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Despite the ongoing increase of women in the top positions, they are still underrepresented in politics. The studies that primarily focus on women’s underrepresentation in politics neglect the role of gender as a category that structures and makes sense of social practices. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mechanisms that regulate the contemporary gender order in politics through discourse analysis and the contribution of the critical feminist perspective.

The study is based on 30 biographical interviews with Italian politicians and focuses on the account of their political experiences and on the meanings attributed to these.

The results of this paper underline the tendency to either absolve or blame women for gender inequality in politics through different interpretative repertoires: “Women’s disinterest toward politics,” “Politics as masculine context” and “Politics–family unbalance.” The analysis allowed to unravel the way in which the discursive practices create and reproduce the hegemonic gender order in politics.

The research is limited to 30 qualitative interviews, and so results cannot be generalized.

The findings of this paper highlight the importance of exploring issues relating to the gender gap in politics and stress the need to implement actions to promote gender equality in politics.

The paper contributes to an understanding of women’s underrepresentation in politics and offers causes for reflection on a phenomenon that has profound implications for our society.

Despite repeated attempts to implement gender education in schools, numerous forms of resistance still persist, maintaining the current gender order, especially in Italy. Thus, in this paper, the authors focus on the practices of resistance opposed to gender education in kindergarten.

This study takes a qualitative approach, and data collection was conducted using ethnographic observations, a focus group and an in-depth interview. The authors used critical discourse analysis (cf: Fairclough's three-dimensional model).

As per our findings, teachers' resistance is attributed to “hegemonic masculinity” and “essentialism”. In the case of “hegemonic masculinity”, the discourses emphasise that male feminisation is a threat and female masculinisation is harmless. On the “essentialist” side, teachers' discourses focus on the segregation of genders that justify naturalised gender differences.

This study emphasises the need for specific training for figures as important and authoritative as teachers. In addition to the training of teachers who currently work in kindergarten, it is also necessary to address the issue at the institutional level, adding to the university courses the teaching of specific subjects related to gender.

This paper offers causes for reflection on a profession that has profound implications in our society and about the power of resistance to implementing gender education. The implications are discussed.

Different data sources are used simultaneously to disclose discursive practices of resistance to gender education in Italy.

Considering the ongoing international debate on the role of public administrations in economic systems, the interest around public service motivation (PSM) has significantly grown among practitioners and scholars in the past two decades. Following the research streams that have investigated topics of organizational behavior within the public context, the purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of PSM on public employees’ feelings of job satisfaction. The novelty of the study lies in linking some characteristics of the work context presumed to be more prevalent in public organizations with specific job characteristics, regarded as relevant antecedents of job satisfaction.

The study is based on two complementary studies conducted in an Italian public administration. The paper shows how PSM influences job satisfaction, job engagement, and life satisfaction.

This paper shows how PSM influences job satisfaction, job engagement, and life satisfaction. The findings display how job engagement affects both job and life satisfaction in such contexts. Additionally, the findings display how job engagement affects both job and life satisfaction in such contexts.

Although based on a specific context of public administration, the analysis allows some generalizations.

Based on these results, the paper contributes to two main streams of the literature. First, it enriches the existing research on PSM by analyzing how it can be managed in complex organizations. Second, it informs the literature on job satisfaction and work-related stress and relates to the intersection between organizational behavior and human resource management that informs the drawing up of HR policies. Furthermore, the paper sheds new light on how to deal with such problems and at the same time opens new avenues for investigations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the voluntary disclosure of risk-related issues, with a focus on credit risk, in graphical reporting for listed banks in the major European economies. It aims to understand if banks portray credit risk-related information in graphs accurately and whether these graphs provide incremental, rather than replicative, information. It also investigates whether credit risk-related graphs provide a fair representation of risk performance or a more favourable impression than is warranted.

A graphical accuracy index was constructed. Incremental information was measured. A multi-level linear model investigated whether credit risk affects the quantity and quality of graphical credit risk disclosure.

Banks used credit risk graphs to provide incremental information. They were also selective, with riskier banks less likely to use risk graphs. Banks were accurate in their graphical reporting, particularly those with high levels of credit risk. These findings can be explained within an impression management perspective taking human cognitive biases into account. Preparers of risk graphs seem to prefer selective omission over obfuscation via inaccuracy. This probably reflects the fact that individuals, and by implication annual report’s users, generally judge the provision of inaccurate information more harshly than the omission of unfavourable information.

This study provides theoretical insights by pointing out the limitations of a purely economics-based agency theory approach to impression management.

The study suggests annual reports’ readers need to be careful about subtle forms of impression management, such as those exploiting their cognitive bias. Regulatory and professional bodies should develop guidelines to ensure neutral and comparable graphical disclosure.

This study provides a substantive alternative to the predominant economic perspective on impression management in corporate reporting, by incorporating a psychological perspective taking human cognitive biases into account.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework that incorporates factors external to the organization into the business process management (BPM) lifecycle through dynamic capabilities (DCs), beginning with strategy and persisting through the business process transformation.

The study comprised four distinct phases. First, a literature review was conducted to identify validated theoretical models related to the topic. Then, a systematic review of the literature was conducted by accessing the EBSCOhost, ISI/Web of Science and Scopus databases, for the purpose of understanding how the relationship between BPM and DCs has been addressed. The third step was the identification of the meta-capabilities involved in the relationship between DC and BPM, the fourth step was the construction of a framework that integrated an external view into BPM through DC, and the final step evaluated these framework through a case study.

Ten texts were selected after a systematic literature review. The following main points of convergence were identified: DC contributes to the conceptualization and understanding of BPM, DC assists in the process of organizational change by promoting the adaptation of the company to the environment, and DC enhances BPM performance. A framework was developed and presented.

The proposed framework, which incorporates an external perspective into the BPM lifecycle through DCs, can be used by managers and researchers interested in the promotion of BPM.

The study shows how the sensing, seizing and transforming meta-capabilities can act to evaluate the outside-in perspective, serve as a benchmark for the alignment of business processes and enable the operationalization of emerging demands through the dynamic adaptation of processes.

As conviviality can nurture community social capital, this paper aims to investigate how such capital can give rise to economic behaviour in terms of developing business relationships.

The empirical analysis was based on case studies of Italian businesses recognised as active communities that periodically organise convivial activities to fuel reciprocal collaboration. The case studies were constructed by combining a collection of secondary data, in-depth interviews and participant observations.

This paper shows how: community social capital in convivium emerges from self-narrative stimulated by ritual practices; social trust mobilising a convivial social capital is fuelled by knowledge generated through sharing and empathic relationships; community-based social relations embed business relations and if mediated, community-based business relations can also embed a community business.

The originality of the paper is twofold as it contributes: to understanding how conviviality can be used as a strategic tool for entrepreneurs to develop business relationships from convivial relations; and to finding intersection points between studies on business relationships from social capital and studies on entrepreneurship from community social capital.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of in-store mobile usage on purchase decision making in order to understand whether and to what extent the use of the device changes the shopper behavior in terms of planned and unplanned purchases even across different retail store formats.

Data were obtained using a structured questionnaire from 406 respondents interviewed in hypermarket and discount stores, after the checkout. Data were measured through t-tests and the analysis of variance.

The mobile intensifies a process of preparation making it popular and the same across the different store formats, confirming how the growing convergence, making store formats less distinctive in the eyes of the consumer, has somewhat flattened and standardized the pre-shopping out-of-store preparation.

The pervasiveness and the versatility of the mobile, and its ability to influence the decision-making processes, leads to important managerial questions and implications regarding the effectiveness of in-store marketing initiatives and the need to review the mix of out-of-store and in-store investments, with the knowledge that the consumer will continue to become even more prepared and well informed in the future.

Mobile devices could be used out-of-store, as a tool for shopping preparation, and in-store as a tool for self-regulation. Therefore, it becomes crucial to understand how the mobile influences the decision-making process as well as the buying behavior of shoppers.

This paper aims to investigate the practice of conviviality as the right setting to explore how social capital interacts with business relationships and in particular how resources impacting business relationships take shape in social relations.

This paper has adopted the single case study method combining in-depth interviews, participant observations and focus groups. The investigated case is an Italian business community located in Hangzhou (China), recognized as one of the most active foreign communities in organizing convivial activities.

The study shows that conviviality contributes to generating resources thereby creating interactions in business relationships via social relations through self-narrative, community feeling and empathy. These resources bear distinguishing features. Based on relationships of trust, they are fitting and mutual knowledge-based resources and they are resources performing a sense of inner time.

The paper contributes to the interpretation of the interplay between business relationships and social capital through conviviality and is in line with a direction of research, which is increasingly involving industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) researchers, which is the analysis of social capital in business networks.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the current role of qualitative research in the analysis of the relations between brands and consumers in new market spaces, with particular reference to how it can be enhanced with quantitative techniques to study interactions in online communities.

The paper reviews key scientific contributions in the area of qualitative marketing research. Drawing from this theoretical background, the authors then propose the integration of digital ethnography (a qualitative approach) with quantitative text mining as an innovative approach to gain insights into perceptions of brand associations among online consumers.

The paper contributes to a greater awareness of both limitations and new perspectives in relation to qualitative market research, while suggesting innovative paths for future research.

The new methodological approach described can be used to better understand brand knowledge based on consumer brand associations. These insights can then be applied towards developing and implementing effective branding strategies.

The authors propose an interdisciplinary methodology to study consumer behaviour in online communities which incorporates digital ethnography and computer-assisted textual analysis. Particularly the latter technique (borrowed from the field of linguistics) has not yet been exploited extensively in marketing research, but is capable of offering new types of knowledge with important implications for strategic brand management.