CSR integration in the strategy. An Italian excellence able to compete with global leaders

The present work aims at understanding how multinational corporations act and behave both at national and international level in the fields of corporate social responsibility and sustainable development, trying to draw up conclusions about their integration of ethical values and stakeholders engagement in the strategy. The study will then presents how big multinational enterprises react to the increasing pressures from stakeholders reporting their corporate social responsibility at global level. The article is divided upon two sections: the first section entails a critical review of the literature about shareholder and stakeholder management, corporate social responsibility and stakeholder engagement; the second section performs a critical analysis of the corporate social responsibility reporting of 5 big multinational competitors in the challenging business of high technology adhesive tapes. The analysis will also present a good starting point for an Italian excellence, historically able to base its history and success on the strong values orientation, to develop an accurate reporting activity of its socially responsible practices. We will therefore show a comparison among those 5 major competitors which enable us a) to understand how these companies operate at global level and engage stakeholders in the entrepreneurial project and b) to examine how these companies react to increasing internal and external pressures reporting and communicating their CSR activities. We will conclude how all corporations present a positive relation among internationalization and CSR, underlining how Corporate Social Responsibility cannot be only considered as the carrying on of charity programs by enterprises; we will show how all the involved firm present a good stakeholders disclosure and present themselves as committed in the communication of CSR programs. With his book (Freeman 1984) the author revolutionized the way of thinking about business, its purposes and approaches. The main shift this new train of thought had been able to generate, therefore, is the multi-stakeholder vision of the enterprise. Firms traditionally were only focused on maximizing shareholders’ value and managers were considered as agents of shareholders with the main task to serve their interests; the publication of Freeman criticized this approach sustaining that businesses, in order to create a sustainable business models and create value in the long term (Colombo & Gazzola, 2013), have to take into account interests and needs of a multitude of stakeholders’ categories, which directly or indirectly could affect or be affected from the activity of enterprises.