Search results

The purpose of this study is to investigate how an environmental management system (EMS) might affect the environmental product innovation propensity of a firm through its influence on two factors shaping the knowledge process: the human capital management practices of training and development and the organisational context.

To test the study’s hypotheses, an empirical analysis was carried out on 262 companies drawn from 16 developed European markets included in the S&P Europe 350 Dow Jones index over the years 2005-2015.The authors adopted regression analysis by using the ordinary least squares and the binary logit econometric models.

Consistently with the study’s predictions, results show that for organisational contexts characterised by the presence of family owners, the EMAS-certified EMS reveals as a significant moderating factor that positively influences their approach to the knowledge management tools for the improvement of the workforce cognitive capabilities, with a significant impact on the firm’s openness towards green product innovation. On the contrary, the ISO 14001-certified EMS tends not to stimulate such proactive behaviour, in both family and non-family firms.

The findings suggest that an EMS can stimulate the knowledge exploration in the environmental protection field. To this end, top managers should overcome the bureaucratic vision of an EMS and conceive it as a knowledge management tool able to support the learning evolution of the organisation through an effective commitment to human capital management policies of training and development.

Drawing from social identity and institutional theories, this is the first study – to the best of the authors’ knowledge – that theorises and tests why the adoption of an EMS might stimulate the knowledge advancement of the organisation in a different way, especially in peculiar organisational contexts of family firms where the identity overlap between the family and the firm tends to affect the knowledge management process.

In an increasingly turbulent and competitive environment, open innovation could be critical for a firm’s success, favoring organizational flexibility and accelerating innovation processes. However, sharing innovation projects with external partners often requires changes in traditional organizational behavior and visions of CEOs. The purpose of this paper is to theorize and empirically verify how the CEO turnover and some socially relevant characteristics of the old and the new CEO may impact firms’ propensity toward open innovation under an integrated agency-resource dependence view and social identity perspective.

The empirical analysis was carried out on 264 companies drawn from 16 developed European markets included in the S&P Europe 350 Dow Jones index over the years 2006-2015. To test the predictions, the authors adopted regression analysis by employing the panel two-stages least squares model and the ordinary least squares econometric model.

Consistently with the predictions, the authors found that CEO turnover stimulates open innovation. Particularly, the results suggest that the organizational identity rationale may motivate a divergent propensity between insider and outsider new CEOs, with outsiders more prone to open innovation. The higher tendency of new outsider CEOs to undertake innovation projects jointly with external organizations prevails also within firms that experienced a long tenure of the former CEO, thereby suggesting that a new outsider CEO appears able to renovate corporate strategic directions also in highly orthodox organizational cultures.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that theorizes why CEO turnover might impact the propensity of the firm toward open innovation. The authors use an integrated agency-resource dependence perspective, and the results from the empirical analysis mostly support the predictions. Moreover, the authors adopt the social identity theory to show that the organizational identification of the CEO matters in the decision of engaging in open innovation.

This paper aims to provide insight into the evolving relationship between humans and machines, understanding its multifaceted impact on our lifestyle and landscape in the past as well as in the present, with implications for the near future. It uses bibliometric analysis combined with a systematic literature review to identify themes, trace historical developments and offer a direction for future human–machine interactions (HMIs).

To provide thorough coverage of publications from the previous four decades, the first section presents a text-based cluster bibliometric analysis based on 305 articles from 2,293 initial papers in the Scopus and Web of Science databases produced between 1984 and 2022. The authors used VOS viewer software to identify the most prominent themes through cluster identification. This paper presents a systematic literature review of 63 qualified papers using the PRISMA framework.

Next, the systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis revealed four major historical themes and future directions. The results highlight four major research themes for the future: from Taylorism to advanced technologies; machine learning and innovation; Industry 4.0, Society 5.0 and cyber–physical system; and psychology and emotions.

There is growing anxiety among humankind that in the future, machines will overtake humans to replace them in various roles. The current study investigates the evolution of HMIs from their historical roots to Society 5.0, which is understood to be a human-centred society. It balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems through a system that radically integrates cyberspace and physical space. This paper contributes to research and current limited knowledge by identifying relevant themes and offering scope for future research directions. A close look at the analysis posits that humans and machines complement each other in various roles. Machines reduce the mechanical work of human beings, bringing the elements of humanism and compassion to mechanical tasks. However, in the future, smart innovations may yield machines with unmatched dexterity and capability unthinkable today.

This paper attempts to explore the ambiguous and dynamic relationships between humans and machines. The present study combines systematic review and bibliometric analysis to identify prominent trends and themes. This provides a more robust and systematic encapsulation of this evolution and interaction, from Taylorism to Society 5.0. The principles of Taylorism are extended and redefined in the context of HMIs, especially advanced technologies.

This paper aims to provide new evidence on firm-specific determinants and effects of corporate social and environmental responsibility (CSER) in the food industry.

The current study is designed to empirically answer dual related research questions. First, we investigate the extent to which effective corporate governance (CG) mechanisms foster CSER. Second, we analyse the impact of CSER engagement on corporate financial performance (CFP). Consistent with the research design, to avoid sample selection bias, the authors employed Heckman two-step model (1979) to a worldwide sample of 324 food firms between 2011 and 2017.

The findings of the study reveal that effective board characteristics foster CSER engagement. Furthermore, CSER engagement is a positive predictor of improved profitability and also reduces the cost of debt (COD).

This article has elements of originality regarding the research questions, the context and the method. First, the authors demonstrate that CSER is a “missing link” between CG and CFP in the food industry. The authors’ contribution complements the debate on CSER and CFP through the stakeholder theory, the resource-based view and the innovation management perspective. They disentangle the effect of CG from the impact of social and environmental responsibility after correcting for endogeneity bias. The implications of the study contribute to a win-win scenario for companies investing in CG that result in higher CSER engagement, better profits and lower cost of capital.

Digital technologies, and the affordances they provide, can shape institutional processes in significant ways. In the last decade, social media and other digital platforms have redefined civic engagement by enabling new ways of connecting, collaborating, and mobilizing. In this article, we examine how technological affordances can both enable and hinder institutional processes through visibilization – which we define as the enactment of technological features to foreground and give voice to particular perspectives and discourses while silencing others. We study such dynamics by examining #SchauHin, an activist campaign initiated in Germany to shine a spotlight on experiences of daily racism. Our findings show how actors and counter-actors differentially leveraged the technological features of two digital platforms to shape the campaign. Our study has implications for understanding the role of digital technologies in institutional processes as well as the interplay between affordances and visibility in efforts to deinstitutionalize discriminatory practices and institutions.

Organizational legitimacy is a central concept in institutional theory and in the more recent stream of communicative institutionalism. Within this scholarship, there exists an elaborated understanding of how macro-level actors, such as news media, influence individual judgments at the micro-level through a top-down communication process. However, little is known about the upward process by which individual propriety judgments influence validity judgments of news media at the macro-level. In this paper, we propose that this upward process of the legitimacy loop is facilitated by the degree to which expressed propriety judgments by individuals create thematic broadness, which bridges stand-alone conversations. Through a study investigating a post-scandal phase in the financial sector, we show how propriety judgments in social media become pre-validated at the meso-level prior to their validation by news media at the macro-level. The presented theoretical framework and empirical insights based on time-series regression analysis provide new knowledge about the multilevel process of organizational legitimacy formation in a digital age and extend our understanding of how a consensus is revealed at the meso-level.

This paper illustrates the aims and the contents of the 1995 Local Government Accounting Act, which introduced an accrual-based financial reporting for Italian municipalities and provinces. To this end, this paper focuses on a sample of 23 local governments that produced these reports for the first time in 1998, and highlights a series of problems that emerged with regard to both communicational efficacy and fair presentation. The conclusions summarize the major gaps between the reform’s objectives and actual effects, and explain the reasons for these gaps and formulate some suggestions in order to re-design the system.

The purpose of this paper is to make a numerical study of natural convection of water‐based nanofluids in a square cavity when a discrete heat source is embedded on the bottom wall, applying a “nanofluid‐oriented” model for the calculation of the effective thermal conductivity (Xu‐Yu‐Zou‐Xu's model) and the effective dynamic viscosity (Jang‐Lee‐Hwang‐Choi's model). Another motivation is the numerical solution of the equations of the flow with a meshless method.

A meshless point collocation method with moving least squares (MLS) approximation is used. A test validation study of the numerical method takes place for pure water flow, as well for water/Al₂O₃ nanofluids. The influence of pertinent parameters such as Rayleigh number (Ra), the non‐uniform nanoparticle size keeping the mean nanoparticle diameter fixed, the volume fraction of nanoparticles and the location of heat source on the cooling performance are studied.

The presence of a discrete heat source, as well as the various thermal boundary conditions affects the characteristics of the nanofluid flow and heat transfer. When the ratio of minimum to maximum nanoparticle diameter is increased, the local Nusselt number is increased and the heat source temperature is decreased. The increase of solid volume fraction of nanoparticles causes the heat source maximum temperature to decrease and the Nusselt Number to increase.

The present study constitutes an original contribution to the nanofluid flow and heat transfer characteristics when a discrete heat source is presence. “Nanofluid‐oriented” models are used for the calculation of the effective thermal conductivity and dynamic viscosity.

This study aims to verify the presence, evolution and determinants of voluntary environmental disclosure from companies listed on the Milan Stock Exchange. The authors examined documentation of listed firms from 2006 and 2009. These years immediately precede and follow Italian legislative decree n. 32/2007, which introduced (albeit on a voluntary basis) disclosure of environment-related company information.

The authors’ approach utilizes multivariate regression analysis. The disclosure index of the years 2006 and 2009 represents the dependent variable. Independent variables include firm size, business industry, public shareholders, legislation and environmental performance.

The results show positive effects on environmental disclosure related to legislative decree n. 32, the presence of government shareholdings in firms’ ownership structure, business industry and firm size. The interrelation between firm size and environmental performance shows that large companies give more information only if they produce more environmental pollution, to legitimize themselves to stakeholders.

Despite the authors’ contributions concerning environmental information described in the Introduction, they must express two limitations of their analysis. First, the sample analyzed is quite small (only 44 firms). Second, carbon dioxide emissions was chosen as an indicator of atmospheric pollution, yet emissions information has not been provided by Italian firms (even those that are listed on the Milan Stock Exchange), despite being accepted internationally as a measure of environmental performance in business. In addition, in Italy, there is no database ranking firms on corporate social responsibility (CSR).

There are many reasons behind the weak or even negative roles of managers regarding social and environmental disclosure. These reasons include a dearth of resources, the profit imperative, lack of legal requirements, insufficient knowledge or awareness, poor performance and fear of bad publicity. What seems to be a real obstacle is the lack of knowledge about non-financial disclosure – in particular, how to gauge, produce and release information when it comes to a firm’s interaction with environment and society, and this void causes low levels of disclosure and even the absence of such action. Some of the reasons for non-disclosure might be attributed to a lack of awareness and knowledge among corporate managers regarding CSR reporting, in general, and disclosure on eco-justice issues, in particular.

The first contribution of this work is to realize, for the first time, a specific analysis on Italian firms’ environmental disclosures. Moreover, the study extends this analysis to all entities’ informative documents. This paper also allows an examination of effects of new legislation that encourages environmental information in a corporation’s financial annual report. Finally, this is the first paper to conduct quantitative analysis on firms in the Italian financial market concerning environmental disclosure, as well as regression analysis to identify determinants of firms’ disclosure.

This paper aims to explore the rationale, the process and the outcomes and risks of place branding in rural China.

An in-depth case study analysis, including interviews, has been conducted.

Place branding in the case of China is practiced and dominated through administrative entities by using subsidies and regional development programs to coordinate, organize and promote local agricultural resources. Although this government-led place branding has effective effects on rural development, it is unsustainable and unstable because it lacks sufficient market and stakeholder participation.

The effectiveness of place branding in China has been examined and proved.

The government’s role in place branding in China should be adjusted. The government should position itself as a service and auxiliary role. Simultaneously, it should strengthen market-oriented operations and stakeholder participation in place branding.

This paper is one of the first contributions to examine the impact of place branding as a rural development policy tool in China, and the in-depth case study examines and proves the effectiveness of place branding in rural China.