Cross compliance and awareness: a case of study in three provinces of Tuscany

The behaviour and performance of a business depend on the interactions between a set of related activities, such as planning, development, production, output/input flows, etc. The ways of organising communication flows between these activities and the knowledge-processing mechanisms are extremely important for the decision-making processes. Knowledge is not the fruit of a passive acquisition, but is instead proactively built up, through endless exchanges between the individual and his physical and social environment. The institutions, in the broadest sense, are external facilities (external scaffoldings) which play a key role in expanding as well as reducing the intellectual horizon of a business or individual; from a cognitive perspective, such entities are veritable “extensions of the human mind "(Lombardi, 2001). A business moves within a “socio-technical landscape” which is determined by situations and events that go beyond the range of the national policies and direct their technical and technological adaptations to ethically-orientated productive models (Brunori et al, 2008). In this scenario, the need for training/information about environmental issues and conditionality has become a strategic theme for the institutions in charge of planning and management training. On the other hand, adaptations are possible and effective insofar as they are accepted and shared and if what seem to be constraints are turned into challenges by the business itself. This paper analyse the level of knowledge of environmental problems on a global scale and the level of sharing and awareness of individual responsibilities in connection with the conditionality principle and analyse the information flow within the socio-technical system the farms belong to, the preferred channels for the acquisition of knowledge/information, and the role attributed to the main players in the relational system built around the farms.