Abstract

The present paper presents the innovative concept of intercorporate social responsibility. The theoretical frameworks we make reference to are, on one hand, the International literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), social in nature, and, on the other one, the economic literature on externalities. Generally speaking, the most recent international literature by “Corporate Social Responsibility” means some virtuous behaviour performed by a single and specific corporation, as, for example, a way of production sensitive and respectful toward the environment. The idea of intercorporate social responsibility, instead, stresses the potentiality, in terms of corporate virtuous behaviours, of a network of different organizations. In other words, the core idea of our paper is that “together it is possible to perform better and even in a more ethical way”. The idea of intercorporate social responsibility took origin thanks to a project by which we developed a new way to solve production externalities, that is to say externalities exchange among corporations. Production externalities, which generally represent a challenge that has to be managed to prevent performing in a non ethical way, if exchanged, become a CSR source. In particular, we have developed a technological platform by which a consortium of 60 Italian enterprises (named Costellazione Apulia) may exchange externalities (otherwise origin of waste) within a European funded project. The idea has been that one of observing how SMEs exchange not only material externalities but also technological and knowledge externalities, verifying the Marshall vs Jacobs model of economic development supported by externalities and observing the development of a special interactive and inter-organizational social responsibility. The paper presents the idea of intercorporate social responsibility within the most recent literature on Corporate Social Responsibility and reflects, in a more general way, on externalities as a way to support organizational development and corporate virtuosity.