State-owned Enterprises in the Italian corporate network, 1972-1983

State-owned enterprises pervaded Italian capitalism from the 1930s to 1999. Historians have stressed the relevance of stateowned enterprises to capital-intensive industries, but argued they also might curb private-sector growth. While researchers have mapped the extension of the major Italian state-owned groups, private companies in the Italian corporate network remain largely unexplored. We use the interlocking directorates technique to assess Antonio Chiesi’s thesis that in the mid-1970s the Italian corporate network was marked by two distinct centers, one stateowned and one private. We base our analysis on Imita.db for 1972 and 1983, using both network analysis and a prosopographic approach. Contrary to Chiesi’s results using a different sample, in 1972 the Italian corporate network was characterized by one large center, comprising both private and state-owned companies. By 1983, however, system cohesion had decreased sharply; stateowned enterprises had disappeared from its center, and the Italian corporate network, as Chiesi argued, had two distinct centers.