Abstract
Corporate responsibility tends to take different forms in relation to the different competitive conditions in which a company operates. The purpose of the paper is to analyse corporate responsibility in scarcity economy, with demand largely exceeding supply. In this situation, corporate responsibility, in the main, seeks profitability as the primary goal. The Olivetti case is analyzed to show how the conditions of company wellbeing simply reflect corporate social responsibility, where company growth is directly associated with the development of relations within the local environment as well as social relations.
Highlights
The many notions of ‘firm’ put forward in management doctrine highlight the growing importance attributed to understanding relations with the environment on one side, and recognition of the social implications of corporate activities on the other
The term social, which is often associated with corporate responsibility may, in that sense, be considered redundant because we expect a firm to answer for its own actions to society first of all; but it is confusing, because it calls to mind an idea of welfarism, in other words, of activities performed in order to materially or morally help someone, which is not the firm’s function
In the following decade14, 1960-1970, the international academic debate about corporate social responsibility took shape and outlined two schools of thought: one led by the economist and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman[15], an advocate of the maximisation of profit as the only duty of the manager and the firm, and the other led by Davis[16], Frederick[17] and McGuire[18], which attributed to the business vaster responsibilities than those purely economic or required by law, but did not indicate explicitly what they were
Summary
The many notions of ‘firm’ put forward in management doctrine highlight the growing importance attributed to understanding relations with the environment on one side, and recognition of the social implications of corporate activities on the other. In his scientific production, Gino Zappa already assigned a pre-eminent role to the concept of the environment and the firm’s dependence on it. Corporate responsibility is part of the relationship between the firm and the environment because the firm answers for the actions that it performs directly or indirectly in the environment, and for their consequences, and it is structural in character; this concept pervades the entire organisation, and is innate in the very notion of business, its role in society and its rights-duties in relation to the internal and external environment. The term social, which is often associated with corporate responsibility may, in that sense, be considered redundant because we expect a firm to answer for its own actions to society first of all; but it is confusing, because it calls to mind an idea of welfarism, in other words, of activities performed in order to materially or morally help someone, which is not the firm’s function
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