La Responsabilità sociale delle imprese: analisi, rendicontazione ed effetti delle performance sociali sulle performance finanziarie

The field of corporate social responsibility (CSR), based on the complex relationship between economics and ethics, has been the subject of a growing and renewed interest in the last decade.The contributions with which CSR may improve corporate performances are both internal, according to the resource-based theory, and external, such as reputational capital, definite as the most important competitive advantage that companies can have and that ultimately leads to profitability.To increase corporate reputation and maintain business legitimacy, companies have to communicate their sustainable actions in a manner that goes beyond mere financial aspects. In order to do that, internet is a very relevant CSR communication tool, since it allows to spread a greater amount of significant and specific information to several targets.The survey carried out in the present study addressed two purposes. The first was to examine the CSR reporting practices of Italian companies into annual reports, which can be in a social, environmental, or sustainability form, depending on the company. We employed the content analysis, a methodology frequently used to examine information coming from CSR disclosures in annual reports and stand-alone CSR reports. The second purpose was to analyze the relationship between CSP - measured by social disclosure - CFP - measured by market and accounting ratios. The link between CSP and CFP has been evaluated by using the Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient.