Department of Management

Ca' Foscari University of Venice

Giovanni Favero

 

Ca' Foscari University

 

Economic History

Associate Professor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laboratorio di Storia Contemporanea

 

Istrevi,

Head of the Scientific Committee

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SIDeS,

Member of the Scientific Committee

 

 

Giovanni Favero

Associate Professor

I am  Associate Professor in Economic History at the Universita' Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italy.

I graduated in History in Venice at Ca' Foscari (1995) and got a PhD in Urban and Rural History in Perugia (1999). I was visiting researcher at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (1998) and at the Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques (1999) in Paris, and at the University of California at Irvine, School of Social Sciences (2000).

My research interests stretch from the history of statistics (subject of my PhD dissertation, then published as Le misure del Regno, 2001) to business history and urban history. The critical edition of the correspondence between the director of the Italian statistical bureau at the end of the 19th Century and the main industrialist of the time (Lo statistico e l'industriale, 1999) was the occasion to shift the focus on business history, dealing with the relationship between the crisis of big business and the development of industrial districts (Lo smalto e la ruggine, 2002) and then with the development of a multinational network firm (Benetton, 2005). An interest for urban history dates back to the PhD, and is at the origin of a study on the connection between local policy and economic development in a small Italian city (Amministrare lo sviluppo, 2007). Some raids into early-modern times concerned the demographic history of the Venetian ghetto (with Francesca Trivellato), and ceramic manufacturing in the Republic of Venice.

More recently, I edited a special issue of the journal Quaderni Storici, 134.2 (2010) on statistical sources. An article on how businessmen could influence the production of statistical data resulting in a deep regulatory capture was published in the journal Enterprise & Society on June 2011. A survey of the complex relationship between statistical thinking and official statistics in Italy all along the 19th and 20th Centuries has just been published by Einaudi in the Annals of its history of Italy.

The connection between quantification and business management in modern times is now my main field of interest. A current research project I am working on together with Marisa Agostini at the Ca' Foscari Department of Management concerns the connection between accounting fraud, managerial succession and business failure.

Together with Michael Serruys of Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Miki Sugiura of Tokyo International University, I am also coordinating an international project on gateways and hinterlands in modern Europe. With Michael Serruys I am also working on an assessment of the evolution of the Italian railway network in historical perspective.

An important study under way concerns industrial privileges in the Republic of Venice: I am working on this issue in the frame of a book on the political economy of family, State and market in the Republic of Venice, together with my colleagues Paola Lanaro at Ca' Foscari and Andrea Caracausi at Padua University. 

 

Department of Management

S. Giobbe,

Cannaregio 873

I - 30121 Venice

Room 14/B

Office Hour: click here

Office

Tel. +39-041 234.8721

Fax +39-041.234 8701

Email:gfavero@unive.it

Papers in English

 

Business Attitudes Toward Statistical Investigation in Late Nineteenth Century Italy:

A Wool Industrialist from Reticence to Influence,

Enterprise & Society, 12 (2) June 2011.

 

Weather Forecasts

or Rain Dance?

On Inter-War Business Barometers, EBHA Conference in Geneva, September 14-16, 2007.

 

Old and New Ceramics Manufacturers, Products and Markets in the Venetian State (XVIIth-XVIIIth centuries),

in P. Lanaro (ed.),

At the Center of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland, Toronto, CRRS, 2006, pp. 271-315.

 

Benetton

Identifying an Image, Imagining an Identity,

EBHA Conference in Frankfurt, September 1-3, 2005.

 

Corrado Gini

and Italian Statistics under Fascism,

Il pensiero economico italiano,

XII (2004), n. 1, pp. 45-59.