A gramscian perspective on field dynamics. The case of the privatization of Italian steel industry. Issue 4 (December 2020) - Mollona, Edoardo
Highlights: Italian steel privatizations was locally idiosyncratic since global foreign investors played a marginal role. Hegemonic practice, a Gramscian concept, is appropriate to understand and describe the unfolding pattern of privatization.. Hegemonic practices organize the diffused agency of social actors aiming at reproducing and changing a field's institutions The emergence of a specific historical bloc explaines the stabilization of discursive and political opportunity structures. Alliances need to become a historical bloc to stabilize a field. Abstract: Institutional fields are not static, they undergo times of fragmentation and times of settlement. Neo-institutional research has long explained the settlement of fields as either the effect of political manoeuvring of actors, or of discursive activity influencing cultural codes, narratives and symbols. But can these processes really be considered in isolation? In this paper, we propose to adopt a comprehensive view on fields' dynamics, one that embraces the interaction of political and discursive manoeuvring to explain how fragmented fields manage to settle. To do so, we build on the Gramscian concept of hegemonic practices as discursive and political processes that integrate cultural equivalence among actors with political alliances based on aligned interests. Hegemonic practices align actors in a new historical bloc (a new settlement). Through this lens, we interpret the case of the Italian State steel privatization (1984–1995) and propose a process model explaining what yields fields' dynamics from fragmentation to settlement. The model highlights the action of diffused agency in field dynamics, thus overcoming the obsolete challenger/incumbent view, and the need of becoming a historical bloc for alliances to stabilize a field.