Integral Human Development Through Culture: The Olivetti Blueprint for Unleashing Creative Forces

Abstract

This study explores the exemplary case of an organization pursuing a cultural strategy to support the Integral Human Development (IHD) of its critical internal and external stakeholders. It presents the historical case of Olivetti, the first Italian multinational company, in the period 1930–1970. Olivetti's approach to corporate social responsibility is well-documented, while its cultural approach, extensively used in managerial practice around the world for almost a century, has been underexplored in organizational and business ethics research. Our findings reveal the Olivetti Cultural Strategy (OCS) that is characterized by different processes of engagement of key personalities with humanistic and artistic backgrounds. These processes integrate individuals through professionalization and collaboration with technical corporate profiles, support their humanistic and artistic vocations, and provide “freedom space” for cultural outputs. These outputs benefit internal and external stakeholders across the three dimensions of IHD: freedom, relationality, and transcendence. This study contributes to debates on the critical role of the humanities and the arts in humanizing business and on how cultural activities can be leveraged by companies to support IHD for their internal and external stakeholders.