave rise to the impulse to consider the scientific organisation of work according to Adriano, vocational training through the opening of the Mechanics Training Centre and senior management training that would give rise to the IPSOA postgraduate institute of business administration in the 1950s. Sabrina Fava considers these all structural initiatives able to offer a different perspective on the aim of business: not profit as the sole priority, but other things as well.

Fava’s analysis therefore proceeds to trace the making of young Adriano’s impressions and their subsequent transfer to the Ivrea-based company through Olivetti’s letters to family members and other written evidence. Sabrina Fava provides a clear, helpful summary to understand more about Olivetti’s business culture, still imitated and followed today.

 

Adriano Olivetti. Un approccio pedagogico al lavoro

Sabrina Fava (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)

Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica – Journal of Theories and Research in Education 18, 3 (2023)

The Grand Tour of the USA of the 1920s behind many innovations in the Ivrea-based company

 

Business and organisation of the factory as an uninterrupted flow of material and immaterial relationships and transitions. Business as community. These concepts were dear to Adriano Olivetti, ideas recalled and reaffirmed many times and on many occasions. It is also a worthwhile endeavour to read the contribution of Sabrina Fava (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore) on “Adriano Olivetti. Un approccio pedagogico al lavoro” (Adriano Olivetti: a pedagogical approach to work) which recently appeared in Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica – Journal of Theories and Research in Education to better understand these aspirations.

The author investigates one of the particular aspects of Olivetti’s human and entrepreneurial venture: his ‘educational trip’ to the United States in 1925 and its links with some of the initiatives that would later characterise the entrepreneur’s activities.

Fava relates that Olivetti began to consider strategic company organisation and human resource training choices precisely during his Grand Tour of the United States, when he analysed American production systems in search of effective solutions to overcome workers’ alienation in labour by rethinking the Taylorist production system and overturning the cliche that profit must come first.

Those months gave rise to the impulse to consider the scientific organisation of work according to Adriano, vocational training through the opening of the Mechanics Training Centre and senior management training that would give rise to the IPSOA postgraduate institute of business administration in the 1950s. Sabrina Fava considers these all structural initiatives able to offer a different perspective on the aim of business: not profit as the sole priority, but other things as well.

Fava’s analysis therefore proceeds to trace the making of young Adriano’s impressions and their subsequent transfer to the Ivrea-based company through Olivetti’s letters to family members and other written evidence. Sabrina Fava provides a clear, helpful summary to understand more about Olivetti’s business culture, still imitated and followed today.

 

Adriano Olivetti. Un approccio pedagogico al lavoro

Sabrina Fava (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)

Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica – Journal of Theories and Research in Education 18, 3 (2023)