“Managerial Styles Within an Italian Industrial District: Two different successful stories”,

The scientific literature about Italian industrial districts always tried to define the rules and the governance mechanisms acting inside them, but often it considered the district enterprises as an unique whole, not caring about the different managerial styles (understood as corporate behaviours and not just only as individual entrepreneurial and managerial inclinations) which can occur between the enterprises within a same district. Instead, there is a wide variety of managing firms also within an industrial district. So, starting from a systemic approach, the aim of this paper is to try to fill this gap exposing a clear example of different managerial styles in a Southern Italian industrial District (Nocera-Gragnano); indeed, two of the most successful enterprises within it (La Doria and AR) are easily distinguishable by the essence of their organisation and strategies. While the first one is considerable properly as a management conduction firm (which cares deeply about, in example, corporate communications or a well definite recruitment process), the latter is instead considerable as a family conduction firm that often cold be as overlooking some management issues and rules. So it is interesting to understand how these two firms, born in the same territory and endowed of similar start-up conditions, acting two dissimilar ways of organisation and strategy, became not only district leaders but also leading international enterprises within their industry, that is the tomatoes manufacturing. We argue that, although the different managerial behaviours (and consequently the strategies too) of these firms, they achieve quite similar final goals, thanks to the vital system features of the industrial district. Indeed, these ones, interacting with the firm-specific dynamic capabilities, allow the achievement of similar (but not identical) corporate performances.