Corporate Statecraft
A Research Program led by Marco Mari and supported by Italia Innovation.
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Corporate Statecraft
A Research Program led by Marco Mari and supported by Italia Innovation.
Google Scholar Page
SSRN Profile
❶ Front Page / Research Manifesto
❷ Literature Review
❸ Methodologies
❹ Cases and Living Labs
❺ Author: Marco Mari
The research integrates theory, case studies, and living labs into a cumulative inquiry where conceptual development, comparative analysis, and real-time observation jointly advance the understanding of corporate statecraft.
This study begins with Italy and the United States because they occupy opposite poles of the embeddedness–liberalism spectrum: Italy’s deeply embedded, polycentric economy of industrial districts and family firms contrasts with the U.S. liberal-market benchmark, defined by dispersed coordination, fluid capital markets, and university-anchored innovation. This contrast maximizes variation in governance forms while holding constant advanced, rule-based democracies, enabling precise tests of how corporate statecraft operates under different institutional orders—when firm-led governance enhances capabilities, openness, and legitimacy, and when it instead reinforces oligarchic lock-in. The pairing also builds on a long transatlantic research tradition in which U.S. social science has drawn on Italy’s industrial economy to illuminate broader institutional mechanisms—most notably Putnam on civic community, Piore and Sabel on flexible specialization, and Berger and Locke on comparative production systems. This dialogue created a shared analytic vocabulary for embeddedness, capability formation, and institutional change, making the Italy–U.S. nexus a natural foundation for theorizing corporate statecraft as a comparative phenomenon.
Field Research Sites
Italy also serves as the European anchor because its polycentric geography and internal heterogeneity—north–south divides and diverse district models—allow high-resolution analysis of how corporate statecraft interacts with civic and associational infrastructures. Other major European economies introduce confounding institutional features: Germany’s corporatism and codetermination, the UK’s convergence toward U.S.-style liberal markets, and France’s centralized dirigisme all blur the line between private rule-making and state design. The U.S., by contrast, offers the liberal-market counterpoint and a reference model for market-led coordination. A light extension to Japan, might further triangulate the analysis of corporate statecraft by incorporating a leading Asian economy historically intertwined with Western industrialization. Japan’s keiretsu legacies and association-led coordination offer a legally embedded, collective variant that tests the portability and limits of the mechanisms identified in the Italy–U.S. comparison. Each case will engage its specialized literatures in business history, regional economics, and governance to ensure contextual precision and cumulative inference.
❶ Author
Marco Mari
PhD Candidate
Politecnico di Milano
Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering
marco [dot] mari [at] polimi [dot] it
marcomari.com