INTERCORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AS A NEW WAY TO SOLVE PRODUCTION EXTERNALITIES. A CASE STUDY

Purpose - The present paper, based on the concept of intercorporate social responsibility (Tanucci & Cortini, 2008a; 2008b), aims to investigate the role of corporation networks in green management and, in more general terms, in solving production externalities. In particular, we would like to present the construct of intercorporate social responsibility as a new way of solving production externalities. Approach - The general theoretical perspective from which we start is that of industrial and organizational psychology, while the peculiar theoretical framework to which we refer is the International literature on externalities and industrial symbiosis, whose basis is business oriented. The paper, which is theoretical in nature, presents in its final section a case study relating to a project involving a consortium of 60 Italian organizations which exchange production externalities through an electronic platform to which they are all connected 24 hours a day. Originality - The originality of the paper derives, in theoretical terms, from the application of the principles of industrial symbiosis at a SME level and from its attempt to sustain, theoretically, an important difference in relation to industrial symbiosis: the possibility of conceiving externality exchange in a more flexible way, allowing corporations to exchange different externalities with different parties without always following the same paths of exchange. Such a novel model, presented in the final section of the paper, is possible as a result of an electronic platform that manages the availability of externalities within the network. Moreover, to our knowledge this is the first time that a psychological perspective has been applied to the theme of industrial symbiosis and externalities. Key words: Intercorporate Social Responsibility, Industrial Symbiosis, SMEs, Externalities, Case Study.