From corporate social responsibility to circular economy: An innovative business model for post-pandemic sustainability growth

The research analyses how the strategic lever of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can encourage Circular Economy (CE) practices for post-pandemic sustainability growth with benefit of stakeholders in the agri-food sector. CSR can be defined as the strategic orientation of organization to implement socially and environmentally responsible actions while still pursuing economic goals. CE contributes to harmonizing both the economic growth and environmental protection current ambition of organizations and whole society. While many authors have taken an interest in the CSR and CE as two independent phenomena, there is a lack of understanding about how the two areas could be linked. We argue that they can be mutually helpful, both wanting to enhance the pillars of sustainability. While relation between CSR an CE has been theorized by few previous studies, we contribute to analyze how this happens in the agri-food sector to enlighten scholars and managers towards a more spread implementation of CE. The study has been conducted taking into consideration eight Italian companies in the agribusiness sector that adopt CSR practices. Under the lens of stakeholders’ theory, we have adopted an exploratory, qualitative research design. The sustainability reports of each company were analyzed and referred to the 9R model of CE to interpret the circularity orientation of the single organizations. From the analysis of results, it is possible to see that CSR is able to favour the adoption of CE practices. The study has some implications: The stakeholder theory common to both approaches can be used to highlight their correlation. Agribusiness represents a relevant sector for technological progress and the great attention paid by stakeholders, in order to make the results more generalizable than in previous studies. For the companies it is better to start with CSR first and then be already on the road to reach models of CE.