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This study aims to identify different consumer segments to address the strategies that can be adopted by companies and policymakers to increase the consumption of safer foods and reduce the negative externalities caused by pesticides. More than 3,000 consumers were involved in the survey, of which more than 1,000 completed in all parts.

The complexity of the topic required a multidimensional approach. Therefore, the authors modelled the decision support system by proposing a decision rule-based approach to analyse consumers' food purchasing choices. More precisely, the authors referred to the dominance-based rough set approach (DRSA).

Based on the DRSA results, three consumer segments were identified: green consumers, integrated pest management (IPM)-informed and active consumers, and potential low-pesticide consumers for which different policy implications have been highlighted.

Despite the high number of survey respondents, further research should seek to obtain data from a more balanced sample. Furthermore, different methods of analysis could be applied and the results compared.

Identification and promotion of managerial and public policies to increase the consumption of low pesticide food.

The main social implications can be summarised in the greater knowledge and awareness of the environmental aspects related to food, recognition of the intrinsic quality and/or functionality of food.

The authors contribute to the literature in two ways. First, the authors refer to the DRSA, an innovative approach in the context of consumer analysis. Second, based on the decision rules, the authors identify three consumer segments to which specific tools can be addressed.

Drawing insights from institutional theory, this paper aims to examine whether and to what extent banks have reconfigured their management control systems (MCSs) in response to growing institutional pressures towards sustainability, understood as environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.

The authors conducted an exploratory study at the three largest Italian banking groups to shed light on changes made in MCSs to account for ESG issues. The analysis is based on 12 semi-structured interviews with managers from the sustainability and controls areas, as well as from other relevant operational areas particularly concerned with the integration process of ESG issues. Additionally, secondary data sources were used. The Malmi and Brown (2008) MCS framework, consisting of a package of five types of formal and informal control mechanisms, was used to structure and analyse the empirical data.

The examined banks widely implemented numerous changes to their MCSs as a response to the heightened sustainability pressures from regulatory bodies and stakeholders. In particular, with the exception of action planning, the results show an extensive integration of ESG issues into the five control mechanisms of Malmi and Brown’s framework, namely, long-term planning, cybernetic, reward/compensation, administrative and cultural controls.

By identifying the approaches banks followed in reconfiguring traditional MCSs, this research sheds light on how adequate MCSs can promote banks’ “sustainable behaviours”. The results can, thus, contribute to defining best practices on how MCSs can be redesigned to support the integration of ESG issues into the banks’ way of doing business.

Overall, the findings support the theoretical assertion that institutional pressures influence the design of banks’ MCSs, and that both formal and informal controls are necessary to ensure a real engagement towards sustainability. More specifically, this study reveals that MCSs, by encompassing both formal and informal controls, are central to enabling banks to appropriately understand, plan and control the transition towards business models fully oriented to the integration of ESG issues. Thereby, this allows banks to effectively respond to the increased stakeholder demands around ESG concerns.

This paper aims to focus on the relation between digital transformation and banks’ reputation, as examined through the information disclosed by the five largest Italian banking groups’ efforts to extend and enhance their digital resources. Considering digitalization as a key strategy for managing reputation, which, in turn, can leverage financial and value performance management, the paper investigates whether and how digital activities might affect banks’ reputation. Therefore, this paper proposes the relationship between digitalization and reputation as a lever for performance management and for increasing efficiency.

The authors use content analysis to generate a digital disclosure index, categorizing activities human, structural and relational. For banks’ reputations, the proxies are a measure of corporate reputation and a reputational risk index. Methodologically the study used multiple case studies, considered as particularly suitable to gain an in-depth understanding of the topic in the case of the five banks. A collection of secondary data and semi-structured interviews are included.

Overall, the digitalization-reputation link shows that banks’ reputation is variously affected, not only by exposure to risk (including reputational risk) but also by strategic issues such as digitalization and the effectiveness of the corresponding communication. Consequently, banks should view digitalization as a key driver to be considered not in a stand-alone perspective, but in a combined approach.

Continued research should include the Covid-19 implications. Additionally, it would be important to compare a larger number of banks, with different characteristics, also including variables indicating the corporate governance mechanisms.

The analysis contributes to fostering scholars’ and practitioners’ management of the digital transformation challenge that is a current key-factor, capable of increasing banks’ value. It considers not only the drivers directly affecting monetary value but also the institutions’ social and relational value, as well as their reputation.

This paper extends prior research on the digitalization-reputation relation by investigating digital transformation through disclosure of activities in this area within the Italian banking sector. It allows to leverage the key-factors that can contribute to increasing banks’ value, considering not only the drivers directly affecting monetary value but also the institutions’ social and relational value, as well as their reputation.

The authors' paper aims to examine the organizational issues that come from the recent establishment of the compliance function in Italian banks.

The authors' paper takes as a starting point the Bank of Italy's regulations and the existing literature on compliance, in order to create a theoretical model of an efficient internal control system.

For each organizational structure of compliance, the authors' paper describes strengths and weakness. It also outlines the scopes of compliance and internal audit in order to avoid overlaps. Having regard to the similarities between operational risk and compliance risk, the study identifies cooperation areas so as to achieve synergies, in terms of costs, and a better operational efficiency.

The authors' paper focuses mainly on the relationship between compliance, on one side, and internal audit and risk management on the other. It focuses also on the positioning of compliance within the internal control system, as it has been regulated by the Italian disposals. Further research could concern the relationship with other functions and the regulations of other countries.

The authors' paper identifies cooperation forms between the internal control system functions. This is the way to suggest organizational solutions able to improve banking efficiency.

This subject has not been analyzed in depth to date. This article attempts to obtain an identification of the roles and responsibilities of the main functions involved in the internal controls system, in order to define organizational models characterized by complementarity of interventions and thus oriented towards the objectives of effectiveness and efficiency.

The objective of this paper is to highlight the results of a survey on compliance practices in Italian financial institutions (Italian banks and branches in Italy of foreign banks).

The survey is carried out through a structured questionnaire, arranged into several sections: general information on the definition and framework of compliance risk, organizational structure, reporting, culture, purpose and tasks of the compliance staff, assessment of the compliance staff performance and of the risk. The survey is mainly developed on two issues: organizational and risk assessment implications.

It is found that many survey participants are responding positively to regulation developments, since there is a widespread recognition of compliance as a key element for creating value and improving reputation. It is also found that the Italian banks surveyed, whose compliance activities have been usually performed by internal audit, dedicate less attention to compliance matters in comparison with the branches of foreign banks. The institutions interviewed underline the need to have clear guidelines from supervisory authorities, so that they can achieve an effective and efficient management of compliance risk.

This subject has not been analyzed in depth to date. This paper provides a representative view of the management of compliance risk in Italian banks, thanks to the variety of the issues under observation and the size of the sample.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute for the special number Protest and Activism With(out) Organisation.

Elisée Reclus (1830-1905) wrote in 1851 that “anarchy is the highest expression of order”. This statement, clashing with the bourgeois commonplaces on anarchy as chaos, anticipated the theories, elaborated collectively by the anarchist geographers Reclus, Pëtr Kropotkin (1842-1921), and Léon Metchnikoff (1838-1888), on mutual aid and cooperation as the bases of a society more rationally organised than the State and capitalist one. If a (minority) part of the anarchist movement, in the following decades, assumed this sort of “natural order” to argue that there was no necessity of a political organisation, many militants stated on the contrary the necessity of a formal anarchist (or anarcho-syndicalist) organisation to prepare the revolution and to put in practice the principle of an horizontal and federalist society starting from daily life.

The author’s main argument is that the idea of a public and formalized anarchist organisation has been consistent with the claims of the anarchist geographers for the possibility of an ordered anarchist society and that it was a very geographical conception, as the spatial and territorial activity patterns of anarchist individuals, groups, and federations was a central issue among anarchist organisers.

Drawing on present literature on geography and anarchism and on the multidisciplinary transnational turn of anarchist studies, the author addresses, through primary sources, the contentions and openings of the organisational question in anarchism from Reclus, Kropotkin, and Metchnikoff to the anarchist federations of present day, and its links with the issue of constructive anarchism and with the problem of violence.

The wide development of digital platforms permitted the birth of new financing modalities, namely, crowdfunding, where the crowd of individuals and investors can supply the necessary financial resources for venture creation and growth. While the extant literature has focused on analyzing the dynamics and features of crowdfunding campaigns, few studies have focused on understanding how crowd investors decide which ventures to invest in and which factors influence their decision-making process. Due to this gap, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the factors influencing the choice to invest in an equity crowdfunding campaign, by defining a set of indicators useful to evaluate the risk of the campaign.

An empirical research study of Italian equity crowdfunding campaigns has been conducted to identify quantitative indicators useful for evaluating the risk in a crowdfunding campaign.

Findings demonstrate that the risk indicators proposed to represent important gauges that investors can usefully consider ex ante to assess the degree of riskiness of the investment in the equity crowdfunding campaign.

The limitations of the study regarding the size of the sample that is small due to the necessity to extract enough information in pre and post-equity campaigns. Also, the lack of historical data is another limitation.

The originality of the studies relies on the proposal of quantitative indicators for the evaluation of the risk in equity crowdfunding campaigns for “crowd” investors to reduce information asymmetries.

Mastering aesthetics is a precious source of competitive advantage in creative industries. In fashion, innovation is reflected by how and how much styles change. Elite designers claim to be the only endogenous force shaping fashion innovation season by season. Yet, each season, fashion critics vet the new collections these designers introduce, assessing what is original as opposed to reworked and uninspired, in this way playing a fundamental role as gatekeepers in setting taste within the industry. In this research, we document how stylistic innovation, vis-à-vis the styles premier design houses introduced each season, is impacted, among the others, by the specific exogenous force of critics' assessments of designers' past work. Our data, which include 61 measures detailing the styles introduced by 38 prestigious Italian and French design houses over a nine-year period, suggest designers move further away from styles reviewed less favourably while adhering more closely to styles reviewed more positively. Additionally, the styles a designer introduces are shown to depend on critical assessments of competing designers' styles, revealing how design houses attend to each other's work. This work documents the strong correlation between style dynamics and critics' feedback. It also has important implications for any company trying to find a balance between independence and conformity in setting its own unique positioning into the market.

The purpose of this paper is to find out how effectively implemented are measuring approaches to compliance and whether there is a correlation between the measures implementation, financial specialisation and international activity. The authors evaluate if the regulatory framework implies a measure cost asymmetry, depending both on the proportionality principle and on the existence of different supervisors with an heterogeneous set of enforcement rules.

The analysis is based on a survey involving 84 financial firms (banks, investment companies and insurance companies). Two criteria have been used to interpret the results: the prevailing workability within international and domestic intermediaries; the intermediary typology, creating a distinction between banks other financial intermediaries (FIs) and insurance companies.

Italian financial firms are sensitive to minimise sanctions, but the reputational impact is becoming more important. International firms are more sophisticated than domestic ones for their ability to measure both the probability of non‐compliance events and their severity. Banks show the highest attitude to adopt insurance or financial contracts to minimise the negative impact of non‐compliant behaviours. Small FIs are late in measuring the exposure and losses due to non‐compliance actions.

Four years after the Basel Document on compliance, a large percentage of firms is still managing the process within a function with different purposes; nevertheless, reputational impact has become more important. Small intermediaries show a lower attitude to implement a risk management approach, with a capital management sensitivity. This finding addresses the question about the existence of size effect which could reduce the compliance attitude.