Schumpeter’s views of the innovative entrepreneur are well known in recent studies in business history. But researchers have paid scant attention to his discussions on the motives embedded in entrepreneur’ rational behaviors. Schumpeter mentioned the irrational motives, for example, “the dream and the will to build a private kingdom,” “the will to conquer” and “the joy of creating.” Considering the presence of these entrepreneurial motives, the focal point in this paper is, in particular, around the social dimensions of entrepreneurship such as the social concepts and ideals defining the entrepreneurs’ behaviors through a case of Vittorio Valletta, an entrepreneur-manager of Fiat, the Italian large-scale automobile enterprise.
Since having entered Fiat in 1921, Valletta enthusiastically supported taylorism and fordism beside Giovanni Agnelli, a founder of Fiat. In doing so, he was forced to engage himself with the fascist regime. In a document including the key words like technical progress, discipline, labour, nation and human progress, he showed the unique social theory or philosophy that can be interpreted as the organic elements of the traditional formulations of national solidarity in the fascist era. Clearly, he cannot be regarded as a fascist or semi-fascist. However, it is probable that Valletta did not find any contradictions between the objectives of a force which violently and effectively eliminated the obstacles to management and his own social horizons.
In crisis of the war and postwar, Valletta was prosecuted for collaborations with fascism. But he did not get any sentence in the specific political situations, and he could make a successful comeback to Fiat. In 1948, a debate between Valletta and Celeste Negarville, a communist senator, demonstrated Valletta’s obstinate attitudes to the problems of discipline of labour in factory and postwar economic reconstruction.
Fiat of Valletta was no doubt an engine of postwar reconstruction and motorization in the 1950s and 1960s Italy. Valletta’s managerial strategy was fundamentally based on the ideas of mass production of the utility passenger cars which permitted Fiat not to compete with the gigantic American automobile firms in the market. For Valletta, of particular important was to product much more in the backward situations in Italy. Especially interesting from our point of view is Valletta’s anti-communist model based on the centralized authority and hierarchy that was hostile to syndicates’ model of the self-discipline of workers. While defeating syndicates, Valletta pursued the welfare policy for Fiat workers showing Fiat as “great family.” This familism was, in fact, a product of Valletta’s paternalistic concepts that aimed to make firm a “community of work” or a “community of destiny.”
Central to Valletta who was strongly conscious of Italy’s relative industrial backwardness were the concepts of labour and welfare as well as those of production and development. Taking into considerations Valletta’s social ideals, many observers have found the ‘national populism’, the ‘national productivism’, and the social-democratic ideas. Surely, it might be difficult to define Valletta with those concepts. Of importance in this paper is, however, the fact that Valletta’s ambivalent “conservative utopia” revealed the underlining social ideals in the entrepreneurial behaviors.