Business History Review's Homage to Franco Amatori

In 2022 Business History Review (a publication of Harvard Business School since 1926 and still considered the most prestigious journal in its field) chose to dedicate its summer monograph on "Business History Around the World" to Franco Amatori, Senior Professor of economic history at Bocconi. (A. Colli and A. Lluch, Introductory note: Franco Amatori and comparative business history, vol 96, issue 2, Summer 2022).

In their introductory note, scholars Andrea Colli and Andrea Lluch recognize Amatori's contribution to the discipline and, especially, the dissemination of its comparative approach through ten international colloquiums designed by Amatori and hosted by Bocconi between 1996 and 2017. For many of these colloquiums, the outcome was a volume in a CUP series that offers researchers around the world a state-of-the-art synthesis of some of business history's crucial issues.

Colli and Lluch also acknowledged how Amatori contributed to the shift of Italian industrial historiography from its initial focus on labor and unions to a more complex analysis of corporations and sectors. Bocconi has followed this path for the last thirty years, emerging as one of the world's most important centers for business history.

In recent years, working together with jurist Marco D'Alberti, Amatori focused his scholarly attentions on L'impresa italiana (L'Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, 2020). This monumental work consists of two volumes; the first is dedicated to 220 "corporate biographies" while the second analyzes the institutional context in which Italian firms operate.

Convinced that not everything had been said in the 1500 pages of L'impresa italiana, this year Amatori took on the challenge of writing a short and concise book, L'impresa italiana. Storie e contesti (Treccani, 2022). In the space of little more than one hundred pages he outlines the evolution of Italian firms from the nation's unification to today. This quick read highlights some of the shifts of recent years and comments on companies that have been able to exploit technological excellencies to compete in a global marketplace.

For the first quarter of 2023, Amatori and some colleagues have planned a seminar series that will bring together academics with some of the key players from economics, policy making and the corporate world. In the course of twelve conferences, they'll analyze "The Thirty Years' (Economic) Wars-1992-2022". For more information (in Italian, the language of the seminars) you can click here: Le guerre (economiche) dei trent'anni – 1992-2022.