University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

Managerial Implications, Limits of the Research and
Future Developments
762
The attentiveness manifested by the enterprises towards the guardianship and
exploitation of the territory in which they are located, is born not only from the
conscience and values of the individual subjects interviewed, but above all from their
awareness that the territory is a determinant factor for the competitiveness of the
small enterprise and that it obviously becomes essential if firms uses the territory as
productive resource, as in the case of the agricultural and zootechnical firms.
Overcoming the crisis of the buffalo business section passes therefore necessarily
through a retraining of the territory, and on the base of such conviction, the
enterprises have generally sensitised the actors of the local community and the
economic and productive environment with the purpose of organising synergic action
among all the interested actors that can influence the retraining of the territory.
Consequently, from the restoration of the virtuous path, in which the territory
becomes a "distributor" of resources and of competencies for the SMEs, firms can
profit in their own competitiveness, in the international as well as domestic markets.
By virtue of the strong bond that these enterprises have with the local system,
corporate social responsibility becomes a necessary strategy to overcome the
negative effects produced by the territory and to restore somehow the level of
competitiveness of the firms. From the research emerges the finding that the strategy
of social responsibility of the enterprises interviewed has been pursued primarily at
the level of the community and the environment, even though firms are aware that
they need to mostly invest towards the final market. Thus, they must bring forth a
series of actions that guarantee the quality of the product and its safety as it is
necessary to promote products with ethical / environmental connotation. These
actions can also be realised in joint way through the Consortium for the Guardianship
of the Mozzarella of Bufala.
The realisation of the CSR strategy concerns the editing of the Plan of Territorial
Development, once the enterprises have gained the support of the administrations
that are located in the interested area. So far, comparisons have not been made on the
effects of such strategy on the competitiveness for these enterprises. This fact could
be the principal limit of such research and can be resolved with an investigation into
the results of the plan of territorial development. This would allow research into the
behaviour of the enterprises interviewed in two different temporal moments, before
the realisation of the plan and the retraining of the area and after the realisation of the
plan and the possible retraining of the area, with the purpose to appraise its impacts
in terms of business competitiveness.