Papers presented by Daniela Pirani since 2019
2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform
"Inventing Marketplace Traditions: Memory and Materiality in the Case of Mulino Bianco and the Italian Breakfast (1975-1996)"
Daniela Pirani, University of Liverpool
Abstract:
This paper investigates the role of material practices and memory in establishing marketplace traditions (Hobsbawn & Ranger, 1983), addressing the call to contextualise rhetorical history (Lubinski 2018). It does so by looking at Italian breakfast, a meal based on coffee, milk and biscuits, created by the Italian bakery brand Mulino. The literature that looks at business studies on tradition and nostalgia has not yet explained how certain rhetorical narratives produced by organisations prevail over others, and how they become accepted by external stakeholders. This study aims to answer this question through a historical narrative analysis of unpublished documents from the Mulino Bianco archive in Parma. The analysis unfolds through two key moments in the establishment of this tradition: the development of a new kind of biscuit and the validation of this practice through a PR campaign. The contribution offered is that materiality allows firm-specific narratives to be accepted by external audiences. Artefacts link the history of the organisation with collective mnemonic assets by materialising them into social practices. Through this process, emotions like nostalgia become tangible. Moreover, organisations not only draw from existing mnemonic assets (Lubinski 2018) but they also create new ones. To conclude, this paper observes how invented traditions require novel material artefacts and mnemonic assets to become accepted, and to allow stakeholders to reproduce invented traditions as living ones.
Keywords:
2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform
"How Biscuits Became Italian: The Fleeting Nature of Country of Origin Effect"
Daniela Pirani, University of Liverpool
Abstract:
This working paper looks at the trajectory of biscuits between 1850s and 1930s, showing how biscuits have entered the Italian marketplace as an English commodity, and how they have then been nationalised as an Italian product, giving rise to a national market and a new understanding of this commodity. This paper contributes to business history literature by providing novel data that illustrate how Italian companies entered the global bakery market by imitating English products, and how this in turn affected the national market. Castro and Saiz (2019) suggest that country of origin is, along with nation branding, an answer to globalisation, and both have a ‘sweeping away’ potential towards local brands. This paper attempts a slightly different approach by looking at how the Italian bakery industry emerged and structured by appropriating the British know how and the premium associated with the country of origin. This theorisation is supported by mostly unpublished data collected in Italy about Italian bakery businesses at the turn of the 19th century. These data allow a discussion of the evolution of the Italian bakery business, focusing on the first brands who imported the British know-how and leveraged on the country of origin effect of British bakery. In doing so, this paper takes the perspective of the Italian marketplace to observe how the influence of foreign technologies and consumer culture changed the national bakery industry and the penetration of biscuits consumption. Moreover, it contributes to the discussion on internal business by showing how the country of origin is not a stable asset, as shown by a progressive nationalisation of biscuits in the Italian consumption pattern that eclipsed the British heritage.