Welcome to this module about Corporate Social Responsibility in the Agro-Food sector. My name is Francesco Bimbo and I'm a researcher with the Business Economic Group at Wageningen University. This module is divided in three lessons which will explain the definition of corporate social responsibility, how it applies to the agro-food sector, and I will illustrate a case study on this topic. So, let's start with lesson one. And after completing the lesson that takes approximately 20 minutes, you should be able to define what corporate social responsibility is, as well as understand and summarize the social corporate performance model. Corporate social responsibility or corporate social performance became an academic topic in the mid of '70 in the United States in the field of management of enterprise. Decade later, this topic spreads in the European management literature. Although many theoretical papers have been published on the theory of corporate social performance or corporate social responsibility, there is no unique and well-accepted definition of it. Finding on such topic are fragmented and do not provide a comprehensive theory of corporate social responsibility. Let's now, in the next slides, analyze some of them. The early definitions dated back in the second half of the '70. At that time and according to the mainstream view of the economy, the firm's only social responsibility was making profits, staying within the legal framework, and sharing the wealth with the employees and stakeholder. Also, according to the classical theory of firm, social issues were no concern of business people. Social issues had to be resolved by an unfettered work of the free market system. If the free market cannot solve such problem, it falls upon government and its legislation to solve social issues, not upon the companies. Firms indeed are not equipped to handle social activity. As manager were oriented towards profit, then they do not have the necessary skill to make this social-oriented decision. Further, corporate social responsibility action may deal with business' primary purpose since adopting corporate social responsibility plan were both filled in the fields of any view that are unrelated to their proper aim. Further, by pursuing corporate social responsibility activities, business may make itself less competitive globally. However, the early writers about business and society started by describing firms with the following words, "At present business has seldom enjoyed such much power with so little responsibility." Indeed, according to Eberstadt, business responsibility were those toward society and ethical principles, which were not considered according to the classical view of the firm. Also, few years later, Carroll observed that the social responsibility of business encompasses the economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary expectation that society has of organization at a given point in time. Thus, Carroll went beyond the neoclassical theory and firstly suggested four areas for which a firm is responsible, including ethics and society expectation. Indeed, in the 70s, it became clear that firms are part of the economy and are embedded into the society. Therefore, they have to meet societal expectations since firm's decision have a direct or indirect impact on people that interact with them or that are located nearby. Also, Davis offered a first formal definition of corporate social responsibility by defining it as "the firm's consideration of, and response to, issues beyond the narrow economic, technical, and legal requirements of firms to accomplish social benefit along with the traditional economic gain which the firm seeks.". Further, a few years later, Frederick clarified that "the fundamental idea of corporate social responsibility is that the business corporations have an obligation to work for social betterment." Therefore, in the 80s working in a socially responsible way became an obligation for firms in order to stay in the business due to the public pressure for accounting for their negative externality and unethical behaviors. The definition stated above provided a brief history of the origin of corporate social responsibility as well as an attempt to define it.