Systems of State-Owned Enterprises: from Public Entrepreneurship to State Shareholding

This thesis outlines a new analytical perspective on state ownership through the original concept of systems of state-owned enterprises (SOSOEs). It is argued that the SOSOEs concept adequately captures the evolution of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in modern capitalist economies, challenging and enriching existing economic theories as well as contributing to reinstate the policy instrumentality of state ownership. The concept is defined from a comparative case study analysis of two distinct SOSOEs, operating within the same national context in different time periods. The first case concerns the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI), Italy’s former and most relevant state holding company, that played a central role in the Country’s post-WWII economic development. This thesis advances an interpretation of IRI’s economic function based on an original empirical investigation of its archival and documentary sources, focusing on its main public policy missions and on its display of industrial entrepreneurship features. The second case examines the current Italian system of SOEs, assessing the still relevant presence of SOEs in the Italian national context and evaluating the overall governance of the system through a set of interviews with leading executives. Despite the similarity in size and sectoral diversification, the two SOSOEs differ significantly in terms of their operating configurations. In fact, they could be assimilated to two dichotomous ideal types: the IRI SOSOEs represents a template for the policy-oriented and dynamic ‘public entrepreneurship’ model, while the current Italian SOSOEs resembles the policy-neutral and passive ‘state shareholding’ variant. Implicit in these results is the opportunity for current SOSOEs to embrace a public entrepreneurship configuration, in order to exploit the full policy potential of state ownership in driving economic change. The thesis concludes with a proposal for reforming Italy’s current SOSOEs via the creation of a state holding company

Modeling and Simulation of Metallurgical Processes in Ironmaking and Steelmaking

In recent years, improving the sustainability of the steel industry and reducing its CO2 emissions has become a global focus. To achieve this goal, further process optimization in terms of energy and resource efficiency and the development of new processes and process routes are necessary. Modeling and simulation have established themselves as invaluable sources of information for otherwise unknown process parameters and as an alternative to plant trials that involves lower costs, risks, and time. Models also open up new possibilities for model-based control of metallurgical processes. This Special Issue focuses on recent advances in the modeling and simulation of unit processes in iron and steelmaking. It includes reviews on the fundamentals of modeling and simulation of metallurgical processes, as well as contributions from the areas of iron reduction/ironmaking, steelmaking via the primary and secondary route, and continuous casting

Transformation in Composition:

This study enlarges on the notion of composition in landscape architecture. It builds upon the ‘Delft method’, which elaborates composition as a methodological framework from its sister discipline architecture. At the same time takes a critical stance in respect to this framework, informed by recent epistemological developments in landscape architecture such as the site-specificity and process discourses. The notion of composition is examined from a historical and theoretical perspective, before turning to an examination of the brownfield park project realised in the period 1975-2015. These projects emerge as an important laboratory and catalyst for developments in landscape architecture, whereby contextual, process, and formal-aesthetic aspects emerge as central themes. The thesis of this research is that a major theoretical and methodological expansion of the notion of composition can be distilled from the brownfield park project, in which seemingly irreconcilable paradigms such as site and process are incorporated. By extension, the study elaborates on the disciplinary specificity of landscape architecture as distinct to its sister disciplines architecture and urbanism, propositioning a ‘radical maturation’ of the foundations of the discipline in the period 1975 – 2015, via the brownfield park project. A metaphor for this process is offered by the phenomenon of ecdysis in arthropods (such as the blue swimmer crab), whereby the growth from juvenile to adult takes place in stages involving the moulting of an inelastic exoskeleton. Once shed, a larger exoskeleton is formed, whose shape and character is significantly different to its forebears. The research sketches the contours of a similar ‘disciplinary ecdysis’ in the period 1975-2015, whereby an evolution of design-as-composition praxis in landscape architecture takes place. In the slipstream of these findings, the research sheds new light on the shifts in the form and content of the city itself in this period, and the agency of the urban park in the problematique of the contemporary urban realm. In the cases studied, the park typology has been able to address problems that much of the traditional apparatus of spatial planning and design has failed to do. By extension, the study reveals that many of the paradigms of urban planning and design are in need of major review in the context of deindustrialization. The urban park typology – in its guise as the brownfield park – also appears also able to shape and qualify larger urban regions. As such, the research highlights the rise of brownfield lands and their impact on the fabric of the city, the life of their inhabitants and the paradigms that dominate urban cultures, in turn fundamentally revising the definitions and agencies of notions such as city, nature and landscape

Transformation in Composition

This study enlarges on the notion of composition in landscape architecture. It builds upon the ‘Delft method’, which elaborates composition as a methodological framework from its sister discipline architecture. At the same time takes a critical stance in respect to this framework, informed by recent epistemological developments in landscape architecture such as the site-specificity and process discourses. The notion of composition is examined from a historical and theoretical perspective, before turning to an examination of the brownfield park project realised in the period 1975-2015. These projects emerge as an important laboratory and catalyst for developments in landscape architecture, whereby contextual, process, and formal-aesthetic aspects emerge as central themes. The thesis of this research is that a major theoretical and methodological expansion of the notion of composition can be distilled from the brownfield park project, in which seemingly irreconcilable paradigms such as site and process are incorporated. By extension, the study elaborates on the disciplinary specificity of landscape architecture as distinct to its sister disciplines architecture and urbanism, propositioning a ‘radical maturation’ of the foundations of the discipline in the period 1975 – 2015, via the brownfield park project. A metaphor for this process is offered by the phenomenon of ecdysis in arthropods (such as the blue swimmer crab), whereby the growth from juvenile to adult takes place in stages involving the moulting of an inelastic exoskeleton. Once shed, a larger exoskeleton is formed, whose shape and character is significantly different to its forebears. The research sketches the contours of a similar ‘disciplinary ecdysis’ in the period 1975-2015, whereby an evolution of design-as-composition praxis in landscape architecture takes place. In the slipstream of these findings, the research sheds new light on the shifts in the form and content of the city itself in this period, and the agency of the urban park in the problematique of the contemporary urban realm. In the cases studied, the park typology has been able to address problems that much of the traditional apparatus of spatial planning and design has failed to do. By extension, the study reveals that many of the paradigms of urban planning and design are in need of major review in the context of deindustrialization. The urban park typology – in its guise as the brownfield park – also appears also able to shape and qualify larger urban regions. As such, the research highlights the rise of brownfield lands and their impact on the fabric of the city, the life of their inhabitants and the paradigms that dominate urban cultures, in turn fundamentally revising the definitions and agencies of notions such as city, nature and landscape

Cementing modernisation: transnational markets, language and labour tension in a Post-Soviet factory in Moldova

The aim of my thesis is to investigate workers’ reactions to transnational market reform in a Soviet-era factory in the Republic of Moldova. The thesis finds that there are varying, blurred responses of contestation and consent to market modernisation in the context of one factory, the Rezina Cement Plant of Egrafal Group Ltd., one of Moldova’s first major European transnational-corporate (TNC) private enterprises. Language plays a critical role in workers’ responses, since language is important to Egrafal Ltd.’s goal of market integration and capitalist labour reform. However, corporate language expectations frequently clash with the language that was previously embedded in Moldova’s industrial workscape. As a result, the thesis argues that workers adopt, resist or modify factory reforms through what I call linguistic styles or situational performative modes linked with ideas of modernity, markets and mutuality. The thesis goes on to argue that employees’ spatial status location in the plant, irrespective of job skill and income, corresponds to employees’ differing linguistic modalities and differing tendencies towards protest and accommodation in response to factory restructuring. Workers in the top strata of the factory’s Administration Building speak multiple languages, long for cosmopolitan lifestyles and benefit from high integration into corporate-market structures. Many achieved job mobility in the plant since socialism and now accommodate to capitalism and corporate styles through linguistic codeswitching. The middle strata of ethno-linguistic minorities in Administration’s laboratory and the lower strata on the shop floor lack corporate-backed linguistic capital and are on the fringe of modernisation; both are highly job insecure and protest capitalist change by way of what appears to be traditional language usage, but is in fact a contemporary response to liberal-economic change. This finding leads the study to conclude that workers’ fragmented linguistic-based reactions to market reform do not entail real protectionist collectivism, as Polanyi would have envisioned (Polanyi 1944, 150), nor enduring moral-economic protest along the lines of E.P. Thompson (1971). This is for the very reason of workers’ competing modernist longings and job insecurity – alienating workers from each other whilst drawing them back to local ties – which effectively keeps workers in perpetual oscillation between markets and mutuality

The Ruin of the Past: Deindustrialization, Working-Class Communities, and Football in the Midlands, UK 1945-1990

As a social history of deindustrialization in the Midlands (U.K.), this study explores how loss informed working-class conceptions of identity, culture, and community. By shuttering factories, disrupting social networks, defamiliarizing the landscape, and relegating thousands to the unemployment lines, deindustrialization marooned the Midlands working class in a world they struggled to recognize. Using oral histories to interrogate the ways loss informed everyday life, this study examines how the meanings attached to football transformed the sport into a metonym for the past. The dynamics and values specific to working-class communities are analyzed through the lens of four key working class relationships. Composing the fabric of reality, by dissecting relationships to the body, employment, sociality, and the everyday, this study illustrates how work organized and influenced life. Acting as a before picture to the trauma of deindustrialization, this study emphasizes football’s ubiquity in the lives of the Midlands’ working class. Dedicating attention to absence, automation, mergers/liquidations, and redundancies, this dissertation is also devoted to detailing deindustrialization’s destruction of the working-class community, leaving a landscape defined by absence, memories of football entangled with private histories of loss. The departed family members, workplaces, shops, and even smells continued to live on, as deindustrialization transformed football into a trace of the rich Midlands’ industrial heritage

The political economy of financing late development: credit, capital and industrialisation; Colombia 1940–67

Accounts of economic development during mid-twentieth century have been dominated by import-substituting industrialisation (ISI) and/or state-led industrialisation frameworks. is literature attaches considerable importance to such policy areas critical to manufacturing as: trade and tariffs, foreign exchange and the promotion of credit. According to this view, industrialisation became an official goal and in many developing economies governments committed to it seriously. Focusing on Colombia, this dissertation challenges conventional wisdom. It demonstrates that the Colombian state did not provide financial aid, or implement deliberate trade-protectionist support, for industrialists to the degree hitherto argued. A distinct political-economy configuration, in which small-scale agriculturalists, particularly coffee exporters, wielded significant power within the state, meant that the type of distortive pro-ISI macro policies pursued in other Latin American economies were eschewed. Industrialisation proceeded apace in Colombia, but this was chiefly a market- or private-led phenomenon. e methodology employed to substantiate this claim is not comparative, yet frequent references are made to other Latin American nations to serve as benchmarks and counterpoints. New archival material, both quantitative and qualitative, is combined in novel ways to substantiate the original, revisionist interpretations advanced in the thesis. Policy-makers, targeting the twin challenges of managing external-account pressures and sustaining fiscal revenue, rather than promoting inward-looking development, best explain moderate levels of tariffs and slight overvaluation of the currency observed in Colombian trade policy. e heretofore untold history of the Institute for Industrial Development, a direct supplier of venture capital, shows a government agency with major organisational weaknesses, incapable of fulfilling its legal mandate, least of conforming to the major role attached by the literature as key agent for industrialisation. Findings regarding credit demonstrate that neither ordinary nor subsidised credit flowed to manufacturing to the extent previously thought. Patterns of legislated credit, sector-targeted banking and privileged access to the Central Bank, all show that agrarian ventures, not industrialists, were the recipients of subsidised official financing. A growing incompatibility between the financial requirements of advanced industrialisation and the clientelistic nature of the domestic polity that had to cater for the needs of agrarian groups, prevented policy elites from adopting a pro-manufacturing stance in financial and credit policies, even had they so wished

Gone to Pitchipoi

In Gone to Pitchipoi Katz vividly recalls his experience growing up in the turmoil of WWII, and his extraordinary escape from the constant threats of Nazi occupied Poland. Born in 1931 in the picturesque countryside of Ostrowiec Świętokrzyskie, wherein more than a third of the population was Jewish, Katz experienced a constant juxtaposition of traditional ways of life with the tragedies of those years. Deemed unfit for labor camps, Katz was marked for certain death and forced to live on the run in a daily quest for food, shelter, and friendship. He eventually reunited with his sister, Fela, together encountering a series of narrow escapes and forging on to see the day of liberation. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the fate of Jews in small Polish towns during the Second World War