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Analyzing how and what the local multi-utility AIMAG learned through the 2012 Northern Italy earthquakes, the purpose of this paper is to “normalize” the organizational learning (OL) triggered by disasters.

Seven managers who experienced the earthquakes were interviewed. The collected data are supplemented by archival materials. The analysis was conducted based on the 4I model (Crossan et al., 1999), using the qualitative data analysis tool “NVivo.”

The earthquakes audited AIMAG’s knowledge repositories, revealing its weakness and strength. When the earthquakes struck, individuals intuited the situations based on their previous experience, interpreting the need to respond to the interruptions and begin recovery immediately. The collective interpretation formed the basis for joint actions, which integrated the group learning at the organizational level. The effective cognition and behavior were instituted to the organization, and the new knowledge was absorbed into the organization’s knowledge repositories awaiting the next audit.

The concept of “learning through disasters” is advocated. By perceiving disasters as a series of interruptions that may have happened before and may re-occur, the learning is connected to organizations’ past and future through knowledge repositories. In addition, by analyzing data based on the multi-level OL model, the learning triggered by disasters was observed to occur throughout the organization at individual, group and organizational levels, in which routines played a critical linking role.

Food waste is a severe problem affecting the supply chain due to its significant adverse social and environmental effects. Even if the topic is hotly debated in the literature, there is a lack of research about the success factors influencing food waste prevention initiatives retailers undertake.

The research analyzes how several variables (i.e. product-related variables and technology-enabling variables) might impact the success of the sales of products close to the expiration date that is sold at a discounted price. Data from 390.000 products sold at a discounted price in 2020 and 2021 by a large Italian food retailer were examined with a regression analysis.

The results highlight that both product-related and technology-enabling variables influence the success of food prevention initiatives aimed at selling products close to the expiration date at a discounted price. In particular, the authors stress the importance of digital technologies in supporting food waste prevention initiatives.

The study offers several practical implications for managers in structuring a waste prevention initiative. The introduction of digital technologies, the monitoring of specific variables or the ability to find synergies with other food waste prevention initiatives are discussed to support retailers in reducing food losses.

The paper is focused on the retailer perspective, which is barely investigated due to the difficulty in finding data.

Surveys measuring consumers’ preferences for sustainable food might suffer from socially desirable responding. Social desirability stems in part from social norms about sustainable lifestyles, when respondents need approval from others and when privacy is not guaranteed during survey completion. While various studies showed this phenomenon through laboratory experiments and by comparing different modes of survey administration, no research adopted factorial survey experiments (FSEs) to measure which factors are perceived by consumers as critical for socially desirable answering. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap, at least for young consumers in a case study with organic fruit.

In total, 143 under-30 respondents were involved in an FSE. Each respondent evaluated six hypothetical scenarios (n=858) describing a consumer surveyed about his/her preferences for organic fruit. Respondents indicated whether they believed participants would have answered honestly or not to the survey described in each scenario. Generalized linear mixed models were used to model how scenario attributes were perceived to influence honest answering.

Respondents believe that people are more prone to bias their answers the more they seek approval from others. Moreover, the presence of acquaintances during survey completion is another critical driver of survey misreporting.

This study, by using a novel robust quasi-experimental approach, confirms that social desirability could lead consumers to misreport their preferences when surveyed about an organic fruit. This confirms that well-designed surveys, adopting proper remedies for social desirability should be adopted even for those food products, like fruit, which are usually deemed to be less subjected to misreporting. It also introduces FSEs as a flexible tool for collecting insights from consumers about potential antecedents of their behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the link between identity and crisis deriving by natural disasters, exploring the function of the shared identity linking individuals, groups, organizations and its external networks. The shared identity is not static. It is a dynamic self-reflexive learning process and is reciprocal. The object of the research is a medium-sized multi-utility company, which experienced the 2012 earthquakes, and how responsibly and rapidly it responded and recovered in collaboration with its stakeholders in the local territory.

Semi-structured interviews were directed to both managers and to selected representatives of the “vertical external networks” of the company (local authorities, a consumer association and a trade association). The primary data were supplemented by archived materials for data triangulation.

The research highlights the importance of identity and relationship with local stakeholders and communities when facing the earthquakes. Believing themselves to be socially responsible, ethical and capable, employees were highly motivated and collaborative. Resuming normal services was AIMAG’s priority. The behavior of AIMAG, its employees and its local stakeholders were guided by a shared community identity. After the earthquakes, this shared community identity was strengthened, thus improving the community’s resilience.

The paper highlights the role of identity in linking both inside and outside an organization, in contributing greatly to joint decision making and action, and, finally, in increasing the awareness of the company leaders and staff regarding the importance of their actions for the whole local community. This research advocates the role of identity in disaster risk reduction.

The relation between sport and sustainability is a topic that has recently raised a lot of interest among both academics and practitioners. However, in the academic literature, very few studies have investigated which solutions are implemented in football, despite its popularity, to reduce the environmental impact of its events. This study contributes to filling this gap by exploring how stadium managers tackle environmental issues for football events.

The authors have analyzed 94 sustainability reports of major sports events and conducted 6 case studies in 6 different major league stadiums around Europe in the framework of research supported by UEFA and three EU National Football Associations.

The heterogeneity of practices and goals at both the governance and operational level denote that stadium managers pursue environmental objectives mainly voluntarily and under local pressures. Efforts toward environmental improvement appear to depend on an economic and efficiency rationale, which translates into the adoption of technologies and operational practices characterized by short-term economic returns (i.e. energy and resources savings). As a result, operational practices outnumber governance-level practices.

The analysis clearly highlights that the fragmentation of operational practices derives from a lack of maturity of governance structures, especially when multiple actors have different – yet mutually influencing – responsibilities on the infrastructures or the planning and staging of football events.

Building on the notion of the holistic approach to environmental sustainability in sport management the research differentiated environmental practices according to the operational and governance dimensions. While operational practices tackle environmental aspects directly associated with football events (e.g. waste, energy consumption, water usage, etc.), governance-level practices relate to the systemic allocation of environmental roles and responsibilities within the management structure underlying football events.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how sustainable entrepreneurs (SEs) address the regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive institutional pillars when operating in conservative contexts. It aims to study in depth the use of sustainable innovation (SI) as a means of increasing legitimacy within the institutions, thus triggering an institutional change.

The paper opted for an exploratory study on the Tuscan geothermal heat pumps market, which presents a promising but still largely unexploited sustainability potential despite its low institutional support, using the open-ended approach of grounded theory. The data include interviews and archive data, such as newspapers, magazines.

The paper provides empirical insights on how sustainable institutional entrepreneurs (SIEs) have developed innovative business models based on direct relationship with the final customers and strategic partnerships as a means of increasing legitimacy within the normative and cultural-cognitive institutions, and subsequently in the regulative institutions, through: innovative value propositions aimed at changing industry norms and social beliefs; increasing the private benefit of innovative sustainable business models in order to trigger imitation dynamics; inter-sector strategic partnerships sharing the same sustainability objectives; the inclusion of the relevant actors in relation to the social norms and cultural-cognitive barriers in a value proposition. On the basis of these findings a model has been developed.

The study enriches the sustainable entrepreneurship research stream by providing empirical evidence on how SEs foster changes in the three institutional pillars with SI. It also contributes to the institutional entrepreneurship research by extending the results of previous studies regarding institutional tactics.

The paper could help SIEs prioritizing changes in value propositions and strategic partnerships to create market-based coalitions, as a means of institutional legitimization for SI.

The study illustrates the relationship between the sustainable institutional entrepreneurial practices and each institutional pillar, including the cultural-cognitive institutions, which have been neglected in previous research. This allows formulating five key propositions that guide SEs in succeeding as both sustainable and institutional entrepreneurs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the content, frequency and quality of intellectual capital voluntary disclosure (ICVD) and the changes that took place over two years (2005 and 2006) in a sample of 37 sustainability reports published by Italian listed companies.

The intellectual capital framework consists of three levels: “IC categories”, “IC items” and “IC indicators”, while content analysis was performed using a quality multidimensional scheme composed of three disclosure profiles, namely, time orientation, nature of information and type of information.

The findings evidence a high and increasing incidence over time of ICVD, with strong emphasis on human capital disclosure, which represents the most reported category, followed by relational and organisational capital. ICVD is mainly expressed in non‐financial, quantitative and non‐time‐specific terms with a low level of forward‐looking information.

This study is based on a small sample of sustainability reports; the content analysis process entails some subjective judgments.

From a firm perspective, sustainability reports can be used in synergy with annual reports and other public and private documents to provide IC information. From a user perspective, sustainability reports can be used to acquire IC information over and above information acquired from other documents.

Sustainability reports and ICVD quality have thus far been investigated only to a limited extent. The paper also discusses the potential of ICVD in sustainability reports from a user perspective.

The digital transformation is dramatically changing the business-to-business (B2B) sales environment, challenging long-standing views regarding the critical competencies required of salespeople. This paper aims to explore the personal traits associated with sales performance in a digital selling environment.

Using template analysis, the researchers captured and coded over 21 h of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with senior sales leaders from various industry sectors, exploring their perceptions of the personal traits now required of B2B salespeople in the digital landscape.

The research identifies three high-level trait types critical to sales success within a digital selling environment: “analytical curiosity” – the natural motivation and ability to gather and synthesize sales-related knowledge, “empathetic citizenship” – the ability to establish initial rapport while building long-term trust and “disciplined drive” – the exertion of selling effort in a highly focused and methodical manner across all stages of the sales process.

The present data came from interviews with sales leaders in Canada. A more global sample may lead to additional insights. Moreover, the sample was drawn from long-cycle B2B sales environments; conclusions may differ for short-cycle or business-to-consumer markets.

This paper presents a framework for hiring and developing salespeople in the digital sales environment, identifying personal trait types that sales leaders should look for when hiring: analytical curiosity, empathetic citizenship and disciplined drive. The paper identifies how these trait types influence sales success, suggesting that sales leaders could coach and educate their teams to make the best use of them.

This paper presents a conceptual framework for hiring in the digital sales environment and introduces the trait of analytical curiosity not previously discussed in the literature.

European performing arts companies, intrinsically fragile, have been severely hit by the economic crisis. Within the global search for new economic models in the sector, a growing number of initiatives have been taken in the form of establishing collective and participatory firms. Their forms vary from simple interorganization resource pooling to proper registration of a cooperative. Our research aims to understand the motivations of project initiators for collectively organizing their business. We test the influence of instrumental versus ideologically driven motives as well as the influence of the socio-economic context on the decisions of performing arts entrepreneurs (artists, producers, or directors) to establish participatory firms. We relate these results to the success or failure of collective firms and to the degree of cooperation. We use a qualitative method based on semi-directive interviews conducted in 21 performing arts collective organizations, over two years and in six European countries. Interviews were integrally transcripted and processed using qualitative data analysis software (QSR NVivo 10) in order to realize axial coding. We found that while the context, instrumental logic, and ideologically driven motives influence the decision to establish collective organizations in performing arts, it is the ideological dimensions that are predominant and constitute a necessary condition for the success of a participatory organization. We observe that the more collective organizations are ideologically motivated, the more they are likely to be successful in the long run (success being assimilated to economic sustainability). We also find that the greater the importance of the ideological motive, the more integrated the cooperation. Eventually, these results provide significant information regarding the form of collective firms in performing arts. We observe the emergence of new forms of cooperatives that comprise cooperatives of production and projects or companies, establishing participatory and democratic governance, and pooling resources and financial risk while preserving the artistic freedom of artists. We view these emerging types of cooperatives as a promising avenue both for the sector itself and for the development of the cooperative movement beyond its traditional sectors. The findings suggest that public incentives, as they are currently set up, may miss their objective of promoting shared practices in the arts or even be counterproductive; thus, it would be to their advantage to be modified in light of the above results. We also defend the interest of trans-border cooperative organizations inspired by the cooperatives of production and their governance models and organizations. Despite a number of studies highlighting cooperation in the cultural sector, research on cooperatives in this sector remains embryonic. This paper contributes to this literature. We argue that applied research in this sector can be of contributive value to the literature on cooperatives and participatory firms.

Social Accountability 8000 (SA 8000) is one of the first auditable social standards aimed at promoting labor rights for workers around the world. This certification is currently considered the most important in the field of corporate social responsibility.

According to SA 8000, the organization that seeks certification – besides respecting national, international, and industry regulations – shall consider the requirements defined in the standard.

After describing the SA 8000 requirements, the chapters describe strengths and weaknesses of this standard. The chapter closes with a literature review of the studies that jointly analyzes SA 8000 with ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 showing the opportunities of an integrated quality management system.