The End Of The City Of Gold Industry And Economic Crisis In An Italian Jewellery Town

How does Europe’s economic crisis affect the ways in which industry and entrepreneurship are experienced on a grassroots level? The book offers an answer to this question by exploring the Italian jewellery town of Valenza and the downturn of its principal industry. Through the experiences of its inhabitants, the study investigates the social role that jewellery production had in Valenza and provides an ethnographic account of the crisis the city endures. This analysis delves into the relationship between a community and its industry in order to understand the social and cultural challenges Italy and Europe will face in the future.

Among the founding nations of the European Union, no nation has experienced a more devastating affect from the 2008 economic crisis than Italy. Although its recovery has recently begun, Italy has fallen even further behind EU economic leaders and the EU average. Looking at how and why this happened, Facing the Crisis brings together ethnographic material from anthropological research projects carried out in various Italian industrial locations. With its wide breadth of locations and industries, the volume looks at all corners of the diverse Italian manufacturing system.

Corporate responsibility and sustainable development are two concepts that may be able to reconcile many of the big challenges facing the world; challenges such as tensions between respect for the natural environment, social justice, and economic development; the long view versus short-term imperatives and the competing priorities between developed and developing economies. This book explores the gaps and overlaps between corporate responsibility and sustainable development. These concerns overlap because they implicate corporate practices, state development policy challenges, the concerns and priorities of non-governmental organisations, and the potential for innovative forms of organisation to address these challenges. This collection examines these questions in terms of tensions and interdependencies, between competing claims to resources, rights and responsibilities, strategy and governance, between public and private interest, and the implications for equity and the common good over the long term. This is a valuable resource for researchers, lecturers, practitioners, postgraduate and final year undergraduates in business strategy, international business and international management, public sector policy and management, international development, political economy. It is also suitable for more specialist courses on sustainability, corporate responsibility, governance and international development.

In Gold We Trust is a historical and sociological account of how, by the late 1960s, three small Italian towns had come to lead the world in the production of gold jewelry--even though they had virtually no jewelry industry less than a century before, and even though Italy had western Europe's most restrictive gold laws. It is a distinctive but paradigmatic story of how northern Italy performed its post-World War II economic miracle by creating localized but globally connected informal economies, in which smuggling, tax evasion, and the violation of labor standards coexisted with ongoing deliberation over institutional change and the benefits of political participation. The Italian gold jewelry industry thrived, Dario Gaggio argues, because the citizens of these towns--Valenza Po in Piedmont, Vicenza in the Veneto, and Arezzo in Tuscany--uneasily mixed familial affection, political loyalties, and the instrumental calculation of the market, blurring the distinction between private interests and public good. But through a comparison with the jewelry district of Providence, Rhode Island, Gaggio also shows that these Italian towns weren't unique in the ways they navigated the challenges posed by the embeddedness of economic action in the fabric of social life. By drawing from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, ranging from economic sociology to political theory, Gaggio recasts the meanings of trust, embeddedness, and social capital, and challenges simple dichotomies between northern and southern Italy.

Includes articles on international business opportunities.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the U.S. Government and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in early 2011, is the official government report on the United States financial collapse and the review of major financial institutions that bankrupted and failed, or would have without help from the government. The commission and the report were implemented after Congress passed an act in 2009 to review and prevent fraudulent activity. The report details, among other things, the periods before, during, and after the crisis, what led up to it, and analyses of subprime mortgage lending, credit expansion and banking policies, the collapse of companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the federal bailouts of Lehman and AIG. It also discusses the aftermath of the fallout and our current state. This report should be of interest to anyone concerned about the financial situation in the U.S. and around the world.THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION is an independent, bi-partisan, government-appointed panel of 10 people that was created to "examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States." It was established as part of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. The commission consisted of private citizens with expertise in economics and finance, banking, housing, market regulation, and consumer protection. They examined and reported on "the collapse of major financial institutions that failed or would have failed if not for exceptional assistance from the government."News Dissector DANNY SCHECHTER is a journalist, blogger and filmmaker. He has been reporting on economic crises since the 1980's when he was with ABC News. His film In Debt We Trust warned of the economic meltdown in 2006. He has since written three books on the subject including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books, 2008), and The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail (Disinfo Books, 2011), a companion to his latest film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time. He can be reached online at www.newsdissector.com.

What does the proliferation of food festival tell us about rural areas? How can these celebrations pave the way to a better future for the local communities? This book is addressing these questions contributing to the ongoing debate about the future of rural peripheries in Europe. The volume is based on the ethnographic research conducted in Italy, a country internationally known for its food tradition and one of the European countries where the gap between rural and urban space is most pronounced. It offers an anthropological analysis of food festivals, exploring the transformational role they have to change and develop rural communities. Although the festivals aim mostly at tourism, they contribute in a wider way to the life of the rural communities, acting as devices through which a community redefines itself, reinforces its sociality, reshapes the perception and use of the surrounding environment. In so doing, thus, the books suggests to read the festivals not just as celebrations driven by food fashion, but rather fundamental grassroots instruments to contrast the effects of rural marginalization and pave the way to a possible better future for the community