Inside and outside the company. Methodological insights and later notes on the case-study of Automobili Lamborghini

Abstract

The article proposes an analysis following a fieldwork inside an enterprise, Automobili Lamborghini (Sant’Agata Bolognese) and reflects on some public consequences of the research aftermaths. It shortly focuses on fieldwork, starting from the post-modernist debate, its outcomes, also in the Italian contest, that progressively leads to consider that the ‘fieldwork is not what it used to be’. Afterwards the case-study focuses on the construction of the fieldwork dialogue, on the industrial relations that, based on the German model so-called mitbestimmung, facilitated the researcher’s entrance and her presence in the company, even with an independent project. In addition to detecting the objective difficulty to do ethnography inside the factory, it reflects on the public outcomes that show Anthropology and HR and trade-union representatives increasingly side by side, for the dissemination of the research results. So the Lamborghini research help us to rethink the traditional splits among independent and founded-by-company research, public anthropology and public engagement, identifying useful intersection points, with an usefulness configured differently for the parties in the fieldwork, researcher and research actors.

Keywords

• ethnography
• fieldwork
• industrial relations
• interlocutors
• public engagement