Corporate integrity and the "dark side of business”

In recent years, widely reported corporate scandals and managerial misconducts, ranging from systemic accounting fraud to individual executive greed, have increasingly drawn the attention of business scholars on the need of a new quest for integrity in business, in order to stress the importance of upholding the unconditional human dignity of every man and woman within the economic arena (Acevedo, 2011; Spitzeck, H. 2011; Melé, 2003). The quest for integrity should go beyond the pure and simple impact produced by the mentioned and well-known big corporations scandals. In fact, giving a look at the figures of the financial resources controlled and earned by criminal organizations, we should carefully consider the influence exerted also by CO in the whole economic system. In our paper, we intend to analyse the concept of integrity, focusing on a inter-organizational level, analyzing those cases in which legitimate firms are controlled or influenced (directly or indirectly) by a criminal organization. Adopting this perspective, we focus our attention on the behaviour held by legitimate firms, institutions, local entities, professionals on the border etween the legal and illegal economy. We finalise this analysis to a deeper understanding of the concept of ntegrity in business, relating it not just to a single firm, but to a set of organizational actors, where every single actor has some advantages in pursuing his own goal. We describe the analysis of from three cases from Italy, different in terms of geographical location, sector of activity and nature of organizational actors involved.