Immersing for years into a research endeavour requires strong motivation. This research endeavour, as it is common for researchers, is connected to a pressing research question.

In our case, the research question was the following: Why steel privatisation in Italy walked through a pattern, and produced an outcome, partially idiosyncratic in respect to comparable European countries? While digging into this principal research question, however, we realised that our research illuminated another, more general, theoretical quandary: How to explain local idiosyncratic variations in globally emerging patterns of policy-making?

We started our study by investigating the privatisation of the Italian steel industry. We were intrigued by the peculiarity of the privatisation of the Italian state steel occurring in the 1990s when compared to the privatisation of the steel industries in other comparable European countries in the same period. However, soon we became conscious that our study was addressing the tension between the hegemony of a developing global order and the attempt of a local power system to defend specific interests.

Like Italy, in other European countries, such as France, Spain, and United Kingdom, where the state played a pivotal role in the post-WWII development and reorganisation of the steel industry, privatisations brought about the opportunity to take part in a global process of restructuring and concentration in the steel industry. In these countries, the pressure to increase the scale of production created the incentive for large integrated state-owned companies to sell their assets to foreign global producers. This process facilitated the concentration of the industry and opened the way to the creation of large private global groups able to both exploit economies of scale and enjoy an increased bargaining power, for example in respect to the concentrated upstream industry of iron extraction.

On the other hand, in the Italian privatisation process, which was completed between 1994 and 1995, Italian producers took the lion's share. This was especially true for the production of flat products through integrated processes using large furnaces in which particularly strategic is the issue of exploiting economies of scale.

To explain this idiosyncrasy, we scrutinised the role of the complex tangle of local power relations. Our research theorises on how deep-seated meaning structures and political relations interact with economic pressures to produce local power formations able to explain observed local variations in globally unfolding waves of policy-making.

In stark opposition to the apparently self-evident statement that power relations and culture matter in explaining the evolution of economic institutions and policies is the general attitude to tackling the design and planning of economic policies as a politically neutral exercise in which the so-called technical solutions are there for all to see.

In general, such technical discourses, apparently deprived of political content, which stigmatise alternative worldviews as “ideological”, produce two dysfunctional outcomes, we suggest. First, they make cognitively unacceptable any political discourse that deviates from a specific pedagogic practice (Oakes et al., 1998) that mobilises a specific technical language (Bourdieu, 1991). Second, and consequently, the reduction of the repertoire of considered alternatives forces a homogenisation of economic policies that, once applied to specific political and cultural contexts, may lead to counterintuitive and often undesired consequences.

In our case, we show how the widely accepted economic discipline inspired by the so-called Washington Consensus legitimised the European Commission to produce a discourse on the alleged virtues of markets with respect to state ownership that, in the late 1980s and 1990s, was enforced as unquestionable natural evidence. On the other hand, however, we document the attempts of a specific power system in Italy to respond to the global pressures to privatisations giving rise to idiosyncratic economic institutions.

While reconstructing the privatisation of the steel industry in Italy, in this book, we propose a hegemony theory of privatisation. By the means of the empirical evidence that we report and interpret, we explain how privatisation processes unfold to accommodate economic pressures, political interests, and ideological constraints of a hegemonic social group, or aggregation of social groups.

Therefore, we explain privatisations through the interpretive lens of Gramsci's theory of hegemony. Antonio Gramsci was a Marxist political thinker who focused on the “…relations of human thoughts, feelings, and will to ‘objective’ social process” (Kołakowski, 2008: 969). With the concept of hegemony, Gramsci described the process through which different ideologies struggle for supremacy until one, or a unique combination of ideologies, emerges as the winning one (Gramsci, 1975: 457, 1584). Hegemony ensues when an alignment is reached among ideology, political/organisational structures, and economic incentives (Gramsci, 1975: 1583–1585). The central interpretive device in our analysis is the concept of the historical bloc. A historical bloc is made of the complex and contradictory cluster (Gramsci, 1975: 1051) of (i) cultural “superstructures”, which are shared understandings and meanings, (ii) material forces, or relations of production, and (iii) organisational structures, which wield power through bureaucratic and coercive power.

The idiosyncratic unfolding of the Italian steel privatisation, with respect to other European countries facing a similar crisis of overcapacity, reveals how idiosyncratic cultural, political, and economic forces explain the nature of a specific institutional change.

In France, Spain, and the United Kingdom, a globally legitimated industrial logic moulded privatisation processes, and national privatisations seem to participate in a globally planned restructuring process, with foreign producers playing a key role, whereas privatisations in Italy seem to respond to specific local pressures with domestic producers being the centre of the stage in the process.

The history of the Italian steel industry suggests that economic pressures to create large global champions could not find their way into the Italian steel industry due to the existence of a bundle of local intertwined interests, political relations, and ideological formations that characterised a specific hegemonic historical bloc.

Our work, we suggest, in re-proposing the conceptual device of historical bloc within Gramscian hegemony theory, provides a way to integrate discursive-cultural, economic, and political elements to explain the context-specific destiny of privatisation processes.

Ideology, which operates through discursive structures and hegemonic vocabularies, defines what policy or set of policies are legitimate. The narratives that defend the widely accepted rhetoric that private entrepreneurship creates value whereas state intervention in the economy is always deleterious and unproductive, Mazzucato explains (2013), has veiled the role of the state in producing valuable innovations in many fields and has legitimated the often hurried privatisation of many industries. Along these lines, in our book, we put particular emphasis on the analysis of the ideological-discursive structures that underpinned the steel privatisation process. In this light, the advantage of a Gramscian approach is one of integrating ideology, politics, and economic forces in explaining the socio-economic change.

In the conclusion of the book, we elaborate a model that presents privatisations as a process in which interest groups put in place discursive practices to legitimise new institutions or overrule existing ones. In our explanation, we do not disregard the economic interests of involved actors. However, we investigate such interests as complex objects. They are not just assigned in the abstract; rather they are, at least partially, socially and culturally constructed and are dependent on specific historical trajectories. This perspective contributes to explain why similar countries, belonging to the same supranational political and economic structures (European Union, World Bank, or International Monetary Fund), produced different privatisation patterns. In writing this book, we intended to take the wraps off the deep causal mechanisms and motives that underpin dramatic institutional change. Too often, the pedagogical rhetoric behind the application of economic rationality suppresses the analysis of hidden political conflicts that mould institutional changes. These conflicts trigger not only political manoeuvring but discursive struggles as well that work to assign specific meaning to issues. Along these lines, we investigated how local interest groups actively moulded the pattern of the privatisation of Italian steel. In this exploration, we were guided by the curiosity to understand how local cultural and political opportunity structures interacted with exogenously given and globally spreading pressures to generate a local mutation in privatisation policy.

Under a theoretical and methodological perspective, as is now clear to readers, this book adopts the theoretical lenses of Gramscian hegemony theory. Yet, in the course of our research, we embarked on a dialogue between Gramscian analysis and contemporary sociological research. We found particularly fruitful the interaction with research on social movement and neo-institutionalism. The bridge that we built facilitates, we believe, a reciprocal enrichment since the body of empirical research on framing and institutional entrepreneurship makes available a repertoire of concepts that allows an empirical grounding of Gramscian analysis of hegemony. Specifically, to empirically investigating the discursive strategies that actors applied in the fight for hegemony, we borrow from the literature on social movements the concept of collective action frame that are “action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate” action (Benford & Snow, 2000: 624). On the other hand, our analysis does not occur in an institutional vacuum. Therefore, we explore hegemonic practices considering the constraints in which these practices operate. We mobilise the concept of institution, and the connected concept of institutional entrepreneurship, as developed in neo-institutionalism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Scott, 2014), to account for the coercive, normative, and cultural-cognitive constraints in which hegemonic practices occur and that aim to change. As well we borrowed from neo-institutional theory in sociology the concept of field (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012) that we find much more useful than the economic concept of industry to capture the population of actors and the repertoire of forces that shaped privatisations.

Finally, a caveat. In our work, we especially focused our empirical research on discourse. To this aim, we often mobilised post-Gramscian theorisation, such as Laclau and Mouffe analysis of discursively built political identities (1985), in which the discourse is constitutive of interests. Yet, in our interpretation, economic pressures maintain a key explanatory role. To be clear, we reject the “autonomization of the political” from the economic base as in Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 25). However, the analysis of our case suggests that the specific political and cultural structures of a field may differently mobilise the same economic pressures. Developing further the Gramscian idea that “economic and discursive dimensions are mutually reinforcing” (Levy & Scully, 2007: 977), we propose that the political organisation of a historical bloc crystallises the compromise between economic and cultural pressures that appear “inextricably linked” (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012: 43).

Along these lines, theoretically, our book mobilises the Gramscian concept of the historical bloc to score three objectives. First, the concept of the historical bloc explains the idiosyncratic configuration of local variation of globally spreading policies. Second, the concept of the historical bloc supports the explanation of why and how do countries privatise their industries. Third, the analysis of the dynamics alignment or misalignment of a historical bloc supports the explanation of institutional change and field fragmentation and settlement. Specifically, the process of misalignment is an endogenous explanation of why processes of institutional change start off, while alignment, or, better, re-alignments, explain why and how fields settle after an institutional change. In this respect, our bridging of Gramscian hegemony theory and institutional theory contributes to better articulate the dynamics of institutional changes.

The completion of the first draft of this book was concomitant with the sudden development of the vicissitudes of ILVA, the largest Italian steel-integrated producer that was privatised in 1995 and acquired by the private Italian group Riva.

In 2018, following the judicial problems of the owner, the Riva family, the company was again available on the market and was acquired by ArcelorMittal. At that time, we interpreted the event as the conclusion of a long process initiated 30 years before. More interestingly, the sale of ILVA to ArcelorMittal seemed to finally consummate the fate of European steel-integrated production. Indeed, in 2006, the same group had acquired state-owned steel makers in France, Luxembourg, and Spain. In the United Kingdom as well, in 2007, the Indian group Tata acquired privatised state-owned steel production.

The event, as well, sounded like the conclusion of the story we started to tell; it looked to us as the precipitating of a system towards its end-state equilibrium. After almost 30 years from the beginning of the privatisation process, and the decisive intervening of criminal offences of the Italian laws for environmental protection, the Italian steel industry was converging towards the same destiny of other European countries.

To us, this ending testified that the strength of material forces, precisely the pressure towards the concentration of the industry, found their way to domesticate local cultural and political structures. After all, we could be satisfied with how our theory was able to explain the 30-year delay.

However, to the surprise of most, the end of the drama of ILVA was not written yet.

On the 5th of December 2019, ArcelorMittal announced that it would renounce implementing the content of the sale contract and would abandon ILVA to its destiny.

A number of voices tried to explain what exactly happened and, more importantly, what is going to happen.

Briefly, on 2nd November 2019, the Italian parliament did not ratify a law that assured ArcelorMittal immunity from criminal offences related to environmental law. Without the ...