"What Did It Take to Be a Responsible Business for a European Automotive Corporation in the 1970s and 1980s? Fiat Group’s Responses to the Emergence of the 'Environmental Issue"

Recent business history research on the automobile industry and the environment has focused on the construction of environmental regulations at both national and transnational levels. Significant works have illuminated ECC regulatory development and provided detailed analyses of several critical case studies. Nevertheless, the Italian case has received little scholarly attention from business historians. Existing literature places Italy among the less virtuous countries in supporting emissions regulation, depicting Italian environmentalism as "cosmetic," lacking any programmatic vision or practical consequences. This paper aims to answer three questions a) What actions did Fiat Group take to address the external pressures urging it to deal with the environmental unsustainability of its automotive production process and product? b) How did Fiat Group communicate its priorities and environmental actions to the stakeholders through financial statements? c) How did Fiat Group management’s concept of "responsibility" towards society evolve in the twenty years under consideration? Based on the analysis of the archival documentation and financial statements, the paper maps the evolution of the Group’s priorities and some of the actions it promoted to face the new environmental challenges. Fiat's interest in the environmental issue was relatively precocious (1967-1968) and was value-driven and formulated in terms of social responsibility, focusing mainly on plant emissions, water pollution, and chemical safety in the workplace. Reducing vehicle emissions was relegated to R&D matter and became more pressing only in the 1970s and early 1980s when the oil crisis urged the reduction of fuel consumption. Environmental initiatives could serve as an instrument to safeguard the image of the Fiat Group, threatened by increasing public awareness of the environmental costs of individual mobility and intense labor conflict. Financial statements indicate that the emergence of the "environmental issue" progressively phased out (starting in the mid-1970s) the disclosure of Fiat’s social and welfare initiatives, which had permeated financial reports until then.