Résultats de recherche pour « Corporate Social Responsibility »

Abstract Globalization and financial processes have progressively generated an intense and problematic phenomenon of disconnection between companies and their territories. Breaking of the spatial link has often led to the breaking of the social bond and the rupture of territorial cohesion. In order to counteract this process of progressive lack of solidarity and social trust between companies and territorial communities, a very important role can be played by Corporate Social Responsibility. From few decades the European and the national reflection was focused on “Corporate Social Responsibility” considered a fundament strategy able to activate the (re) construction of new forms of solidarity and to create favorable conditions for social and economic sustainable growth, restoring continuity between activities and long-term effects connected to them. In this perspective, the corporate territorial welfare is its empirical expression, and a strategic tool to achieve the goal of counteract social and geographical peripherality to guarantee a polycentric and sustainable development of territories and highest level of quality of life of local communities. To grasp this new type of relationship that companies can establish with “their” territories starting from their choices of welfare, different models of corporate welfare introduced in some companies in Puglia have been analyzed. A specific attention has been dedicated to the particular form of corporate welfare extended to the territory and therefore to territorial stakeholders. These actions, when present, go well beyond the most classic attention to employees, and can be considered opportunities to give shape or rebuild the most direct link with the territories. In order to investigate the corporates’ welfare choices, we have used a qualitative methodology interviewing the human resources managers of several Apulian companies and asking them about welfare choices. From the analysis carried out it has been possible to define a typology of enterprises in relation to the adopted model of welfare. The objective that we intend to pursue with this ongoing research is to define a kind of open catalogue of good practices that can facilitate the choices of companies to adhere to innovative forms of corporate and territorial welfare.

Abstract Both the theory and practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) are foundational to the field of Business & Society (B&S). However, efforts to define and operationalize this construct have been undermined by definitional discord arising from the disparate sense-making assumptions and methods of competing North American and European research traditions. Scholars wedded to the North American research tradition have striven mightily to uncover “objective” evidence in support of the instrumental proposition that IF corporate executives were to invest more resources to enhance social and environmental performance, THEN the firm’s burnished brand image, reputation, and perceived legitimacy would elevate the firm’s long-term financial performance as well. However, the inconclusive statistical record has failed to move many corporate decision makers beyond the minimal social and environmental investments needed to create the impression of compliance with societal expectations. The proliferation of corporate scandals and the pattern of settling legal disputes without admitting guilt are also troubling. The muted impact of B&S research based on proving the instrumental proposition has prompted a new generation of European B&S scholars to explore the sense-making potential of the European research tradition, which seeks meaning and normative validity within a pluralist crucible of community discourse. This contested communicative space is filled with paradoxical tensions and contending stakeholder voices and narratives. With respect to CSR, this discursive sense-making process is animated by an aspiration toward constructing shared meanings that can guide a search for more collaborative approaches to addressing systemic challenges via stakeholder engagement and experiments in multisector collaborative problem-solving. Rather than try to scientifically “prove” a fact-based pre-existing condition, this approach embraces “an emergent and mediated form of strategic ambiguity” to keep open the possibility of “fulfilling often conflicting instrumental and social/ethical imperatives at the same time” (Guthey & Morsing, 2014, p. 556). This discourse-based search for shared meanings in support of a convergence of economic, social, and environmental values frames CSR as an aspirational cocreative process rather than as a pyramid of normative assertions loosely grounded on a search for validation in efforts to find correlations (or causation) within an assortment of “objective” facts. The discursive approach to constructing CSR also highlights the relevance of the emergence of institutional innovations that enable network interactions to address shared systemic problems. Ultimately, CSR may be expressed as a form of network governance seeking to assure the sustainable outcome of system health and vitality across micro-, meso-, and meta-levels of thought and action.