CSR and its Internal Narrative

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) was coined as a term in the 1950s, although modern notions of corporate responsibility can be traced to the second half of the 19th century. This book uses internal company communications as a dataset to analyse the development of CSR over the past 70 years, making a detailed study of the Pirelli company in-house magazine, 'Fatte e Notizie' ('Facts and News'), which published between 1950 and 2019.

Pirelli, today one of the world's leading tyre manufacturers, is considered the first Italian multinational and has had an international and innovative perspective on social responsibility from its founding. The company magazine represents a record of corporate culture and values over a period of enormous societal change. This book identifies three distinct eras of corporate responsibility, the paternalism of the 1950s and 60s, a period of confrontation from the 70s-90s and finally the shared responsibility perspective of our current era. It applies this structure to key themes of CSR, including women and gender, employee welfare, health and training. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of business history, CSR and business ethics more broadly.

Ilaria Suffia is Researcher in Economic History in the ‘Mario Romani’ Department of Economic and Social History and Geographical Sciences, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy. Her research interests are in business history, in particular in the history of Italian business enterprises, in labour and gender history and in food history. She has published widely in books and journals.