Social Accountability in Italian Listed Companies: Communication or Voluntary Disclosure?

In recent years, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an emerging topic. CSR represents the need for companies to voluntarily concern themselves with the social and environmental impacts on their activity. This paper aims to understand whether listed Italian companies are actually making voluntary disclosures or simply promoting their image to stakeholders. Research has been carried out using an inductive method with a theoretical sampling. We analyse CSR documentation produced by Italian businesses making up the FTSE ECPI Leaders Index of the Italian Stock Exchange and compare their documents with those produced by the Dow Jones Sustainability Europe 40 Index companies. The results confirm recent studies on the quality of Italian CSR. The documents produced by the sample companies show their attention to CSR issues, since in fact these companies draw up a wide spectrum of interdependent reports and produce full documentation using GRI social model reporting. Moreover, increasing standardization brings improvements in consistency and comparability and at the same time discourages manipulation of these documents solely for self-promotion. Finally, comparison with European companies suggests that Italian ones are somewhat “backward” in the types of documents produced, in choice of social reporting models to be used and in external control. The latter—external control—tends to encourage voluntary disclosure, as against an exercise in communications.