Manufacturing Digitalization in Italy

Manufacturing Digitalisation in Italy: The Future Behind examines how digitalisation is transforming manufacturing in Italy, with particular attention to the interplay between new technologies and territorially embedded manufacturing systems.

Drawing on extensive empirical research, the book introduces the concept of the regional digitalisation system to explain how policies, firms, and decentralised institutional capacities jointly shape patterns of digital transformation. Challenging linear models of technological adoption, it advances the idea of “the future behind” to show how pre-existing regional socio-institutional configurations both enable and constrain emerging development trajectories. As Europe’s second-largest manufacturing economy, yet a relative digital laggard, Italy has recently experienced a significant acceleration in firms’ digitalisation, rapidly converging towards the EU average despite structurally adverse conditions. Characterised by regionalised capitalism, small and medium-sized enterprises, territorial inequalities, limited high-technology sectors, and weak, decentralised innovation systems, Italy provides a crucial case for understanding how subnational socio-institutional contexts shape manufacturing transformation and produce distinct regional digitalisation paths.

As the first comprehensive sociological book on manufacturing digitalisation, this book will appeal to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers interested in economic sociology, the sociology of work and industry, comparative political economy, industrial policy, regional studies, innovation studies, and the sociology of technology.