Apprenticeship and technical schools in the formation of industrial districts

Since IDs have been discovered as unit of analysis by economists and sociologists, economic historians have been increasingly called for giving their own contribution to the explanation of the emergence of concentrations of high specialized firms which benefit of skilled labour, suppliers, information, along with services provided by a large variety of associations and institutions, facilities all normally located within the same industrial cluster. The chapter to be included in the section edited by Alberto Guenzi aims to pick up such a challenging request by adopting an interpretative approach addressed primarily to investigate the formation of the Marshallian industrial atmosphere which originated the IDs, rather than the phase of the emergence of the ID itself. Indeed, the existing plentiful literature devoted to the study of the organization of the European urban economies in the medieval and modern age depict a social and institutional environment which could have paved the way for the subsequently achievement of the IDs. According to the above shortly outlined approach, the focus will be moved from the rising and development of specific clusters of firms to the process leading to the birth of “epistemic communities”, a concept borrowed by the economic literature applicable to networks of knowledge in which membership is obtained - typically through some combination both of formal and on-the-job training and tacit as well as codified technical information - only after having achieved the complete mastery of the codes, theories and tools employed in a specific practice. As a matter of fact, in the chapter it will be stressed the importance of the urban guilds as institutions actively involved in building up cohesive and durable “epistemic communities”. For sure, as urban guilds were responsible of selecting, improving, and handing down those technical capabilities which played a crucial role in determining the admission or exclusion from the arts, they also acted as the repository of a community’s business, technological, legal, and material culture, that seem to be a distinctive feature of the IDs still today. In order to shed some light on the role really played by the “epistemic communities” in the formation of IDs, the IDs emerged in Europe during the 17th and 18th as leaders in the production of fashiion commodities will be compared as they provide interesting examples both of failure and success.