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Company and “social” enterprise

A research study carried out by the University of Parma refines current thoughts on good corporate culture

 

Companies and enterprises not only as economic elements, but as organisations with responsibilities towards the society and the economy in which they exist and operate. Themes that, nowadays, have been pretty much absorbed by most relevant literature and management approaches, but that, nonetheless, should not be taken for granted or considered depleted. Hence the benefit of the study by Federica Balluchi, Giuseppina Iacoviello and Arianna Lazzini, from the University of Parma, which delves around the “Creazione e condivisione di valore in una prospettiva economico-sociale” (“Value creation and sharing from an economic and social perspective”) – the perspective, indeed, of companies.

The three researchers’ line of reasoning starts from the consideration that companies can and should be perceived as “open social systems, that is, systems that can be represented in the form of models within which elements interconnected by interdependent relationships can be defined.” Balluchi, Iacoviello and Lazzini then continue to explain that “it’d be perhaps more appropriate to claim that companies can be perceived and represented as systems, that is, as combinations of subsystems to be examined by researchers, read and interpreted from different perspectives and with different research purposes.” Yet, the study emphasises, in order to properly understand corporate activities, it is important to ask oneself what the true goal of the company itself is, still bearing in mind that we are dealing with “open systems that interact with their environment” and that create or maintain “an exchange process” with the environment itself. Thus, companies conceived as “open systems” that “offer goods and services aimed at fulfilling human needs, and as hubs attracting work and capital.” Not just about profit, then, but much more. Finally, Balluchi, Iacoviello and Lazzini’s conclusion surmises that “what a company achieves does not only concern the company itself: in fact, companies perform a social function, as they are created to fulfil human needs and as their internal organisation consists of people connected with other people, and with entities, which are, after all, groups of people.”

The conclusion also adds that, “Nowadays, companies are challenged on a different plane than in the past, when profitability and a short-term approach constituted the predominant dimension of economic balance. What seems to have changed are certainly not the factors instrumental to an economic balance, but the importance that society as a whole, and as such companies themselves, attributes to them. Today, dimensions of (sustainable) development and social consensus play a leading role, representing factors instrumental to the triggering of virtuous processes aimed at fostering and increasing profitability. Such a change permeates the whole company, engulfing (…) all corporate areas, from communication, internal and external, to management, thus stimulating the emergence of economic and social governance systems.”

Federica Balluchi, Giuseppina Iacoviello and Arianna Lazzini’s research study does not add anything particularly new to the modern interpretation of corporate activities, but has the great virtue of organising, in a systematic and comprehensible manner, the whole range of concepts that, today, are part of good corporate culture.

Creazione e condivisione di valore una prospettiva economico-sociale  (“Value creation and sharing from an economic and social perspective”)

Federica Balluchi, Giuseppina Iacoviello, Arianna Lazzini

in Studi in onore di Luciano Marchi (Studies in honour of Luciano Marchi), Giappichelli, 2021

 

A research study carried out by the University of Parma refines current thoughts on good corporate culture

 

Companies and enterprises not only as economic elements, but as organisations with responsibilities towards the society and the economy in which they exist and operate. Themes that, nowadays, have been pretty much absorbed by most relevant literature and management approaches, but that, nonetheless, should not be taken for granted or considered depleted. Hence the benefit of the study by Federica Balluchi, Giuseppina Iacoviello and Arianna Lazzini, from the University of Parma, which delves around the “Creazione e condivisione di valore in una prospettiva economico-sociale” (“Value creation and sharing from an economic and social perspective”) – the perspective, indeed, of companies.

The three researchers’ line of reasoning starts from the consideration that companies can and should be perceived as “open social systems, that is, systems that can be represented in the form of models within which elements interconnected by interdependent relationships can be defined.” Balluchi, Iacoviello and Lazzini then continue to explain that “it’d be perhaps more appropriate to claim that companies can be perceived and represented as systems, that is, as combinations of subsystems to be examined by researchers, read and interpreted from different perspectives and with different research purposes.” Yet, the study emphasises, in order to properly understand corporate activities, it is important to ask oneself what the true goal of the company itself is, still bearing in mind that we are dealing with “open systems that interact with their environment” and that create or maintain “an exchange process” with the environment itself. Thus, companies conceived as “open systems” that “offer goods and services aimed at fulfilling human needs, and as hubs attracting work and capital.” Not just about profit, then, but much more. Finally, Balluchi, Iacoviello and Lazzini’s conclusion surmises that “what a company achieves does not only concern the company itself: in fact, companies perform a social function, as they are created to fulfil human needs and as their internal organisation consists of people connected with other people, and with entities, which are, after all, groups of people.”

The conclusion also adds that, “Nowadays, companies are challenged on a different plane than in the past, when profitability and a short-term approach constituted the predominant dimension of economic balance. What seems to have changed are certainly not the factors instrumental to an economic balance, but the importance that society as a whole, and as such companies themselves, attributes to them. Today, dimensions of (sustainable) development and social consensus play a leading role, representing factors instrumental to the triggering of virtuous processes aimed at fostering and increasing profitability. Such a change permeates the whole company, engulfing (…) all corporate areas, from communication, internal and external, to management, thus stimulating the emergence of economic and social governance systems.”

Federica Balluchi, Giuseppina Iacoviello and Arianna Lazzini’s research study does not add anything particularly new to the modern interpretation of corporate activities, but has the great virtue of organising, in a systematic and comprehensible manner, the whole range of concepts that, today, are part of good corporate culture.

Creazione e condivisione di valore una prospettiva economico-sociale  (“Value creation and sharing from an economic and social perspective”)

Federica Balluchi, Giuseppina Iacoviello, Arianna Lazzini

in Studi in onore di Luciano Marchi (Studies in honour of Luciano Marchi), Giappichelli, 2021