The social balance between private interest and collective welfare

This study seeks to analyse how the search for the conditions of internal and external teleonomy in production firms represents the basis for the formation of the managerial objectives function (Mella 2008) and how the achievements of such equilibriums must be supported by an appropriate operational and information tool: the social balance. Management, in forming the objectives function that guides the strategic process toward the achievement and maintenance of the conditions of endogenous and exogenous teleonomy, must be focussed on: - value based management and activity based management to guarantee the suppliers of capital adequate volumes of shareholder value, while maintaining the teleonomic conditions that allow them to benefit from adequate volumes of financial flows needed for growth; - knowledge management, in order to favour an organizational behaviour that is informal, motivated, efficient and open to learning on the part of all members of the organization; this allows the firm to maintain the teleonomic conditions of organizational learning which are indispensable for dealing with the growing complexity; - total quality management to guarantee the maximum value for clients and the market in order to maintain the conditions of exogenous teleonomy related to the appreciation of and trust in the company; - community management and social accountability that guarantee value for the entire group by augmenting the conditions of exogenous teleonomy linked to the stable trust that ensures sustainable growth. Against this conceptual framework the study proposes to examine how the above-mentioned modern tendencies of management can be brought together in a single approach that also provides the available information and operational instruments – among which the planning approach that focuses on the integral growth of the organization, social accounting and the use of performance indicators – that reveal the state of the conditions of teleonomy.