Conflict and Participation in Bargaining at Company Level: The Lamborghini Case

In the last 50 years, the nature and quality of industrial relations in Italy have changed considerably. The national bargaining process has been severely weakened and, in the past decade, the social dialogue between parties has been questioned on several occasions. Based on an original corpus of texts documenting bargaining at company level over 50 years within Lamborghini (which was acquired by the Audi VW group in 1998), in this article we analyse the core issues of the debate between the parties, and the very ways in which the debate takes place. Combining techniques of automatic text analysis and reading of individual documents, we obtain a periodisation of the issues at the heart of corporate bargaining that contribute to a discussion of the key elements characterising the virtuous circle of company development and quality of industrial relations.