Pyramids of Trust: Social Embeddedness and Political Culture in Two Italian Gold Jewelry Districts

This article demonstrates the usefulness of the notion of embeddedness to the historical study of Italian industrial districts of small firms and of local economic change more generally. The development of gold jewelry production in two Italian towns, Valenza Po and Arezzo, shows that vertical disintegration was enabled by the creation of networks of heterogeneous social relations. In both towns, social and political ties led to the creation of institutions of collective governance, which in turn produced a workable level of trust between economic actors. The production of trust, however, never ceased to be a contentious process, endowed with multiple and often contradictory meanings embedded in specific networks and contexts, ranging from collective projects of modernization in Valenza Po to the cementing of a secretive informal economy in Arezzo. The embeddedness approach to economic action is superior both to the communitarian arguments of much of the literature on the Italian industrial districts and to transaction-cost theories, which tend to view institutions in instrumental and functionalist ways.