• integrated reporting
• best practices

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) represents a topic, or even better a challenge, of paramount importance and increasingly topical for the whole humanity. For
several decades, these issues have been the subject of debates among academics,
researchers, consultants and managers. Therefore, in order to analyze this topic and the consequent evolution of corporate reporting, I have divided this research into four chapters through which an attempt was made to offer an organic presentation of the origins of corporate social responsibility, of how it is accounted for, of why it is important that a company commits itself in these aspects and which are the main CSR measurement tools. More precisely, the macro objectives that have represented the common thread of this research have been:

- To verify the state of the art of CSR reporting in both Italian and international companies, even in small and medium size enterprises. This has led to a focused analysis in the last chapter of the cases of Monnalisa S.p.a and Dellas S.p.a;
- To show the positive correlation between the company’s commitment to ESG aspects and their economic-financial performances;
- To explain how, with the growth of sensitivity on the issues of corporate sustainability, corporate reporting has evolved within companies.

In the initial “excursus” on the evolution of the various definitions of CSR, I have shown that it is not in question how Western culture has been, since ancient times, permeated by the principle that property and business are sources of wealth and wellbeing not only for the individual owner, but also for the whole community in which the enterprise operates. Therefore, evidence of the existence of a concept of Corporate Social Responsibility has been clear for several centuries. However, it is precisely in this day and age that companies can gain significant advantages when they are perceived socially responsible by their shareholders, consumers, community and in general by their stakeholders in the widest sense of this term. Therefore, the analysis developed in this research focuses, on the Anglo-Saxon literature, where the coinage of Corporate Social Responsibility and its first definition are attributed to Howard R. Bowen.
Therefore, in order to illustrate the "long journey" of CSR, I started from the first studies on this subject (in the 1950s), showing the different prospective provided by the most influential authors and practitioners in this field, up to its current most advanced formulation represented by CSV ( “Creating Shared Value”) proposed by Porter and Kramer. Afterwards, throughout the rest of this research, I have analyzed in detail the consequent evolution of corporate reporting discipline which is strictly connected with the growing of importance of non-financial information and the evolution of CSR. Specifically, the second chapter contained a thorough analysis of the recent non-financial EU directive 2014/95 and its transposition in Italy through the legislative decree n.254 of 30th December 2016. In addition, in the third chapter, I have shown the evolution that is taking place in corporate reporting passing from the “sustainability reporting” or “corporate social responsibility reporting”, that has been around since the early 1990s, to integrated reporting, that represents the most recent innovation in corporate reporting discipline and that is closely related to the concept of value creation. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I went through the examination of two Italian best practices on this topic, namely the cases of Monnalisa S.p.a and Dellas S.p.a. From the analysis of both integrated reports and also thanks to the questionnaires presented to the CFOs of both companies emerged that even in SMEs the integrated report can contribute to a crucial improvement in the integration and therefore also in the functioning of the company processes as well as in bringing many benefits in terms of better reputation and access to credit.