A series of academic research contributes towards the awareness of the environment in which production operates

Realising the environment in which one operates, grasping its crucial aspects, possibly working to improve it. All this is also part of the pedigree of a genuine entrepreneur and attentive manager. It is not just about general culture, but also about complete all-round corporate culture, capable of grasping the immaterial within production. Reading “Dialoghi sulla sostenibilità. Roma 2016” (Dialogues about sustainability. Rome 2016), a collection of essays derived from four conferences designed by the Universities of Lazio, co-ordinated by the CRUL (Comitato Regionale di Coordinamento delle Università del Lazio – Regional Committee for the Co-ordination of the Universities of Lazio), on the occasion of the 2015-2016 Extraordinary Jubilee, is an excellent path to take in this direction.

The authors – a large group of lecturers and researchers from the Universities of Rome -, start with the academic definition of sustainability which, nevertheless, can be similar to the definition that every company may give it. The introduction to this series of research states that the word “sustainability” can be interpreted through its synonyms, so “on the one hand, the concepts of ‘acceptable’ and ‘bearable’ emerge, while on the other those of ‘durable’ and ‘feasible’, focusing attention on the effect of the actions carried out, eclipsing the component of subjective commitment. For this reason, the terms ‘sustainable’ and ‘sustainability’ must be integrated with the terms ‘responsible’ and ‘responsibility’”.

It is possible to think that the idea of academic responsibility is similar or almost the same as corporate responsibility considering that the actions of both these organisations affect the surrounding environment. All the more so when research and production work together to achieve shared results. Indeed, it is based on this fact that the multiple researches have been developed and then collected into a single volume.

So these “Dialogues” represent studies, covering visions, arousing questions on the future of our society and of our environment.  Presenting a series of topics in sequence, such as sustainable development seen in global terms and then extended across the territory, to cities, to new technologies, to training, but also the connections between sciences and well-being seen from the perspective of the economy, food, medicine, ageing; then also the topics of sports and human capital, culture and information, investments and their “sustainable” types, and the governance required for it all.

“Dialoghi sulla sostenibilità. Roma 2016” (Dialogues about sustainability. Rome 2016) manages to be a unique contribution to research despite being made up of multiple contributions. It is a good handbook to understand the context and the sense to give a prudent corporate culture.

Dialoghi sulla sostenibilità. Roma 2016 (Dialogues about sustainability. Rome 2016) 

et.al.

Roma TrE-Press, 2016

A book recounts an entrepreneurial experience along the path of the Kaizen method

There is always a method, whether conscious or subconscious. Also and especially when acting as part of complex organisations such as companies. Entrepreneurs and managers know this. However, the most important things is to understand which method works more than others. Without being dazzled by bright lights that conceal falsehood. Instead, to understand better, one needs to make inquiries, find out what revolves around corporate management, what arises, grows and perhaps even wilts and dies after a while. Everything depends on the people and on their qualities. Qualities that do not entirely depend on further study, but most of all on much more.

Indeed, to find out more about one of the most well-known methods of managing organisations and companies – the Kaizen method -, an interesting read is “Samurai manager. La montagna inaccessibile” (Samurai manager. The inaccessible mountain) by Pierluigi Tosato; this book is a little over 150 pages long and was recently published. It recounts an entrepreneurial and human experience and revolves around the acquisition of knowledge and skills tied to Oriental philosophy (and more) and, indeed, to the Kaizen method.

Kaizen, or continuous improvement, is an Oriental business philosophy that has helped many companies across the world to be successful, starting with the Toyota group. it is a model dominated by pragmatism and common sense, capable of optimising corporate processes. And that’s not all. Kaizen is a total approach, a way of life almost. It requires the realisation of one’s own limits, trust, and humility. It is difficult to improve without self-criticism. Naturally, it is difficult to implement all this in a company. Especially since in some way everything has to originate from the “boss”, the entrepreneur and the manager who prove themselves and question themselves.

Tosato narrates his experience along this path and supplements it with particular features from his own path as a person and as an entrepreneur. And he definitely collected major successes. An engineer from Verona, Tosato accrued twenty years’ experience as the Managing Director of certain multinationals in the industrial sector, such as Interpump Cleaning and Global Garden Products, and then went on to be at the helm of Acqua Minerale San Benedetto and Bolton Alimentari.

According to Tosato, a manager is like a Samurai: a catalyst of forces capable of drawing the energy of co-workers and turning it into something shared and powerful. A manager is also and most of all capable of dreaming. Perhaps this is why one of the most effective summaries presented in the book is that of the dream company, the ideal company, which is perfect and therefore non-existent yet the one which we should in some way aim for.

Tosato’s book not only mentions Oriental philosophy but also classical philosophy, as well as a large group of writers, from the Russians, to Nietzsche, Wilde and Garcia Marquez and it should be read with great care, perhaps overcoming a few of the linguistic images that are somewhat baffling. This book was undoubtedly written with passion, and it is no surprise that it concludes with a sentence from a great imaginative author, Walt Disney: “If you can dream it, you can do it”.

Samurai manager. La montagna inaccessibile (Samurai manager. The inaccessible mountain)

Pierluigi Tosato

Guerini Next, 2016

“Un compositore in fabbrica” (A composer in the factory) is the title of “La Lettura” (Reading matter), the weekly cultural section of Il Corriere della Sera, on Sunday. To announce that a musician will soon be visiting the Pirelli plant in Settimo Torinese, the “New Pole”, the group’s most modern and innovative factory (with the central facility for services and research laboratories designed by Renzo Piano) to watch, listen, talk to the engineers, technicians and workers, to try to understand “what sound the factory has” and write about it. A tale of industry and toil, in the form of notes, chords, harmonies. Music that stems from manufacturing and machinery. To be played to an audience in one year’s time, for the next edition of MiTo.

An ambitious challenge, obviously. Quite unprecedented. Yet one that is inside a dual path. The first concerns the relationship, now in force for some time, within Pirelli itself, between culture and manufacturing, in the specific conviction that “industry is culture”, polytechnic culture, naturally, and that innovation, an essential value of a major multinational that has deep historic roots and a bold aptitude for contemporary appeal that always looks to the future, concerns not just products and productions, relationships and materials, but also languages. Indeed this innovation, in all its forms of expression, needs to be told. In words (writers, poets, as demonstrated by the experience of Sinisgalli and Sereni during the 1950s). In pictures (artists, photographers, graphic designers). In architecture. And, indeed, an original experience, in music. What type of music, and what form of composition, written and orchestrated and performed by whom, all that has yet to be defined.

The second path concerns “the return of music to the factory”, which marks the partnership between Pirelli and MiTo, now standing for several years. Three concerts, in the Settimo Torinese plant itself, in 2010, in 2011 and in 2014, two years ago with the performance of Beethoven’s First and Seventh Symphonies, “la Settima a Settimo” (the Seventh in Settimo), as stated in the catchy newspaper heading. And one more concert, last Sunday, no longer in the factory but in the Auditorium of Pirelli Headquarters in Bicocca, just where the old 20th Century factories made way for contemporary office buildings, research laboratories and training centres quite some time ago. Packed with applauding crowds, the Concert at the Auditorium was crammed to maximum capacity. The musicians of the Altus Trio (piano, violin and cello) performed pieces by Beethoven and Schumann. The utmost of classicality able to prefigure the future, the innovation of a very innovative composer who knows he is the “son” of Beethoven yet interprets “his” own contemporary approach in an original way.

This takes us back to the profound sense of innovation. Awareness of the past, glimpsing at the future.

The Pirelli-MiTo partnership can continue. By listening to and “playing” at the factory and the workplace. Machinery, the workmen’s hands, the sounds, the notes. In search of harmonies.

A recently-published article presents a very clear exposition of the relationships between organisations and foundations.

Modern businesses converse with the environment and their host society. Market is not always the prime objective, there are often other motives. It is more sophistically referred to as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), one of the key areas of attention in the list of intangible assets every good business leader should have for his organisation. When it all gets too lofty and complex, special tools like Foundations come into play. It is important to understand both how they work and what potential they contain and, in this regard, the book “Il ruolo strategico della Fondazioni d’Impresa: tra Responsabilità Sociale e Vantaggio Competitivo” [The strategic role of Corporate Foundations: considering Corporate Social Responsibility and Competitive Advantage] may be useful.  It was recently published by Marco Minciullo (a management research doctorate at Piacenza University) and is a handy guide to the links between business and foundations.

Minciullo’s idea is a simple one: corporate foundations can promote more effective corporate social responsibility insomuch as they amplify and perfect the many measures organisations introduce to help cultivate and develop their surrounding environment and society. As a veritable business culture tool, foundations have a life of their own, working in tandem with the businesses backing them. Either acting independently or in close connection with their backer, foundations help to further the success of CSR.

To shed light on the phenomenon, Minciullo proceeds a step at a time. He starts by presenting key literature on CSR and foundations then links this exegesis to the competitive advantage their presence can bring to a company before moving on to explain how it works in practice, outlining the financial aspects and control mechanisms.

The main benefit of the collaboration lies, according to Minciullo, in the resultant ability to make more balanced decisions. Clearly, it requires both parties to exercise foresight and caution, but the best manufacturing emerges emerge from precisely these behaviours.

Minciullo’s treatise offers nothing new in terms of business culture but it should be commended for how well it presents the current state-of-the-art of the subject.   The perfect guide, as we said.

Il ruolo strategico della Fondazioni d’Impresa: tra Responsabilità Sociale e Vantaggio Competitivo [The strategic role of Corporate Foundations: considering Corporate Social Responsibility and Competitive Advantage]

Marco Minciullo

Impresa Progetto – Electronic Journal of Management, no.1, 2016

The lively tale of a business career outlines the defining features of Italy’s manufacturing culture.

Successful business people have imagination and enterprise in abundance and they’re not scared to use them, in other words, to cast convention aside. Number skills are important, of course, as is a strong nerve and a love of adventure (it doesn’t have to be on the other side of the world). All are key to understanding what lies behind the success in business success stories. The tales make essential reading because each has something different to say about business culture, despite being connected one to the other by a common theme, namely and enterprising spirit, as mentioned earlier, which is the real essence of the successful entrepreneur.

This subject is the domain on Giovanni Panni’s recently published story, “Di domenica, mai” [Never on a Sunday] written by Alessandro Zaltron.  It’s a short book – little more than one hundred pages – but crammed with details of an industrialist still in action, who set up an engineering firm (Panni) from scratch, and gradually grew it, one step at a time, into a world-class business in its field, culminating in its incorporation – while preserving its fundamental business spirit – within the Interpump group.

Panni started out as a lathe operator and followed the conventional path into business leadership, namely the desire to grow and explore, with a firm spirit and a few disappointments to build a career that benefited, undoubtedly, from a favourable economy for many years and, most importantly, from a business culture and philosophy. He built his success one day at a time, not following a manual but by listening carefully to the people around him.

The book tells the Panni story in immediate, easy-to-read prose. People appear, disappear then reappear again. All the crucial milestones are there: parents, education, family homes, big steps forward and little ones back, and little pearls of “business wisdom”.

“To do well in business,” Panni explains at one stage in the book, “you need the support of your loved ones, the people who have to share what you do. That means the support of your family, your wife: a business adventure affects them all.  You need eight hours a day to get the work done, and another eight to find customers, raise bills, plan the business. So, that makes at least sixteen hours a day to start running a business. You need to give it your all. Running a business will change your life.”

The introduction to the story of Giovanni Panni’s life is an equally invaluable text, penned by Interpump Chairman, Fulvio Montipò, who explains,  “In the endeavour to set up an enterprise, falling in love is crucial. We are in the business of hope, so you need to be in love to do it.” On the subject of his friend and fellow business magnate, he only mentions him indirectly, near the end, saying that a true entrepreneur loves what he or she does.

The cover is equally appealing, depicting a man walking, jumping even, with one leg almost double the length of the other.

“Di domenica, mai” [Never on a Sunday] makes no claim to be a serious corporate management textbook, nor even a handy how-to guide. Nevertheless, it is a still a seriously good way of describing that indestructible core of Italian industry.

Di domenica, mai [Never on a Sunday]

Alessandro Zaltron

Franco Angeli, 2016

After the Grand Prix of Germany and Belgium it is now the turn of Monza, on 4 September . The race track is indelibly linked to the names of great drivers, cars, and Pirelli tyres. Photographs, press releases, advertisements and articles from Pirelli magazine preserved in the Historical Archive tell the tales of some of the people who made this track famous.

It was 1922 when the first racing cars started blazing the tarmac of the Italian circuit. The first race was dominated by Felice Nazzaro and Pietro Bordino, behind the wheels of two Fiat 804 cars fitted with Pirelli tyres. They declared that they had found their state-of-the-art Pirelli Superflex Cord tyres “extremely satisfactory”.

Alfa Romeo debuted with the unbeatable P2 in 1924.  The car was driven by Antonio Ascari and Giuseppe Campari. And the tyres were Pirelli Cord, of course. That was just the beginning. Campari won in Lyon in August. Ascari triumphed in Monza in October. By the end of 1924, Pirelli Cord and Superflex Cord was proudly titled “the victory tyre” on the price list. The crowning glory came under the banner of the four-leaf clover. The winning streak continued in Monza again in 1925. It was the first Automobile World Championship. And Alfa Romeo and Pirelli were preparing to triumph. But their excitement was overshadowed by sadness. Antonio Ascari was missing from the photograph of the winning line-up. He had died a few months earlier in an accident at the French Grand Prix. In the race that won the championship title, the unforgotten Antonio Ascari was replaced by Count Gastone Brilli Peri, who had been signed up by Alfa Romeo with the hope that the long sequence of accidents and troubles experienced by the gentleman driver would come to an end. That was precisely what happened. Brilli Peri crossed the finish line of the Italian Grand Prix ahead of Campari. Alfa Romeo and Pirelli were named World Champions.

It was 1932. Once again, Monza was the backdrop for what had become a combination of excellence: Alfa Romeo cars, team manager Enzo Ferrari, driver Tazio Nuvolari and Pirelli Stella Bianca tyres. Add a few unforgettable names to the mix – such as Varzi, and also Borzacchini, Trossi, and Brivio – and you have a truly unbeatable team. It was the squad of “Nivola”’s record-breaking winning streak and year after year of extraordinary exploits.

The F1 Italian Grand Prix in Monza in 1950 was nearly all a line-up of Pirelli champions. There were Argentinian driver Juan Manuel Fangio and championship winner Nino Farina in Alfa Romeo. Years of wins by cars sporting the four-leaf clover emblem were bearing fruits: the Pirelli  Stella Bianca tyres (which would later become the Stelvio model) also outfitted the Maserati cars driven by Felice Bonetto and Prince Bira of Siam. Then there was a young Ferrari driver who was determined to show his mettle on the track where he had won the year before. He was following in his father’s footsteps. His name was Alberto Ascari and he was the son of Antonio who had won with Alfa/Pirelli in 1924. He soon become known as “Ascarino”, the little Ascari. He was a Pirelli driver, too, but would die in a crash in Monza on 26 May 1955.

Juan Manuel Fangio won again in Monza in 1965 and his feat was filmed for a Pirelli advertisement. In the advert, he streaked bumpily by on the Parabolica bend in a red spider. Then he stopped, pulled off his gloves and looked straight into the camera. “I used to race with Pirelli Stelvio, but these Cinturato tyres are truly outstanding!“, he declared.

The life of an extraordinary manager-entrepreneur, condensed into a short and powerful book.

Assessing, selecting, deciding. Alone. The truth is that real entrepreneurs, managers worthy of the name, do each of these three things alone. After speaking to everyone they need to, after reading every report,  looking at every table, probably after countless meetings, entrepreneurs and managers find themselves solely responsible for the decisions they ultimately take. This is also where the wheat is separated from the chaff. This solitude, and also the aptitude and dedication of managers, are the starting points for Denis Delespaul’s “L’eleganza dell’okapi. Confessioni di un manager” [The elegance of the okapi. Confessions of a manager], published recently in Italy (the title refers to the solitary nature of the okapi.)

The 150-page book, readable in a day, presents the life of an manager-entrepreneur.  By way of the unique experiences described, it is the perfect example of the position and characteristics of all good “captains of industry”.  Denis Delespaul was born in Paris in 1953 and arrived in Italy in 1990 where he opened, on behalf of a French banking group, a leasing company which was to become, in 2000, BNP Paribas Lease Group Spa. He has remained, since then, as managing director or, as he prefers to call himself, the “managing entrepreneur.”  The essence of what he does lies in the particularities. He explains that a leader must not be boring but ingenuity, curiosity, vitality, artistry and creativity are not normally listed as necessary requisites in business leadership theories and guides. But they are very necessary. Despaul explains why.

The book describes the life of a founder and managing director of a banking institute. An elegant, informal protagonist who spent twenty five years working outside the box, managing to reconcile guitar-playing with life in a suit, jazz and classical music, humour and philosophy. The nature of his soul also emerges from the characters and authors encountered in the book: Nietzsche, Spinoza and Marco Aurelio, Irvin Yalom, Isaac Getz and Alexandre Havard; not to mention Orsetti del Cuore, Davy Crockett, Robinson Crusoe and many more.

The life of a manager-entrepreneur is not all fun and games, though. Sense of humour and divertissement aside, Delespaul is also acutely aware of the global context in which the new generation of managers are required to operate, squaring up to both a dramatic present and an uncertain future. Despaul’s account, therefore, remembers what corporate life used to be like while also positing, in the final chapter,  what the future holds for many organisations: “A New Deal for management”. The chapter starts with cause for reflection – “One never leads in a vacuum” – and ends with a quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “Le plus beau métier d’homme est le métier d’unir les hommes” (the best job a man can do is one which unites men).

Despaul’s is not a work for those seeking a beginner’s guide to management or for those who believe they have already achieved leadership. It is much, much more.
L’eleganza dell’okapi. Confessioni di un manager

Denis Delespaul

Guerini NEXT, 2016

A study by Sassari University takes stock of a delicate issue that is critical for corporate growth.

Most businesses now recognize the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). It’s a crucial concern, maybe not for all, but definitely for those who set themselves goals that go beyond mere numbers at the bottom of a balance sheet. It is equally crucial to know how to correctly interpret and manage it. This is where CSR can really make the difference. Brunella Arru and Marco Ruggieri (from Sassari University – Faculty of Economic and Organisational Science) have written up a very useful article that helps us to appreciate not just how to handle CSR, but also the various consequences it can have.

Published in the journal Economia Aziendale Online, Vol.  7, June 2016, the article aims to provide a clearer understanding of why socially responsible activities might be seen as having strategic value.  The authors begin by looking at literature on the subject and the associated terminology, then try to pinpoint the benefits of proper CSR as well as the role it plays in “consolidating an organisation’s reputation.”

“Observing our current situation,” they write, “shows how more and more companies are incorporating ethical, social and environmental values into their business strategy as they attempt to fulfil the expectations of a growing number of stakeholders in target markets.” One of the crucial areas addressed in the text is the part which connects CSR to Resource Based View (RBV) and Knowledge Based View (KBV), namely approaches to business analysis which attempt to break production down into its “constituent elements”.

“On recognizing that the social consequences of their operations cannot be severed from their financial performance, in the trade-off between the costs and benefits of responsible business,” Arru and Ruggieri conclude, “business organisations acknowledge that success and competitive advantage are tied to a strategy which must generate profit and positive external consequences, with the resulting benefit to their reputation with employees, customers, investors and the media.”

This article by the two scholars from Sassari is a worthy read: it is comprehensive and clear enough to be read with interest by anyone – both entrepreneurs and managers alike – wishing to gain a closer understanding of the key principles of CSR.

I Benefici della Corporate Social Responsibility nella Creazione di Valore Sostenibile: il Ruolo delle Risorse di Competenza e del Capitale Reputazionale [The benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility in sustainable value creation: the role of competence and reputational capital]

Brunella Arru, Marco Ruggieri

Economia Aziendale Online VOL. 7. 1/2016: 17-41

“In defence of the classic lyceum”, writes humanist Nicola Gardini and Guido Tonelli, physicist at Cern, Geneva and professor at Pisa University, entrusting their thoughts to the insert of Sunday’s “Il Sole 24Ore” (28 August), a newspaper that is traditionally sympathetic to discussing prominent cultural issues, business culture included. “The study of history, Ancient Greek and Latin,” Gardini explains, “teaches us to speak, write and think. But above it, it teaches us to interpret, compare, contrast, to relativise, to understand freedom, beauty, and unity.” Tonelli gives an account of a recent encounter with Michael Hugo Leiters, German executive at Ferrari, in which they compared the work of a scientist with that of a corporate manager, in terms of innovative content.  On one particular point, both were animatedly in agreement: their shared education in the humanities. Such a grounding is crucial, they said, for scientists and corporate executives.  Humanism and science. This kind of study provides a rich and multifaceted education which is especially useful these days, insomuch as science and economics have become such dominant force in modern life (“genome, bionic and robotic studies are on the cusp of triggering an evolutionary leap in our species that will be more than just physical empowerment. It may even affect our consciousness,” L’Espresso warned on 28 August.) Understanding, in order to do. A meeting of philosophy and science. Just as the Ancient Greeks told us. Greece, a  civilisation that pioneered “classic” culture, the pinnacle of all that was held to be contemporary at the time.

The contributions of Gardini and Tonelli enrich the fascinating debate that has been gathering steam online since July, namely the utility of an education in the classics and the key questions of the quality and utility of education in general, the relationship between work and school, and the development of critical consciousness.  They start with a reading from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, a passage which makes a general and extraordinarily contemporary point.

Gramsci wrote,  “One doesn’t learn Latin and Greek in order to speak them, to become a waiter, or an interpreter, or whatever. One learns them in order to know the civilisations of Greece and Rome, whose existence is posited as a foundation of world culture. Latin or Greek is learned by way of grammar, somewhat mechanically; but the charges of mechanistic  aridity are greatly exaggerated. The issue concerns children; they should be made to acquire certain habits of diligence, precision, physical composure, mental concentration on particular objects. Would a thirty or forty-year-old scholar be able to sit at a desk for sixteen hours on end if, as a child, he had not acquired “compulsorily”, through “mechanical coercion”, the appropriate psychophysical habits? This is where one has to start if one also wants to bring up scholars, and pressure must be applied across the board in order to produce those thousands, or hundreds, or just dozens of first-rate scholars that every civilization requires.”

Gramsci continued,  One does not study Latin in order to learn Latin; it is studied in order to accustom children to studying, to analyzing a body of history that can be treated as a cadaver but returns continually to life.  Naturally, I do not believe that Greek and Latin have intrinsic thaumaturgical qualities; I am saying that in a given milieu, in a given culture with a given tradition, studying along these lines produced these particular results. Latin and Greek can be replaced, and they will be replaced, but one must be able to deploy the new subject or set of subjects didactically, in such a way as to obtain equivalent results in the general education of the individual from his childhood years to the time he is old enough to choose a career.  During this span of time, the course of study, or most of it, must be disinterested; in other words, it must not have immediate or much too immediate practical purposes: it must be formative while being “instructive”, that is, rich in concrete information. Gramsci presents an interesting opening, here, to other subjects of study, in addition to Latin and Greek, as part of a child’s general education. It may be a useful point to emphasize a very current issue: the importance of a far-reaching scientific education, something which is lacking in Italian schools despite being critical, not just as a means of economic development, but more importantly, in terms of civil consciousness, responsible citizenship (scientific, bioethic and environmental etc. issues which affect our daily life.) In other words, an education built on “polytechnic culture”. The same goal as Gramsci’s lesson.  Besides, Greek, it should be remembered, is not just the language of philosophers, poets and dramatists; it is also the tongue of scientists, mathematicians and astronomers, of a scientific culture underpinning all modern knowledge. The knowledge of a “polytechnic” – our key word again –  civilisation.

The pages of Gramsci’s Notebooks make a very specific point about the usefulness of study. The essays were written in the 1930s, a different time, of different politics and ideals (Gramsci, leader of the Italian Communist Party, PCI, had been imprisoned by the Fascist Regime and was also heavily criticised by members of his own party who sympathised with more orthodox Soviet Communism.) Nevertheless, confined to his cell, he still had a very clear idea of the historical lessons to be learned from Italian culture and the need to lay the foundations, for a time after Fascism, of a new popular and participatory democracy. Something which schools, clearly, should be part of: “In the present school, the profound crisis in the traditional culture and its conception of life and of man has resulted in a progressive degeneration. Schools of the vocational type, i.e. those designed to satisfy immediate, practical interests, are beginning to predominate over the formative school, which is not immediately “interested”. The most paradoxical aspect of it all is that this new type of school appears and is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences. This social character is determined by the fact that each social group has its own type of school, intended to perpetuate a specific traditional function, ruling or subordinate. If one wishes to break this pattern one needs, instead of multiplying and grading different types of vocational school, to create a single type of formative school (primary-secondary) which would take the child up to the threshold of his choice of job, forming him during this time as a person capable of thinking, studying, and ruling – or controlling those who rule. The multiplication of types of vocational school thus perpetuate traditional social differences; but since, within these differences, it tends to encourage internal diversification, it gives the impression of being democratic in tendency. But democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can become skilled. It must mean that every “citizen” can “govern” and that society places him, even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this. Fundamental concepts. Another leading Italian scholar, Piero Calamandrei, a liberal and one of the “fathers of the Italian Constitution” returned to these same issues a few years later, discussing them in a fine book, “Per la scuola”, republished in 2008 by Sellerio (“There can be no real democracy when access to education is not equally guaranteed for all.”)

To study is, therefore, a right. And in contemporary society, also a duty. Gramsci notes,  “Studying too is a job, and a very tiring one, with its own particular apprenticeship – involving muscles and nerves as well as intellect. It is a process of adaptation, a habit acquired with effort, tedium and even suffering. Wider participation in secondary education brings with it a tendency to ease off the discipline of studies, and to ask for “relaxations”. Many even think that the difficulties of learning are artificial, since they are accustomed to think only of manual work as sweat and toil.  The question is a complex one. Undoubtedly the child of a traditionally intellectual family acquires this psycho-physical adaptation more easily. Before he ever enters the class-room he has numerous advantages over his comrades, and is already in possession of attitudes learned from his family environment. Similarly, the son of a city worker suffers less when he goes to work in a factory than does a peasant’s child or a young peasant already formed by country life. This is why many people think that the difficulty of study conceals some “trick” which handicaps them; they see the gentleman complete, speedily and with apparent ease, work which costs their sons tears and blood, and they think there is a “trick”. In the future, these questions may become extremely acute and it will be necessary to resist the tendency to render easy that which cannot become easy without being distorted. If our aim is to produce a new stratum of intellectuals, including those capable of the highest degree of specialisation, from a social group which has not traditionally developed the appropriate attitudes, then we have unprecedented difficulties to overcome .”