The strategic, organizational and managerial aspects in the sustainability communication with stakeholders: the Centro Porsche Padova Case Study

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to address the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) discipline from a strategic and communication standpoint, by suggesting a stakeholders-based approach whereby Centro Porsche Padova (CPP) could address and develop its own sustainability strategy approach. The first part of the thesis has been dedicated to the analysis of the CSR discipline and its development over the years, as well as a forward-looking approach has been adopted in order to give the hints about where the current sustainability reporting discipline seems to be moving on. Then, the Freeman’s theory of stakeholders has been recalled and, once provided the justification of its linkage with CSR, those studies serving as the theoretical foundation of the methodology have been revised. In particular, the priority was given to those studies investigating the two alternatives of CSR communication strategies, which respectively encompass an outside-in and an inside-out perspective. The second part of the thesis has been devoted to the depicting of CPP’s stakeholders in order to analysing their perception of CPP’s sustainability strategy approach. The analysis has been conducted by using a semi-structured questionnaire, as an expression of the perspectives and fundamentals of CPP’s sustainability strategy approach, by adopting an outside-in and an inside-out perspective. The resulting data have been analysed to derive the state of the art of sustainability expectations by CPP’s stakeholders, which reveal if the perceptions of the internal stakeholders show some differences when compared to the whole stakeholder community. Some conclusions and limits of the thesis have been presented in the last part of the thesis, in order to show whether it has achieved the goal to address the stakeholders’ view theory within CSR prescriptions applied by CPP’s approach.