Inappropriate development, engineering ideology and the corporatist vision in Italy, 1890-1929

The thesis was conceived as an effort to contribute to three more or less distinct academic discourses, by attempting to analyze the relationship between them. These fields of study are: 1) technology as social and political process, and the related category of scientific management as ideology in industrial capitalism; 2) the corporatist conception of political organization; 3) the contemporary debate on appropriate development and alternative technology for today's poor countries. The historical phenomenon invoked as the mediating element in trying to unite these categories is corporatist reformism in inter-war Italy. The bulk of the thesis is an attempt to examine this reformism as it was expressed by the engineering community. It is argued that the generic tensions in industrial capitalism between technological rationality in the organization of production and the opposing fragmentary pressures applied by economic competition - tensions which emerged in the social philosophy of technocracy - were atao present in the articulation of corporatist ideology in Italy. The historical feature of Italian development which gave the political push to the engineering ideology was, it is suggested, the legacy of dependent and inappropriate industrial development. Thus economic weakness because of an unsuccessful development model which conformed little to factor endourent - the 19th century British model - encouraged social reformism to be conceived in terms of technological solutions. The resulting reform conception - technocratic corporatism - was however merely ideology, and as such emerged to conceal failed practice. Apart from investigating the engineers' conception of reform, therefore, the thesis also traces the failures to implement reform at a technical level, which the success of the corporatist model presupposed.