Governance, Ownership Structure and Reporting Features: The Case Study of an Italian Social Cooperative Network

The diffusion and the consolidation of the experiences and the realities of the third sector were determined during the '80s and '90s, in concomitance with the reflection and the reorganization of the social politics, oriented to individualize and to put new modalities of intervention to answer to the multiplication and the plurality of the demands and the social questions. In this context it always assumes great weight and scientific importance the analysis and the study of the phenomenon of the cooperation, especially, the no profit ones. First of all, we presented the main characteristics and the historical evolution of the social cooperatives in the context of investigation, the Italian law and economic system, focusing on the aggregation of this particular kind of enterprises. Secondly, we also investigated the aggregation consortium about the relationships between: - the governance; - the building of business relationships with other partners such as other socials enterprises, third sector organizations, public administrations, profit companies; - the implementation of a global informative system (social and economic). Our research is supported by a business case study. In this analysis, developed on the Solco Imola Consortium, we showed that in this organization, the multistakeholder approach has a significant impact on the financial reporting system. In fact, we analyzed the instruments and the content of the external information of Solco Imola Consortium, observing an hardest presence of non financial information in its external reporting, and an extension of the financial reporting both in the time-side and in the space-side. This organization showed a particular integration between the consolidated financial statement and the social balance that we defined aggregate balance.