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Informed by the work of Laughlin and Booth, this paper aims to analyze the role of accounting and accountability practices within the fifteenth century Roman Catholic Church, more specifically within the Diocese of Ferrara (northern Italy), in order to determine the presence of a sacred‐secular dichotomy. Pope Eugenius IV had embarked on a comprehensive reform of the Church to counter the spreading moral corruption within the clergy and the subsequent disaffection with the Church by many believers. The reforms were notable not only for the Pope's determination to restore the moral authority and power of the Church, but also for the essential contributions of “profane” financial and accounting practices to the success of the reforms.

Original fifteenth century Latin documents and account books of the Diocese of Ferrara are used to highlight the link between the new sacred values imposed by Pope Eugenius IV's reforms and accounting and accountability practices.

The documents reveal that secular accounting and accountability practices were not regarded as necessarily antithetical to religious values, as would be expected by Laughlin and Booth. Instead, they were seen to assume a role which was complementary to the Church's religious mission. Indeed, they were essential to its sacred mission during a period in which the Pope sought to arrest the moral decay of the clergy and reinstate the Church's authority.

The paper shows that the sacred‐secular dichotomy cannot be considered as a priori valid in space and time. There is also scope for examining other Italian dioceses where there was little evidence of Pope Eugenius' reforms.

The paper presents a critique of the sacred‐secular divide paradigm by considering an under‐researched period and a non‐Anglo Saxon context.

Both the ideals of the European Union (EU) and the EU's recent political difficulties have attracted comparison with the Habsburg empire. In recent years, some of those making comparison have turned to the Austrian Jewish novelists, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, who were crucial to the imaginative emergence of the Habsburg Myth. This paper analyses their writings and those of Robert Musil and Gregor von Rezzori in relation to the Habsburg Myth as a story about European unity, about Austria-Hungary as a supranational polity and about Austria-Hungary's self-proclaimed providential purpose in European affairs. It explores the dissonance between the Habsburg Myth and the EU's territorial composition and argues that the Habsburg Myth is, nonetheless, revealing about the EU's internal hierarchies and its geopolitical difficulties in relation to Russia.

This paper aims to investigate whether religiosity and religious diversity affect the adoption of sustainability reporting assurance (SRA) by companies based in predominantly Roman Catholic and Protestant countries. To this aim, a theoretical framework is developed using the social norm, signalling and agency theories.

A pooled logit regression model is applied on a sample of 2,541 firm-year observations collected from the most sustainable companies in Europe in the period between 2004 and 2015 to test the effect of religiosity on SRA adoption. Different analyses are used to check for the robustness of the findings and a generalized method of moments (GMM) is used to address potential endogeneity issues.

The results of this study show that companies based in highly religious countries are more likely to adopt SRA practices to show compliance with the religious social norms of their stakeholders. The results also show that companies based in predominantly Roman Catholic countries are more likely to adopt SRA practices than those operating in Protestant countries. This may be due to the fact that the structural organization of Catholicism is based on a vertical, top-down control system, which does not foster trust and requires constant assurance. This explains the emphasis placed on SRA by stakeholders adhering to Catholicism. Stakeholders from Protestant countries, on the other hand, tend to rely more on the principles of social ethics and social mutual control that characterize their doctrine and, therefore, do not need any additional, external assurance of corporate commitment to sustainability.

This paper provides new insights into the influence that religiosity and religious diversity have on SRA. This study also provides evidence on the usefulness of social norm theory for conducting empirical research into corporate practices and could set an example for future studies in this field.

Pope Francis has highlighted the important global crises regarding the plight of refugees, the victims of war, the consequences of poverty, and the impact of climate change. He has done this while the Catholic Church is undergoing a serious internal crisis related to the ongoing revelations of clerical sexual abuse and a divided, unaccountable leadership. In calling for increased activity for peace, reconciliation, and justice among the Church’s members, Francis is offering to share leadership with followers of the Church in a revolutionary and inclusive way. Ira Chalaff’s concept of courageous followership: assuming responsibility while also serving others, challenging leadership while also participating in transformation, and taking moral action while also speaking directly to the hierarchy, points to a way that members of the Church can constructively apply the call from Pope Francis to the lives of their local communities with an eye to making a global impact. The Church will not be able to follow the pope’s call to external leadership on the inclusion of refugees and the restraint of disastrous climate change unless it is also able to reform its internal relationships and restore confidence in a leadership badly damaged by the clerical sex abuse crisis.

This work aims to assess the potential of a Bio-District as a model for applying the circular economy concerning the waste scope. It aims to understand the capability of organic farms to manage waste with a circular perspective, starting with the use of indicators that directly or indirectly impact the waste scope.

This study is based on previous work that identified and systematised the circular indicators of the agri-food sector within a dashboard. With this research as a basis, the indicators within the waste scope in the dashboard were extracted. Cross-linked indicators with an indirect connection to the waste scope were also systematised and tested in a case study. Primary and secondary data were used for the study. The primary data came from a semi-structured interview, and the secondary data were from official databases.

The work highlights two important results. The first allows the definition of a subclassification of indicators by product and organisation, extracting those with a cross-linked characteristic concerning the waste scope. Secondly, the indicators' application shows the farm's circular and waste valorisation potential within the Bio-District. The study also made it possible to test a new indicator, the “Potential Energy Biomass Recovery”, to measure the farm's potential to produce energy from waste.

This research proposes a new circular economy approach to evaluate waste management in the agri-food sector.

Current news on environmental problems frequently emphasizes the totally unprecedented nature of the ecological crises that beset us in this nation and the Western world as a whole. We are told, for example, that the summer of 1988 constituted “the hottest summer on record” in North America. Similarly we hear mat Boston Harbor has never in its history been so polluted, and in European waters seal populations died of an epidemic in 1988 on a scale never before witnessed by man. By stressing this “never before” aspect of events, it is sometimes argued mat the experience of the past is largely irrelevant for policy planners. Since our circumstances are new, so the argument runs, past experience leaves us with little or no instruction for the formulation of a practical public policy for the environment.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the emergence and existence of retro-industries. The paper proposes using a multidisciplinary approach to define the concept of retro-industries and to identify its specificities.

Literature reviews in marketing and economics were used to create a model of innovation adoption and diffusion in retro-industries.

The paper provides theoretical insights about the factors that foster retro-industries such as heritage, tradition, nostalgia and revival. The paper suggests that these factors influence innovations mechanisms and explain the use of the past to manage the challenges of the future.

The paper enriches an identified need to analyse industry from retro perspective; and to identify the factors that foster the emergence of such industries.