L'impresa socialmente responsabile e il suo governo multi-stakeholder. Un modello di impresa per il sindacato e la politica democratica

This essay puts forward the model of socially responsible company and multi-stakeholder corporate governance as a better alternative to the “shareholder value” model of firm, which is still purported by neoliberal “reformers” even though it concurred to the causation of the global financial crisis. The socially responsible company is based on a fair social contract among its stakeholders consistent with Rawlsian theory of justice, and it is more efficient than the “shareholder value” alternative, since it doesn’t sacrifice human capital specific investments and complementarity of cognitive assets, and may resort to preferences for conformity to fair institutions elicited by the adhesion to a social contract. It entails a democratic governance implementable by means of different institutional and organizational form: from a combination of company law and self-regulation, to an harder company law reform based on the co-determination principle (here recommended); social enterprises and small size firms networks. The importance of this proposition to democratic and unions’ policy is instantiated by the effects that the adopted model of corporate governance has on the welfare state crisis, its complementarity with labor law reforms, and the case of car industry, where Chrysler and Volkswagen (symptomatic of the multi-stakeholder governance logic) are confronted by FIAT (exemplar of the abuse of authority logic).