Dai gatti selvaggi al cane a sei zampe. Tecnologia, conoscenza e organizzazione nell'Agip e nell'Eni di Enrico Mattei (review)

Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI), a leading force in the Italian energy industry, has been the object of numerous works chronicling its strategic evolution; for example, Francesca Carnevali's "State Enterprise and Italy's 'Economic Miracle'" (Enterprise & Society, June 2000). Yet there was a lack of scholarly studies on the organizational history of its formative years, largely because the company records have only recently become available. Even more important, notes Daniele Pozzi, has been the long shadow cast over the history of the company by the tragic fate of ENI's deus ex machina Enrico Mattei. Still shrouded in mystery, the premature death of this larger-than-life figure in a plane crash in October 1962 has prevailed over the attention of those who have written about the origins of ENI, consigning to oblivion the history of the organization that Mattei decisively contributed to create. The complex process of accumulation and deployment of the technical and organizational capabilities that made ENI a success story is the topic of this book, the first monograph based on a thorough examination of the vast company archives. The rich and copious evidence at his disposal allows Pozzi to move well beyond Mattei while fully incorporating his crucial managerial role within the broader history of ENI and its forerunner, Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli (AGIP).

The book is divided into three parts, each covering a phase of the company's history, spanning four decades, from 1926 through 1962, with a short closing passage on the immediately post-Mattei years from 1962 through 1967. The opening section deals with the first two decades of AGIP, beginning with its founding as a State controlled corporation with a charter to engage in petroleum exploration and commerce in 1926 and continuing to 1948. That year the electoral landslide that ushered in the long regime of the centrist Christian Democrats (DC) enabled Mattei, elected to Parliament in the DC ranks, to take control of AGIP and pursue a vigorous course of oil nationalism. Poised to drive Italian economic growth, the strategy was based on further exploration of the commercial deposits of natural gas in the Po Valley, drilling of which had shown promising prospects during World War II. A moderate, reformist DC with an entrepreneurial background of a small independent producer of dyes in the 1930s, and having played an active role as a Catholic partisan commander in Northern Italy, Mattei had been named commissioner of the company at the end of World War II. But only after 1948, on the heels of the DC's electoral victory that paved the way for the strengthening of a mixed economy, did his expansive view prevail over that of those who, both within the company and the Italian government, favored resuming AGIP's much less ambitious prewar profile as a largely commercial enterprise dependent on cartel agreements with the Italian branches of Standard Oil of New Jersey and Shell for a share in the distribution of fuel oil and gasoline.

The second part of Pozzi's book charts the implementation of Mattei's strategy, amid continual readjustments, sudden shifts in direction, and not a few organizational setbacks, in the five years (1948–1953) leading to the creation of ENI. This was a vertically integrated holding company able to operate in competition with the international oil companies and break their control over refining and petrol distribution in Italy. To accomplish this end, given ENI's modest oil findings on the national soil, the company turned increasingly to international markets and tied its fortunes to those of emergent oil nationalism embraced by such producer countries as Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. Internationalization and diversification into the petrochemical industry form the subject of the third part of the book, reconstructing the first decade of ENI down to Mattei's death.

The thread around which...