Sustainability and stakeholder approach in Olivetti from 1943 to 1960: a lesson from the past

Purpose of the paper: The sustainable enterprise focuses on its stakeholders’ interests. Today this perspective is a central one in the dialogue on enterprise goals and on the nature of the firm but it was already clear in the past history of some enlightened entrepreneurs like Adriano Olivetti. This important entrepreneur was able to balance economic responsibility and social ones in his managerial model and he showed that the pillars of sustainability, as we call them today, were internally coherent. Methodology: We apply an interpretative framework (Carroll’s pyramid) to analyze the entrepreneurial choices by Adriano Olivetti according to the various perspectives of Corporate Social Responsibility. Our analysis is based upon Adriano Olivetti’s texts and the transcriptions of his speeches, his biographies, and on interviews to managers that were active during the years of Adriano Olivetti’s administration of the Olivetti Group or later experienced the values left in the company after his untimely death. Findings: This article highlights how their extraordinary experience has demonstrated the full compatibility between social and economic responsibilities. Moreover, the article proves that the various dimensions of corporate social responsibility are tightly connected. Finally, it shows how good stakeholder management practices are a successful strategy.Research Limits: The article’s main limitation is that it is mostly based on anecdotal evidence and secondary sources. Practical implications: The analytical framework we employ can be useful in driving responsible management processes for modern managers and entrepreneurs. Originality of the paper: This article proposes two modified versions of a classic model on corporate social responsibility

Ethical Branding in the Modern Retail: A Comparison of Italy and UK Ethical Coffee Branding Strategies

Modern markets can be seen as complex systems of relationships where stakeholders are able to influence the firms’ decision-making processes and their value creation processes. Modern businesses should adopt a broader perspective in order to not focus their actions only on maximize economic performance, but to design them considering even their social and environmental impacts on the system as a whole. Firms have to respond to the stakeholders’ expectations as a way to obtain the legitimacy needed to create a beneficial environment that will help them in creating a positive effect out of their system of relations, without violating the social contract tying together all the actors in a given system. It follows that, when companies can effectively communicate to their systems’ actors how they are following the principles of sustainability and prove that their actions are socially responsible, they can get several advantages. One of the way companies must accomplish this feat is to ask third parties to certify their actions in order to be able to print on their products one of the various Ethical Labels. Using these labels to mark their products can be a tool to influence the consumer to buy from the firm over the competitors, leveraging on a higher legitimacy. In this paper, we have studied the evolution of the practice of non-financial disclosure trough ethical labels that 14 coffee brands, both in Italy and in England, as a way to understand how, in different markets they have changed over a 5-year time

The Impact of Social Responsibility Disclosure on Corporate Financial Health: Evidences from Some Italian Public Companies

Companies are today often seen as one actor in a complex system linking all the actors with several, different ties, and binding them by a social contract asking each of them to meet the expectations of the other social actors in the same context, in order to get the legitimacy they need. Corporations can adopt social disclosure to increase their legitimacy towards all stakeholders, influencing their behavior and leading to the creation of a positive Corporate Association (Brown and Dacin, 1997). In this paper we investigate the relationship between Social Responsibility Disclosure practices and Corporate Performance. We develop a framework to study this topic through several perspectives: External evaluation (Ethical Ratings), utilization of specific behaviors (Ethical Labels), Principle (Code of Ethics) and Behaviors (Social Reports) disclosure. In order to get a first understanding of these relationships we have selected a sample of Italian Companies listed on the italian stock exchange

Mediating Service Recovery Satisfaction in the Relationship between Internet Service Recovery and Customer Loyalty

This current study purposes to identify the relationships between service recovery strategies, service recovery satisfaction, and both dimensions of customer loyalty in regard to Internet providers using the partial least squares (PLS-SEM) approach on a sample of 430 internet customers in Egypt. This study contributes insights into how seven service recovery strategies affected customer loyalty with its both attitudinal and behavioral dimensions directly and indirectly via service recovery satisfaction. These insights are helpful for service managers faced with service failure and academicians interested in how service providers respond to service failures and customer dissatisfaction in the B2C context. The results of this study show that some SR strategies positively influence both service recovery satisfaction and customer loyalty toward internet providers. Furthermore, service recovery satisfaction positively influencing the customer loyalty. In addition, SRS plays a mediating role in the relationship between SR strategies and customer loyalty. The results highlight that internet service providers should implement SR strategies quickly and with an empathetic manner to satisfy customers and to encourage customer's loyalty. Finally, some implications and further research directions were presented

The Relationship between Service Recovery and Patronage Intentions: The Mediating Role of Relationship Quality

This study aims to investigate, using the structural equation modeling with a partial least square (PLS-SEM) approach, the relationship among service recovery strategies, relationship quality, and customer patronage intentions concerning Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Egypt. Our findings confirmed that some service recovery strategies positively influence on both relationship quality and patronage intentions. As well as, relationship quality has a significant impact on customer patronage intentions. Furthermore, relationship quality has the role of a mediator of the relationship between SR strategies and patronage intention. Moreover, both speeds of recovery and empathy moderate the relationship between some SR strategies and relationship quality. Finally, our study proposed some theoretical and managerial implications