ABSTRACT
It’s been a little over 50 years (September 13, 1970) since the New York Times published the article by the future Nobel of economics Milton Friedman, entitled The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. On the 50th anniversary there were many articles aimed at contributing to the current lively debate on the finalism of the company and, even earlier, on the very nature of the company, to understand the validity that today the Friedmanian theoretical approach can have (better known as shareholder theory) and whether its ascertained limits can eventually be overcome by alternative models, primarily that of the stakeholder theory. However, on closer inspection, Friedman’s need to focus on profit as the sole purpose of the company found strong reasons which, at the end of the 1960s, appeared to be central to improving the collective well-being. Obviously, even before Friedman’s article, companies were called to make profit, however it assumed a secondary role with respect to other purposes, such as the need to produce goods and services to satisfy the needs of the community. In other words, Friedman marked the transition from profit as a means to the supreme end of the firm. The approach that is gaining more consensus today seems to be, with due distinctions, the one that characterized the pre-Friedman period, namely that of the purpose that leads to customer
orientation. There is a clear risk of returning, in a few years, to the same need felt by Friedman 50 years ago, that is to the observation that putting profit in second order, or not framing well its role, produces undesirable effects for the business continuity.
This paper aims to examine, through the analysis of the articles published during the pandemic, how the response of companies to the crisis generated by Covid-19 has not only highlighted the weaknesses of the shareholder and stakeholder theory, but it seems to
confirm the trend towards what can be defined as the “third way”, which, by placing at the center the good of the company and its contribution to collective well-being, tries to reconcile the debate between shareholder theory and stakeholder theory. This third way
is based on the real entity theory, in particular on the version which, in line with the business-economic approach of the Italian doctrine, considers the company as an independent entity with its primary interest in pursuing the common good
KEYWORDS
Common good, Good of the firm, New normal, Real entity theory, Shareholder theory, Stakeholder theory
