Making Things Beautiful and Doing them the Italian Way : Discourses around Aesthetics, Labour Discipline, and Value in Global Production

This article focuses on the way in which the narratives around beauty are used in the regulation of labour relationships in some of the Italian manufacturing companies (clothing and footwear) producing abroad. Drawing on a long-term ethnography on the delocalisation of Italian companies to Romania (Redini, 2020) and utilizing interviews with Italians entrepreneurs, it attemps to show how the rhetorics around an aesthetics of living, working and producing in the 'Italian way' allows to impose specific working conditions and wages on Romanian workers. The concept of beauty to which the informants refer recalls an essentialised idea of territory and identity and is strongly politically connoted. On the one hand, it is substantiated by the culture of making things beautiful and doing them well associated with Italian manufacturing and artistic production, and on the other it refers to the role assumed by Italian capital in the political-economic transition of Romania.