A Factory of Sociologies from FIAT to FCA

Abstract

This introductory essay puts the sociological debates on FIAT in perspective, by showing the relations between the evolution of the Italian multinational and the changes in the practice of sociological inquiry. At several junctures, the debate on FIAT has been so publicly relevant that it became a difficult and somehow hostile terrain for the development of a “quiet and cold” explanatory sociology independent of any positioning in the field of contention. But this is exactly what makes the relation between the Italian automobile factory and sociology a specific one, a privileged perspective through which it is possible to look not only at the changes in the world of labor, but also at the evolution of the discipline over time.