L’impegno educativo della fabbrica Olivetti nell’Italia del secondo dopoguerra. Storia di una comunità responsabile

Abstract

The Olivetti factory, founded in the 1930s, experienced a total transformation in the post-war period thanks to Adriano Olivetti, who, from 1946 to 1960, created an educational project for modernizing his enterprise and making it more international. Olivetti’s “concrete utopia” was constructed around the idea of a “community”, guiding the life of the factory towards a more conscious and responsible participation, by tending to blur the division between managers and workers and between working and private life. The signs of this corporate revolution were the cultural and social initiatives promoting the worker’s personal and professional development. The social services for children, women, families were opened not only to the staff but also to the inhabitants of the surrounding area, which made the Olivetti factory a laboratory for true democracy, for the rights of the weakest and for education of whole person. The historical reconstruction of the educational practices promoted within the Olivetti factory offers new answers to the challenges of today’s global crisis, both the economic and the employment issue. It is also a vision of work that values individual and collective development within a new community dimension.