Corporate social responsibility in agri-food firms: the relationship between CSR actions and firm’s performance

Over the last years, many firms introduced environmental and social sustainability in their business mission and adopted Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as the operative tool of a new business model. Several studies focused on the relationship between CSR and firm’s performance or more generally value creation in the supply chain. The present work aims at giving further insight into this relationship with reference to the agri-food sector. It wants to illustrate a conceptual framework of this relationship and represents a preliminary empirical work aimed at understanding and testing some main link. Through multivariate techniques data on CSR actions were analysed to identify the firm CSR strategies and using the correlation analysis and non-parametric tests the link between CSR strategies and firm performance was tested, both directly and through innovation variables. Results highlighted that firms with lower CSR orientation have also lower profitability levels and showed the association between the adoption of specific innovations and some CSR patterns, while the connection innovation-performance was not statistically proved. The small size of the sample does not allow a conclusive analysis. Nevertheless, results provide useful insights to better specify the conceptual model CSR-performance.