Geographies of Growth, Decline and Restructuring

Abstract

This article deals with the recent evolution of the Italian steel industry and of steel-making activities in two localities in the Mezzogiorno. After providing an account of the rise and fall of the public steel sector in Italy and its role in shifting the industry’s centre of gravity to the South, it concentrates on a conceptually informed discussion of the remarkable rise of northern mini-mill operations and the subsequent acquisition by a few of these companies of the privatized public enterprises in the 1990s. Most attention is paid to two of the leading new companies (Lucchini and Riva) and to the trajectories of some of their steel-making activities in two localities in Basilicata and Apulia. The trajectories of these companies and localized steelmaking activities are themselves explained in the light of the resources and strategies of corporate actors and the context in which these actors operate. Actors’ strategies are driven by a quest for profits and a struggle to accumulate in the face of competition from rival producers, and are examined in relation to the economics of steel production in the Italian South, the processes of workforce recomposition in Taranto and the tensions between profitability and environmental protection. The context includes cyclical and secular trends in the consumption and production of steel, some of the aid and restructuring actions of the ECSC, some of the specific characteristics of accumulation and competition in the steel sector and the legacies of earlier phases of local development that helped shape actors’ strategies.