Between «communitarian» enterprise and local community: corporate welfare policies in some Italian contexts

The purpose of our study was to explore multi-faceted connections between corporate welfare strategies (CWs) and local development. Although there are a large number of studies on the topic of CSR and CW, to this day, the plausible connection between CWs and local development has been largely overlooked from an academic viewpoint. Our original hypotheses assumed that there is a plausible relationship between CWs implementation and socio-economic development. In particular, CWs are likely to foster local economic diversification in related and unrelated sectors through knowledge and entrepreneurship spill-overs, as well as to strengthen local communitarian ties. Before investigating those plausible relations, we tried to put forth an acceptable, although non- conclusive, definition of corporate welfare, mainly relying on the CSR academic literature and the local development corpus of studies. Moreover, we referred to a multifaceted group of academic contributions and relied on social capital literature, Evolutionary Economic Geography’s concept of “related” and “unrelated” variety, as well as on local development studies. The mix of these three academic literatures allowed us to develop an interpretative schema that frames CWs within local development processes. In chapter 2, our analysis focused on Olivetti’s history and Adriano Olivetti’s political thought. We were inspired to dwell on this specific case for many reasons: 1) the Olivetti company is widely considered, by Italian academic literature, the ante litteram socially responsible enterprise. Therefore, for the sake of our study on CW and CSR, we could not avoid analyzing this paradigmatic case; 2) a more obvious hint came from Becattini’s comment on Porter and Kramer’s shared value (2011). Becattini’s reference to Olivetti led us to detect, what were so far, unexplored connections between Olivettian thought and Italian local development literature. Becattini’s reference to Olivetti’s case suggested an intellectual line of thought that, sometimes outwardly and often implicitly, connects AO’s social and political ideas to the local development literature. Hence, we went down this path of an ideal intellectual line of thought and reviewed Giorgio Fuà’s work (one of the few masters that Giacomo Becattini acknowledged), the theoretical cornerstones of Giacomo Becattini up to Porter and Kramer's shared value. We then proposed, relying on Olivetti’s, Becattini’s, Porter’s and Kramer’s works, a reassessment of the original concept of shared value, and called it "communitarian" shared value. We then analysed the implementation of CWs in a specific territorial context. We focused on the effects of CWs implemented by Ferrero and Miroglio, two Albese multinationals in the province of Cuneo. As aforementioned, by investigating the possible “external” effects that stem from larger enterprises’ CW policies - such as rising levels of local entrepreneurship, a growth in the number of firms operating in related and unrelated sectors, an increase in the levels of local trust relationships - our goal was to better understand this connection (that had never been fully explored academically) and add an original contribution to the subject of “internal” CSR with external effects. Lacking general research and quantitative data on the subject, we relied mostly on a qualitative/ethnographic approach based on a deep analysis of literary and historical works, on the results of a web-survey that we administered to 28,759 enterprises in the province of Cuneo and on approximately 80 in-depth interviews. The original hypotheses of research have not been confirmed directly. It is instead the “entrepreneurial style” of local multinationals to condition, in a sort of spurious relation, both the independent CW variable and the dependent variable “local socio-economic development”. Additionally, empirical research led us to better describe the “Cuneo system”, a macro productive system that encompasses a variety of LPSs and that present hybrid socio-economic features which we have defined as a “polycentric system of local productive systems”.