Benefit Corporations Approach to Environmental, Social and Governance Disclosure: A Focus on Italy

Abstract

Abstract Over the last decades, Benefit Corporations arouse as a new corporate structure, alternative to traditional ones and pointing to offer a new approach to the management of business and sustainability issues. These companies' activities are statutory aimed at bridging for-profit and no-profit activities; thus, they intentionally and statutory pursue economic purposes together with social and environmental ones, to create a positive impact on economy, society and environment. Even though, Italian and other national laws set some specific disclosure duties for Benefit Corporations, especially in terms of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues, the literature still calls for further research on the topic. Therefore, this paper is aimed at contributing to bridge this gap, investigating the way Italian Benefit Corporations approach ESG disclosure. To this end, an exploratory analysis has been conducted, implementing a qualitative method, based on a multiple case study strategy. Even though the descriptive nature of the study, the achieved findings pointed out that the Benefit Corporation structure not necessarily implies a better approach to ESG.