SMEs as the Unknown Stakeholder Entrepreneurship in the Political Arena

Workers represented by the trade unions in Europe are government workers and, to a lesser extent, the workers of large enterprises. SMEs as the Unknown Stakeholder investigates how and to what extent the self-employed and micro-enterprise workers can be represented in the social arena. Strong because of their accountability and subject to competition, self-employed and micro-enterprise workers can leverage vis-à-vis the rest of society to gain leadership and a larger share of the resources that are being diverted from productive sectors to bureaucratic sectors. The authors highlight the need to go beyond this culture and separate the useful from the beautiful, and put forward the suggestion that micro-enterprise and SME representatives should add new scopes to their way of representing their workers.

Massimiliano Di Bitetto is the head of the central office for planning of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR). He started his career as a researcher in the area of marine biology and environment. He currently works in the area of sociology of organizations.

GianMarco Gilardoni is a trade union representative in the Cisl, a major federation of labor unions in Italy. He was previously a leader of the trade union for the self-employed and the micro-entrepreneurs in Lombardy, Northern Italy. He now works in Switzerland and supports Italian workers there.

Paolo D'Anselmi is a management consultant and policy analyst and teaches Corporate Social Responsibility at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy. He is a graduate in Electrical Engineering (Rome Sapienza) and in Public Policy (Harvard). He is also the author of Values and Stakeholders in an Era of Social Responsibility: Cut-Throat Competition?

Foreword; Lez Michael Rayman-Bacchus 
Foreword; Jacob Dahl Rendtorff
Introduction; Massimiliano Di Bitetto, GianMarco Gilardoni and Paolo D'Anselmi
PART I: THE ORDINARY WORLD OF TRADE UNIONS
1. The Self-employed as the Unknown Worker; Massimiliano Di Bitetto, GianMarco Gilardoni and Paolo D'Anselmi
PART II: FIELD WORK BEST PRACTICE
2. Legal Status and Working Conditions of Self-employed Persons in Bulgaria; Vesselin Mitov
3. Three Layers Across the Board in France; Laurent Labrot
4. Lawyers and Engineers in Greece; Sofia Lampousaki
5. Tax Simplification in Hungary; Boglárka Bata
6. Upstream Negotiation of Newspaper Vendors in Italy; GianMarco Gilardoni
7. Taxi Cab Deregulation in Poland; Robert Geisler
8. Emerging Farmers' Markets in Slovakia; Peter Dzupka
9. The Legal Status of the Self-employed in Spain; Alexis Serra
PART III: LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE
10. Towards an Ecology of Industrial Relations; Massimiliano Di Bitetto, GianMarco Gilardoni and Paolo D'Anselmi
11. SMEs as the Unknown Stakeholder of European Social Dialogue; Massimiliano Di Bitetto, GianMarco Gilardoni and Paolo D'Anselmi 12. Understanding the Unknown Stakeholder; Massimiliano Di Bitetto, GianMarco Gilardoni and Paolo D'Anselmi
PART IV: ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN THE POLITICAL ARENA
13. Separating the Useful from the Beautiful; Massimiliano Di Bitetto, GianMarco Gilardoni and Paolo D'Anselmi
Conclusions: The Cultural Effort of Separating the Useful from the Beautiful; Massimiliano Di Bitetto, GianMarco Gilardoni and Paolo D'Anselmi