On “Corporate Responsibility”

Assuming that what I have written until now is true, the relationship between firms and their external environment is a major issue requiring careful thought for reasons that have a broader import than those of the 1970s. In those years, the firm–external environment relationship was an issue of economic democracy. It was centred on the interplay between business and the political system, which determined citizenship rights and the rules of the market. This situation ultimately affected the behaviour of the firms that were required to consider the development of the entire social system. At the end of the twentieth century, the economic scenario within which the actors played (firm, industrial workers, representative organisations, political classes, State) was disrupted by three momentous events: the surge of the price of oil, the slowing down of global growth and the technological revolution triggered by the development of information technology. Although the most attentive observers could glimpse the revolutionary significance of these events, they did not at first perceive their full import. Only the effects of the profound technological, managerial, liberal and social–institutional transformation finally sparked a deep awareness of this change across the economies of the industrialised countries. In the industrialised world, the external environment thus gradually became what it is now: an inextricable bundle of economic and socio-cultural factors. The awareness of this change is not easily achieved. It is evidence of the fact that managers have put aside the principles of neoclassical economics, according to which the economic system and the social system are two separate spheres, and the market is the prevailing sphere of business activity. Indeed, considering the market as the sole determinant of business activities is no longer a credible approach. Even in the long term and in large organisations (where firm ownership and control are separate), the objective of profit maximisation cannot be the prevailing policy, although it cannot be neglected, as both Berle and Means and Marris have recently and brilliantly reported [1].