Dal petrolio all'energia: ERG 1938–2008. Storia e cultura d'impresa [From Oil to Energy: ERG 1938–2008, Enterprise History and Corporate Culture] (review)

This book is the outcome of the Italian oil-refining firm ERG-sponsored high-profile scientific research to celebrate its seventieth anniversary. Paride Rugafiori and Ferdinando Fasce present an exhaustive reconstruction of the company's evolution from the first small plant built near Genoa in the 1930s to the present day, when ERG still operates as a multibusiness group on a European scale, involved in different energy-related industries.

The book's most important aspect is the fact that Rugafiori and Fasce analyze a family-controlled business, which was able to innovate (both technically and organizationally) and survive in a highly competitive and internationalized economic sector during the period historian Andrea Colli defined as Italy's "fourth capitalism" in his works Il quarto capitalismo: un profilo italiano, (2002) and The History of Family Business, 1850–2000 (2003). What makes this case even more remarkable is the fact that the Garrones, the owning family, operated in an industry that has often been portrayed as the epitome of integrated, managerial, big business as analyzed in the classic studies by Alfred Chandler in Strategy and Structure (1962) and Edith Penrose in The Large International Firm in Developing Countries (1968). In this way, this book makes an important contribution to the field of oil business by integrating "minor" companies operating alongside the major ones, often in a complex symbiosis with the latter, both in Europe and in the United States.

Unfortunately, the book lacks a comparative perspective and does not establish analogies between ERG and other family-run oil companies such as Phillips Petroleum, Getty Oil, or the Perretti family's API in Italy. In fact, this pitfall could be easily explained by taking into account the lack of scientific literature with regard to many of the lesser known actors in the oil arena (for instance, the number of works of Frank Phillips and Jean Paul Getty is small, while there is simply nothing written about Ferdinando Brachetti Perretti). Despite this minor and understandable limitation, this book offers a highly detailed reconstruction of the company, based mostly on ERG's archives and on interviews with former managers or with members of Garrone family (gathered by the authors during the research or already available in the celebratory booklets published by the company in the previous years).

The close relation between the history of the family and the history of the company is stressed from the beginning of the book, when the authors begin depicting the quest of a young Edoardo Garrone for whatever occupation that could allow him to marry his beloved girlfriend. During the 1930s, Garrone gathered resources through his family network and Genoa's merchant community, which permitted him to establish ERG in 1938.

The evolution of what was a marginal operator to becoming the first private Italian refining group was indeed a consequence of the high rate of development of the Italian economy after the Second World War and ERG's effective strategy of international cooperation. Through an extensive research in the British Petroleum (BP) archives, the authors study how the agreement between ERG and BP, with which ERG operated as BP's contractor, allowed the Italian firm to operate on a sufficient scale to sustain rapid growth without having to do significant investments in forward or backward integration. Operating with international partnerships on a large scale inevitably led to new challenges this rather traditional family business had to deal with, something that forced them to do some transformations to their until-then-existing corporate governance and organizational structure.

The company went through an even more dramatic metamorphosis affected after Edoardo Garrone's sudden death in 1963. His son, Riccardo—who had to take over the running of the company at the age...