How the social responsibility creates value: models of innovation in Italian pasta industry

The socio-economic changes of the last decades, in a context ofmarkets globalisation and renewed environmental and food safety problems,have produced new sensitivities of the aware and responsible citizenconsumers. In this constantly evolving scenario, agribusiness enterprises, inorder to maintain competitiveness in the world market, have fielded efforts tointroduce new strategies and paradigms into their corporate approaches.They were inspired more and more to the sustainability and to the socialresponsibility for pursuing the value creation and for meeting the citizensconsumers’ needs. The aim of the paper is to contribute to the theoreticaldebate on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in agri-food and through theanalysis of a case study in Italian pasta industry to evaluate the performance ofsocial responsibility in order to value creation. The results are very interestingand confirm the positive relationship, repeatedly stressed in the literature,between orientation to social responsibility and the firm’s economic andfinancial performances.