Manufacturing Digitalisation in Italy: The Future Behind

Manufacturing Digitalisation in Italy: The Future Behind examines how digitalisation is transforming manufacturing in Italy, with particular attention to the interplay between new technologies and territorially embedded manufacturing systems.

Drawing on extensive empirical research, the book introduces the concept of the regional digitalisation system to explain how policies, firms and decentralised institutional capacities jointly shape patterns of digital transformation. Challenging linear models of technological adoption, it advances the idea of “the future behind” to show how pre-existing regional socio-institutional configurations both enable and constrain emerging development trajectories. As Europe’s second-largest manufacturing economy, yet a relative digital laggard, Italy has recently experienced a significant acceleration in firms’ digitalisation, rapidly converging towards the European Union (EU) average, despite structurally adverse conditions. Characterised by regionalised capitalism, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), territorial inequalities, limited high-technology sectors and weak, decentralised innovation systems, Italy provides a crucial case for understanding how subnational socio-institutional contexts shape manufacturing transformation and produce distinct regional digitalisation paths.

As the first comprehensive sociological book on manufacturing digitalisation, this book will appeal to scholars, practitioners and policymakers interested in economic sociology, the sociology of work and industry, comparative political economy, industrial policy, regional studies, innovation studies and the sociology of technology.

Francesco Ramella is a Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Turin, Italy, where he is the Director of the Luigi Bobbio Center for Public and Applied Social Research. He co-founded and served as the first president of the Italian Society for Economic Sociology. He is a member of the editorial and scientific boards of Stato e Mercato (which he directed from 2011 to 2015) and Sociologias. His previous books with Routledge include The Economy of Collaboration: The New Digital Platforms of Production and Consumption (2020) and Sociology of Economic Innovation (2016).

Alberto Gherardini is a Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Turin, Italy, where he works on innovation and industrial policies, regional development and employment relations. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Florence. His work has appeared in journals, such as Higher Education Policy, International Journal of Sociology, Journal of European Integration, Scientometrics, South European Society and Politics, Stato e Mercato and Transfer.