How the social responsibility creates value: models of innovation in Italian pasta industry

Abstract

The socio-economic changes of the last decades, in a context of markets globalisation and renewed environmental and food safety problems, have produced new sensitivities of the aware and responsible citizen consumers. In this constantly evolving scenario, agribusiness enterprises, in order to maintain competitiveness in the world market, have fielded efforts to introduce new strategies and paradigms into their corporate approaches. They were inspired more and more to the sustainability and to the social responsibility for pursuing the value creation and for meeting the citizens consumers' needs. The aim of the paper is to contribute to the theoretical debate on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in agri-food and through the analysis of a case study in Italian pasta industry to evaluate the performance of social responsibility in order to value creation. The results are very interesting and confirm the positive relationship, repeatedly stressed in the literature, between orientation to social responsibility and the firm's economic and financial performances.