Abstract
In this paper the authors analyze the two most important interrelated processes of social change in Italian agriculture: first the increasing productive specialization of family farming, both full and part-time, lending to the persistence of small farms but also to their growing integration and complementarity with other economic activities; and second the increasing heterogeneity of agricultural workers accompanied by the destructuring of their strong working-class identity, which had matured in the previous decades. This identity, however, also reflected a deep separation between agricultural laborers, their labor market and institutions, and the rest of the working class. The authors argue that these changes are progressively contributing to the full integration of agricultural social relations within an increasingly complex society. The analysis of these two processes in recent Italian experience shows that this trend towards integration differs totally from the hypothesis often advanced in the past according to which the integration of agriculture would occur through the development of green factories, more and more similar to large Fordist manufacturing plants. On the contrary, at least in present-day Italy, integration means increasing heterogeneity, also of organizational patterns in manufacturing, and growing inter-dependence.
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Giovanni Mottura is Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Modena. His main research interests are labor markets, labor organization, and occupational structure in agriculture; and more generally, the sociology of the agrarian question and petty commodity production in capitalist societies. In English he has published in collaboration with Enrico Pugliese “Capitalistic agriculture and capitalism in agriculture: Italian case”, in F. H. Buttel and H. Newby (eds.),The Rural Sociology of Advanced Society: Critical Perspectives, Allanheld and Osmun, Montclair, New Jersey, 1980.
Enzo Mingione was Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Messina, and is currently at the University of Milan. His main research interests are social classes, urban development and urbanization, labor markets, and unemployment. He has published extensively in English. His main publications areSocial Conflict and the City, Oxford, 1981;Beyond Employment, co-editor with Nanneke Redclift, Oxford and New York 1985;Fragmented Societies, Oxford and New York, forthcoming.
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Mottura, G., Mingione, E. Agriculture and society: Remarks on transformations and new social profiles in the case of Italy. Agric Hum Values 6, 47–58 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02219421
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02219421