Italian Economic History Research Papers (original) (raw)

This paper identifies some traits that characterised the history of the porcelain manufacture of Doccia when it was a possession of the Ginori family, from the foundation to the fusion with the "Società Ceramica Richard” in 1896. The origin itself of the manufacture was unusual: not mercantile but mercantilist, not only entrepreneurial but also administrative. Such peculiarities descended and depended from the founder himself: Carlo Ginori, a passionate alchemist and an illuminist at core who united entrepreneurial vision and market knowledge with a great capacity to administer and govern territories and properties.
From this origin, the manufactory derived four characteristics that persisted through its long life under the control of the Ginori family. Firstly, being a personal possession of the family and never a corporation with its own personality, the factory was managed by “ministers”. This occurrence confronted the property, ahead of its time, with all agency problems typical of modern corporations with separated ownership and control. Sometimes, as in the case of Johannon de Saint Laurent, Jacopo Fanciullacci and Paolo Lorenzini, the relationship run smoothly, in other cases it created fractures and strategic incapacity. Secondly, Doccia was immediately created as a centralized production facility and for all its life it made no concession to homeworking and decentralisation. In such a context, again ahead of times, to authoritarian excesses on the side of the property corresponded early collective claims from the workforce: an exercise for future industrial relations. A third point regards accounting methods. Accounting was a meticulous presence inside the manufacture, but did not correspond in any way to the usual merchant one. Considering unsold stocks as present values, the manufactory at times managed inventories with presumed values higher than that of the entire production facility, while active sale strategies were adopted only at the end of the eighteenth century. The family was appeased by a constant influx of income from its various activities and would not pursue growth per se. Accounting, in this sense, was more an instrument of control over administrators than the base for strategic reasoning. The modernization of bookkeeping was introduced just in the first half of the nineteenth century. Last characteristic that Doccia derived from its peculiar foundation was the inheritance problem. Fighting among heirs, heirs still not of age, trustees with little decision power were common traits of each generational transit. All these problems increased the decision power of administrators, exacerbating agency conflicts.
With this complex heredity, the porcelain manufacture of Doccia crossed the centuries of industrialization, from the alchemical crucible to mass consumption, bearing witness of the social and cultural changes entailed in economic modernization. Often ahead of times, the Ginori manufacture experienced social conflicts, paternalism, the passage from entrepreneurship to a managed enterprise, bureaucratization and the relationship with the surrounding territory. It did so with a success that should not only be measured in terms of profits or generated income flows, but also from a social and cultural point of view. In time, as count Fossombroni wrote in his report on the manufacture, written in 1780, the manufactory came to represent an art gallery, for the beauty of its products, a social establishment for the employment it generated, a succesfull trade, given its sales and exports, and a stimulus for all landed proprietors to dedicate their capital and talent to industrial pursuits. A call for successful aristocratic entrepreneurship.