ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with culture over time in regard to a specific economic change process. It shows how the culture of labour that took root in a particular region, the Italian north-east, played a role in the economic growth which connoted that area from the 1980s onwards. The culture of labour as defined by the Lombardo-Veneto School reflects the features of the entrepreneurial and economic relationships of the region. The chapter describes the original features of the culture of labour as it emerged in the first laboratory in the decades around Italian unification. It focuses on the corporate and social paternalism that accompanied the application of the Lombardo-Veneto Schools precepts. The chapter dwells on the spread of small enterprises during the 1950s and 1960s, here presented as a form of imitation within an entrepreneurial culture. The Lombardo-Veneto scholars are often likened to the historical German-speaking economists for having inherited the socialism of the chair doctrine.
