Authenticity: Is Corporate Social Responsibility the Key to Overcoming Crisis?

Adopting a theoretical and normative perspective the work focuses on authentic CSR-driven strategies and the origins of entrepreneurial and managerial behaviors that have contributed to the crisis and hence need for a profound rethinking. In the first part of the paper a critical review of the Encyclical Letter (Laudato Sì May 24th, 2015) on the care of “our common home” is presented, with the aim to emphasize the complexity of the crisis and to suggest a path to overcoming it through a renewed environmental, economic and social ecology and a radical change of the businesses conduct. In the second one a series of business cases are briefly presented and subsequently discussed. The case studies are related to Italian companies whose strategic and operational behaviors are based on a durable CSR orientation and a genuine responsible decision-making process. Moreover, they are examples of how entrepreneurs/managers—who in “hard times” voluntarily persist in investing in CSR—can promote cultural reorientation, helping others to unlearn the bad habits inspired by the ‘turbo-capitalism’ and valorize humanity, relationships, and the local/global human community. Accordingly, the work highlights that both within the scientific and managerial world a creative response to the deep economic, social and anthropological crisis can be experienced and testified.