Banks and productive enterprises: an asymmetrical reciprocal relationship. A sociological look

Abstract

For a bank-centric country such as Italy, the importance of specific relationships between different banks and heterogeneous business fabric, such as the Italian one, for the purpose of economic development, has not been duly evaluated by economic sociology. In this paper, we try to highlight, at different levels (macro-meso and micro), how economic sociology can argue the current due importance of relationship lending in facilitating disadvantaged productive fabrics in a context where - after the “rationalization of the credit system” - the proximity of the bank to the entrepreneur and the reading of its possibilities towards the “future” have been obscured by the dominance of past-oriented rating models and simple balance sheet analysis.