During the 1980s and 1990s, Italian industrial districts and their internal economic structure became a major field of academic inquiry in the social sciences, receiving a lot of attention as an alternative regional industry configuration that successfully resisted the trend toward mass production and large-firm dominance during the Fordist era. Especially the so-called Third Italy was celebrated for its ability to achieve growth on the basis of an agglomeration of small and medium-sized firms that were closely linked through regional production networks (

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