Deindustrialisation and Management Sciences. The Shadow of Velleitarismo

In recent times some scholars have pointed out the parallel advancement of the process of de-industrialisation and of the crisis of Management Sciences. On one hand, as authoritatively stated, the structure of strategic and advanced sectors of Italian Industry has been disjointed and/or poorly sold to companies of other countries transferring the control and initiatives of national development to the international economy. At the other hand it seems that the Management Sciences developed in Italy, represented mainly by the Business Management (Organizzazione Aziendale), are struggling to keep up with the changes induced by the technological and socio-economic revolution. In addition, Management researchers, according to what happens globally, must face the uncertainties arising from the multiplication of inter, trans and cross disciplinary proposals to which the multi-disciplinarity, originally claimed by the doctrine of Business Management doctrine, no longer offers an adequate response. In this perspective, the eclecticism emerging from the evolution of studies seems not to reach an adequate and shared level of maturity to represent a challenging and reliable paradigm of reference. This leads to consider the actuality of Federico Caffe’s research on eclecticism and velleitarismo (wishful or unrealistic thinking) in Economics referring to the post World War II in Italy. The last studies hypothesise a similar behaviour regarding the evolution of management studies in the face of the challenges of the rapidly changing word in recent decades. In this paper, we will use the term velleitarismo as it relates to its first applications to political analysis by Antonio Gramsci of Federico Caffe’s later insights into political economy. From this reasoning, the attempt is to apply this concept to the contemporary crisis of industrialisation and to the difficulties of management studies, a perspective that can be extended to the diminishing role of industry in Europe and Western Countries .