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1 – 10 of 31Gianluca Biggi, Ludovica Principato and Fulvio Castellacci
This paper investigates strategies for addressing the global challenge of food loss and waste (FLW) within the food industry. It examines the relationship between corporate social…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper investigates strategies for addressing the global challenge of food loss and waste (FLW) within the food industry. It examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and state regulatory interventions for reducing FLW.
Design/methodology/approach
This mixed method study utilizes a unique panel dataset which includes the 150 largest food industry companies in Italy, Norway and the UK. It combines quantitative data analysis with qualitative insights derived from corporate strategies and corporate communications.
Findings
The analysis reveals that food companies with an established CSR strategy and in particular companies whose CSR reports highlight their environmental and social achievements are more likely to achieve in effective FLW reduction. Additionally, national-level regulatory interventions guided by European Union waste strategies act as pivotal benchmarks and encourage stricter corporate food waste management policies.
Practical implications
This research underscores the significance of CSR strategies and effective state regulation in the fight against FLW and offers policymakers and businesses valuable insights enabling development of robust strategies.
Social implications
By emphasizing the interplay between CSR and regulatory intervention, this research contributes to the achievement of a more sustainable and efficient global food system that addresses both economic and ethical concerns and could have far-reaching societal and environmental implications.
Originality/value
The paper sheds light on the interplay between CSR initiatives and regulatory interventions for tackling FLW and emphasizes their synergistic impact on sustainable practices within the food industry.
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Ernesto Cardamone, Gaetano Miceli and Maria Antonietta Raimondo
This paper investigates how two characteristics of language, abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity, influence user engagement in communication exercises on innovation…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper investigates how two characteristics of language, abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity, influence user engagement in communication exercises on innovation targeted to the general audience. The proposed conceptual model suggests that innovation fits well with more abstract language because of the association of innovation with imagination and distal construal. Moreover, communication of innovation may benefit from greater adherence to the narrativity arc, that is, early staging, increasing plot progression and climax optimal point. These effects are moderated by content variety and emotional tone, respectively.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) application on a sample of 3225 TED Talks transcripts, the authors identify 287 TED Talks on innovation, and then applied econometric analyses to test the hypotheses on the effects of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity on engagement, and on the moderation effects of content variety and emotional tone.
Findings
The authors found that abstractness (vs concreteness) and narrativity have positive effects on engagement. These two effects are stronger with higher content variety and more positive emotional tone, respectively.
Research limitations/implications
This paper extends the literature on communication of innovation, linguistics and text analysis by evaluating the roles of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity in shaping appreciation of innovation.
Originality/value
This paper reports conceptual and empirical analyses on innovation dissemination through a popular medium – TED Talks – and applies modern text analysis algorithms to test hypotheses on the effects of two pivotal dimensions of language on user engagement.
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Asis Kumar Sahu, Byomakesh Debata and Saumya Ranjan Dash
This study aims to examine the impact of manager sentiment on the firm performance (FP) of Indian-listed nonfinancial firms. Further, it endeavors to investigate the moderating…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine the impact of manager sentiment on the firm performance (FP) of Indian-listed nonfinancial firms. Further, it endeavors to investigate the moderating role of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and environment, social and governance (ESG) transparency in this relationship.
Design/methodology/approach
A noble manager sentiment is introduced using FinBERT, a bidirectional encoder representation from a transformers (BERT)-type large language model. Using this deep learning-based natural language processing approach implemented through a Python-generated algorithm, this study constructs a manager sentiment for each firm and year based on the management discussions and analysis (MD&A) report. This research uses the system GMM to examine how manager sentiment affects FP.
Findings
The empirical results suggest that managers’ optimistic outlook in MD&A corporate disclosure sections tends to present higher performance. This positive association remains consistent after several robustness checks – using propensity score matching and instrumental variable approach to address further endogeneity, using alternative proxies of manager sentiment and FP and conducting subsample analysis based on financial constraints. Furthermore, the authors observe that the relationship is more pronounced for ESG-disclosed firms and during the low EPU.
Practical implications
The results demonstrate that the manager sentiment strongly predicts FP. Thus, this study may provide valuable insight for academics, practitioners, investors, corporates and policymakers.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to predict FP by using FinBERT-based managerial sentiment, particularly in an emerging market context.
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This paper aims to provide insights into the potential of digital technologies-based innovations for more inclusive healthcare by alleviating the affordability, accessibility and…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to provide insights into the potential of digital technologies-based innovations for more inclusive healthcare by alleviating the affordability, accessibility and availability barriers to utilization of healthcare services. Also, it aims to provide insights into the potential of digital technologies-based innovations for more inclusive services, broadly.
Design/methodology/approach
A conceptual framework is inductively developed by analyzing real-world examples of digital technologies-based innovations for more inclusive healthcare through the lenses of economics of information in digital form and certain characteristics of services.
Findings
Concurrent implementation of digital technologies-based healthcare innovations with innovations and/or modifications in service processes can enable greater inclusivity by alleviating the affordability, accessibility and availability barriers to utilization of healthcare services.
Research limitations/implications
Issues relating to inequities in healthcare, as a social problem, are the focus of research at multiple levels (e.g. global, national, regional and local) in several academic disciplines. In relation to the scope of the problems and challenges pertaining to providing quality healthcare to the unserved and underserved segments of society, worldwide, the contribution of the proposed framework to practice is modest. However, by highlighting the promise and potential of digital technologies-based innovations as solutions for alleviating barriers to affordability, accessibility and availability of healthcare services during various stages (prevention, detection, diagnosis, treatment and post-treatment follow-up) with illustrative vignettes and developing a framework, the article offers insights for future research. For instance, in reference to mission-driven social enterprises that operate in the product-market space for inclusive innovations under resource constraints, a resourcefulness-based view of the social enterprise constitutes a potential avenue for theory development and research.
Practical implications
Given the conceptual nature of the article, the implications for practice are limited to cognitive implications. Action implications (instrumental implications or implications for practice) are outside of the scope of the article.
Social implications
Innovations that are economically viable, environmentally sustainable and socially impactful is one of the important issues of our times.
Originality/value
The proposed framework provides insights into the potential of digital technologies-based innovations for more inclusive healthcare by alleviating the affordability, accessibility and availability barriers in the context of emerging and less developed country markets and base of the pyramid segments of society in these markets.
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Abby Yaqing Zhang and Joseph H. Zhang
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors have become increasingly important in investment decisions, leading to a surge in ESG investing and the rise of sustainable…
Abstract
Purpose
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors have become increasingly important in investment decisions, leading to a surge in ESG investing and the rise of sustainable investment assets. Nevertheless, challenges in ESG disclosure, such as quantifying unstructured data, lack of guidelines and comparability, rampantly exist. ESG rating agencies play a crucial role in assessing corporate ESG performance, but concerns over their credibility and reliability persist. To address these issues, researchers are increasingly utilizing machine learning (ML) tools to enhance ESG reporting and evaluation. By leveraging ML, accounting practitioners and researchers gain deeper insights into the relationship between ESG practices and financial performance, offering a more data-driven understanding of ESG impacts on business communities.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors review the current research on ESG disclosure and ESG performance disagreement, followed by the review of current ESG research with ML tools in three areas: connecting ML with ESG disclosures, integrating ML with ESG rating disagreement and employing ML with ESG in other settings. By comparing different research's ML applications in ESG research, the authors conclude the positive and negative sides of those research studies.
Findings
The practice of ESG reporting and assurance is on the rise, but still in its technical infancy. ML methods offer advantages over traditional approaches in accounting, efficiently handling large, unstructured data and capturing complex patterns, contributing to their superiority. ML methods excel in prediction accuracy, making them ideal for tasks like fraud detection and financial forecasting. Their adaptability and feature interaction capabilities make them well-suited for addressing diverse and evolving accounting problems, surpassing traditional methods in accuracy and insight.
Originality/value
The authors broadly review the accounting research with the ML method in ESG-related issues. By emphasizing the advantages of ML compared to traditional methods, the authors offer suggestions for future research in ML applications in ESG-related fields.
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Yawen Shan, Da Shi and Shi Xu
Based on imprinting theory and episodic future thinking, this paper aims to study how CEOs’ attributes and experiences inform innovation in tourism and hospitality businesses. It…
Abstract
Purpose
Based on imprinting theory and episodic future thinking, this paper aims to study how CEOs’ attributes and experiences inform innovation in tourism and hospitality businesses. It also explores ways to quantify innovation in this sector.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors quantitatively analysed innovation in tourism and hospitality using extensive data from companies’ annual reports. They further adopted multivariate regression to test how CEOs’ experience affects enterprise innovation.
Findings
Results demonstrate that CEOs’ academic education and rich work experience can promote corporate innovation. The authors also identified a mediating role of the tone of narrative disclosure in annual reports between CEOs’ academic education and corporate innovation. The imprinting effects of career experience and educational experience appear both independent and interactive.
Research limitations/implications
CEOs are more inclined to engage in corporate innovation when influenced by the combined imprinting effects of strategic management training and work experience. Additionally, leaders should consider how communication styles indirectly influence innovation activities.
Originality/value
This paper introduces an integrated perspective that blends imprinting theory and episodic future thinking to bridge knowledge gaps regarding the interaction of CEOs’ past experiences. This work enhances understanding of how CEOs’ imprinted experiences, together with their capacity for envisioning future scenarios, can drive corporate innovation.
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Although there is a growing body of work on immigrants' information behavior, little is known about the pre-arrival information experiences of immigrants who consult formal…
Abstract
Purpose
Although there is a growing body of work on immigrants' information behavior, little is known about the pre-arrival information experiences of immigrants who consult formal information sources such as immigration agents. Drawn from a larger study on the information behavior of immigrants, this paper mainly reports the semi-structured interview findings on the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants who used formal information sources with discussion on how that affected their post-arrival settlement into Canada.
Design/methodology/approach
The study used a mixed method approach with semi-structured interviews (n = 60) and surveys (n = 205) with participants who arrived in Canada between the years of 1971 and 2017. Data were collected from May 2017 to February 2018.
Findings
Although the overall scope of the original study is much larger, this paper features findings on the pre-arrival information experiences derived mainly from an analysis of interview data. This study provides insights into the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants consulting formal information sources such as immigration firms, individual immigration consultants and more formal government agencies. The author introduces a new concept of “information crafting” by exploring the negative consequences of selective information sharing by immigration consultants/agents in newcomers' settlements in Canada, primarily positive information about life in Canada, sometimes with exaggeration and falsification. The interview participants shared story after the story of the settlement challenges they faced after arriving in Canada and how the expectations they built through the information received from immigration consultants and government agencies did not match after arrival. This study emphasizes the importance of providing comprehensive information about life in Canada to potential newcomers so that they can make informed decisions even before they apply.
Originality/value
The findings of this study have theoretical and practical implications for policy and research. This study provides insights into the complicated culturally situated pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants. Moreover, the study findings encourage researchers in various disciplines, including psychology, migration studies and geography, to delve more deeply into newcomers' information experiences using an informational lens to examine the information newcomers receive from diverse sources and their effects on their post-arrival settlement in a new country. The study challenges the general assumptions that formal information sources are always reputable, useful, and comprehensive, and it provides some future directions for research that seeks to understand the culturally situated information behavior of diverse immigrant groups.
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Shiyang Liu, Weibiao Ma and Nanxin Deng
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of noncognitive skills on educational mismatch in the context of China and to further explore the potential mechanisms…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of noncognitive skills on educational mismatch in the context of China and to further explore the potential mechanisms concerning how noncognitive skills determine mismatch outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses the Chinese Family Panel Survey of 2018, which provides the Big Five Personality Inventory to assess respondents' noncognitive skills and contains information on educational mismatch. The authors estimate the effects of noncognitive skills on educational mismatch by means of a probit model. Additionally, the correlated random effects (CRE) model and instrumental variable (IV) approach have also been exploited in the robust checks.
Findings
The findings show that the composite score of noncognitive skills reduces the probability of being overeducated and, conversely, increases the likelihood of being undereducated. When distinguishing the effects of different personality traits, the authors find significantly negative effects of agreeableness and openness on overeducation and a positive effect of openness on undereducation. With regard to heterogeneous analysis, the effects of noncognitive skills on educational mismatch exist mostly among white-collar employees and employees with fewer than 5 years of work experience. Finally, the authors provide two likely mechanisms related to job search effort and social capital, followed by the presentation of supporting evidence.
Practical implications
The results of this paper underline the importance of noncognitive skills in raising the quality of jobs that individuals can obtain. This suggests that the development of noncognitive skills should be encouraged to be integrated into formal education systems and social job training programs in China.
Originality/value
Despite a growing interest in its consequences in the labor market, the role of noncognitive skills in determining educational mismatch has rarely been discussed in developing countries. This study provides the first evidence regarding the effects of noncognitive skills on education mismatch in China. It contributes to the research on noncognitive skills' labor market outcomes and enhances the understanding of the factors driving educational mismatch.
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Tahir Albayrak, Aslıhan Dursun-Cengizci, Lawrence Hoc Nang Fong and Meltem Caber
By conducting a longitudinal study, this study aims to investigate how the role of hotel attributes in destination competitiveness changed through the stages of pre-, amid and…
Abstract
Purpose
By conducting a longitudinal study, this study aims to investigate how the role of hotel attributes in destination competitiveness changed through the stages of pre-, amid and recovery from the crisis.
Design/methodology/approach
First, the latent Dirichlet allocation method was used to identify hotel attributes from 15,137 online reviews, and then a sentiment analysis was performed to determine tourist satisfaction with the subject attributes. Second, separate asymmetric impact competitor analyses were conducted for the three stages of the crisis, and their results were compared with understand how the role of the hotel attributes changed throughout the crisis.
Findings
The results revealed that the impacts of hotel attributes on tourist satisfaction and destination competitiveness differed significantly at each stage of the crisis.
Research limitations/implications
This research expands the existing literature by offering valuable insights by elucidating the changing characteristics of hotel attributes at each crisis stage. The results extend the body of knowledge in destination management by providing evidence on the validity of asymmetric impact competitor analysis.
Originality/value
To fully understand the impact of a crisis (e.g. COVID-19) on destination competitiveness with a focus on the hotel sector, this research conducted a longitudinal study that covers three stages of the crisis (i.e. pre-, amid and post-crisis). Moreover, unlike previous studies, this research considers the asymmetric relationships between service attributes and overall tourist satisfaction, as well as competitors’ information.
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Elia Rigamonti, Luca Gastaldi and Mariano Corso
Today, companies are struggling to develop their human resources analytics (HRA) capability, although interest in the subject is rapidly increasing. Furthermore, the academic…
Abstract
Purpose
Today, companies are struggling to develop their human resources analytics (HRA) capability, although interest in the subject is rapidly increasing. Furthermore, the academic literature on the subject is immature with limited practical guidance or comprehensive models that could support organisations in the development of their HRA capability. To address this issue, the aim of this paper is to provide a maturity model – i.e. HRAMM – and an interdependency matrix through which an organisation can (1) operationalise its HRA capability and assess its organisational maturity; (2) generate harmonious development roadmaps to improve its HRA capability; and (3) enable benchmarking and continuous improvement.
Design/methodology/approach
The research described in this paper is based on the popular methodology proposed by Becker et al. (2009) and the procedure for maturity evaluation developed by Gastaldi et al. (2018). This method combines academic rigour and field experience in analytics, in a process spanning eight main phases that involves literature reviews and knowledge creation techniques.
Findings
We define HRA maturity through four areas and 14 dimensions, providing a comprehensive model to operationalise HRA capability. Additionally, we argue that HRA maturity develops through an evolutionary path described in four discrete stages of maturity that go beyond traditional analytics sophistication. Lastly, the interdependency matrix reveals specific enablers for the development of HRA.
Practical implications
This paper provides practitioners with useful tools to monitor, evaluate and plan their HRA development path. Additionally, our research helps practitioners to prioritise their work and investment, generating an effective roadmap for developing and improving their HRA capability.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to provide a model for evaluating the maturity of HRA capability plus an interdependency matrix to evaluate systematically the prerequisites and synergies among its constituting dimensions.
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