Territory, Social Capital and Resilience: The Workers’ Buy-Out Case

Abstract

New forms of appropriation of economic activities that had ceased or were in the process of failure, have been recently established in Italy. These initiatives are carried out by the cooperation of laid-off workers and/or workers subsidized by governmental unemployment insurance, and they are inspired by experiences on an international scope, such as South American empersas recuperadas. Therefore, former workers organized as cooperatives try to recover the company in which they were previously employed with the acquisition of business units or through purchase agreements, becoming directly involved in the management and leadership of the firms. In this way, the workers become entrepreneurs by resorting to workers’ buy-outs (WBO). The aim of this paper is to investigate the phenomenon of WBO initiatives in relationship to the social resilience of the territory. More precisely, in this work, the authors shed light on WBO actions meant as initiatives for companies restoration from the bottom, such as with other bottom-up actions as in the context of public real-estate regeneration. Through a multivariate analysis, the WBO initiatives have been investigated concerning their uneven geographical distribution in Italy.