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This paper aims to investigate the strategic governance of the digital transformation of the accounting environment in cultural organizations, with a specific focus on practices of social responsibility and stakeholder engagement in virtual museums.

By adopting a multiple case study approach, this study investigated five Italian virtual museums and their digitalization processes. Data were collected and triangulated from multiple sources, including documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with 16 key informants.

Considering the digitalization of the accounting environment as a paradigmatic change, the authors identify three key transitions for its strategic governance: from the static, technical and physical to the relational, emotional and digital; from bureaucratic managerialism to value cocreation; and from traditional CSR to integrated external engagement. Moreover, the authors found that social responsibility and stakeholder engagement practices are used in a limited way, and that the use of social media appears to be increasingly important and to be carried out through an emergent rather than a deliberate strategy.

The paper draws from a limited sample of case studies in one country and is based on exploratory research. This paper calls for more comparative studies using a longitudinal approach to investigate the impacts of digitalization on the accounting environment of cultural organizations.

This study is one of the few studies concentrating on the effects of digitalization on the accounting environment of cultural organizations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a crisis that has hit the European economy and the currently existing systems. To cope with the crisis, Europe has started an investment aiming the energy transition and crisis. Portugal, Spain and Greece have received the approval of their National Recovery Plans from the European Commission, with a definition of spending up to 2026 through the European Union (EU) Next Generation Found. The study investigates whether the Green Deal policies are relaunched by the plans financed and whether the pandemic has changed and conditioned the priorities of the energy transaction. The study uses the lens of corporate social responsability (CSR) and relapse measurable across the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The Green Deal policies supported by new European investments in the three countries were analyzed through a content analysis (CA) technique to investigate the associated practical and theoretical elements.

The energy theme has a relevance compared to other issues in the investment plans envisaged in Greece, Portugal and Spain. The analysis highlights energy efficiency, sustainable energy and reduction of consumption among the main themes. Energetically, sustainable building plays a central role. The study highlights the relationship between Green Deal policies, CSR, SDGs and management tools adopted.

The study strengthens the relationship between the Green Deal, CSR and SDGs by identifying policies that have already been implemented and theoretical and practical gaps on which politicians and scholars will have to investigate and support in the process of development and continuity of the identified pillars.

This article has two main aims. First, to observe the different causes of public (dis)value. Second, to explore, through a case study, an example of public value regeneration through the social reuse of assets seized from criminal organizations.

This is a theoretical article with a case study, utilizing semi-structured interviews.

The study analyzes the factors resulting from the regeneration of new public value within an initially compromised context. This is achieved by ‘freeing’ and converting properties seized from the Mafia in public goods available to the community (Plus-Value). The article finds that the different causes of public (dis)value are Mafia infiltration in public goods, corruption, tax evasion, abstaining from voting, (ab)use of power and (ab)use of law.

The study may help both scholars and practitioners to identify strategies to offset (dis)value factors, something that would be easy to imagine as having managerial implications.

The value regenerated with respect to properties confiscated from the Mafia and then converted to social activities for the community highlights how it is possible to transform public (dis)value to public value.

The article explores a little examined area of public value, that is the destruction of value or (dis)value.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can help in defining preventive strategies in taking decisions in complex situations. This paper aims to research how workers might deal with intervening AI tools, with the goal of improving their daily working decisions and movements. We contribute to deepening how workers might deal with intervening AI tools aiming at improving their daily working decisions and movements. We investigate these aspects within a field, which is growing in importance due to environmental sustainability issues, i.e. waste management (WM).

This manuscript intends to (1) investigate if AI allows better performance in WM by reducing social security costs and by guaranteeing a better continuity of service and (2) examine which structural change is required to operationalize this predictive risk model in the real working context. To achieve these goals, this study developed a qualitative inquiry based on face-to-face interviews with highly qualified experts.

There is a positive impact of AI schemes in helping to detect critical operating issues. Specifically, AI potentially represents a tool for an alignment of operational behaviours to business strategic goals. Properly elaborated information, obtained through wearable digital infrastructures, allows to take decisions to streamline the work organization, reducing potential loss due to waste of time and/or physical resources.

Being a qualitative study, and the limited extension of data, it is not possible to guarantee its replication and generalizability. Nevertheless, the prestige of the interviewees makes this research an interesting pilot, on such an emerging theme as AI, thus eliciting stimulating insights from a deepening of information coming from respondents’ knowledge, skills and experience for implementing valuable AI schemes able to an align operational behaviours to business strategic goals.

The most critical issue is represented by the “quality” of the feedback provided to employees within the business environment, specifically when there is a transfer of knowledge within the organization.

The study focuses on a less investigated context, the role of AI in internal decision-making, particularly, for what regards the interaction between managers and workers as well as the one among workers. Algorithmically managed workers can be seen as the players of summarized results of complex algorithmic analyses offered through simpleminded interfaces, which they can easily use to take good decisions.

Accountability and transparency represent two concepts that are gaining more and more importance in the higher education systems. Universities are increasingly called upon to provide both financial and non-financial information. This circumstance has attracted the interest of academics interested in examining the transparency levels of universities. However, limited attention has been paid to corporate governance disclosure. This study aims to bridge this important gap by analyzing the amount of corporate governance information disseminated by Italian universities through their website and the factors capable of influencing this level of disclosure.

This study uses manual content analysis on a sample of 92 Italian universities to measure the extent of corporate governance information dissemination. In addition, it uses various regression models to test the research hypotheses.

Empirical results demonstrate, first, an adequate commitment to online corporate governance disclosure and, second, a greater propensity toward the dissemination of corporate governance information by the largest and public universities.

The findings greatly enrich the academic literature and have important practical implications for universities, policymakers, and lawmakers.

The paper focuses on how knowledge visualization supports the development of a particular multiobjective decision-making problem as a portfolio optimization problem in the context of interorganizational collaboration between universities and a large automotive company. This paper fits with the emergent knowledge visualization literature because it helps to explain decision-making related to the development of a multiobjective optimization model in Lean Product Development settings. We investigate how using ad hoc visual tools supports knowledge translation and knowledge sharing, enhancing managerial judgment and decision-making.

The empirical case in this study concerns the setting up of a multiobjective decision-making model as a portfolio optimization problem to analyze and select alternatives for upgrading the lean production process quality at an FCA plant.

The study shows how knowledge visualization and the associated tools work to enable knowledge translation and knowledge sharing, supporting decision-making. The empirical findings show why and how knowledge visualization can be used to foster knowledge translation and sharing among individuals and from individuals to groups. Knowledge visualization is understood as both a collective and interactional process and a systematic approach where different players translate their expertise, share a framework and develop common ground to support decision-making.

From a theoretical perspective, the paper expands the understanding of knowledge visualization as a system of practices that support the development of a multiobjective decision-making method. From an empirical point of view, our results may be useful to other firms in the automotive industry and for academics wishing to develop applied research on portfolio optimization.

In this paper, we depart from extant conceptualisations of knowledge translation mechanisms to examine projects as a way to achieve effective knowledge transfer. Our empirical analysis focused on a university–industry research project in the automotive industry.

The empirical analysis was based on a qualitative investigation. We analysed material collected within a research project involving a partnership between two universities and Fiat-Chrysler Automotive (FCA), a multi-brand auto manufacturer with a product range covering several different market segments. We used three data collection techniques: internal document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews.

Our findings show that, in a U-I research project, goals represent a key dimension to support knowledge translation. Defining the goal implies an ongoing negotiation process, where researchers and company employees work together, in order to converge towards a shared meaning of the goal. In this sense, goal orientation and goal-based interaction have significant implications for knowledge translation processes.

Studies to date have focussed on the concept of knowledge translation as a way to contextualise the transfer from the source of knowledge to the receiver and to interpret the knowledge to be exchanged. This study expands the understanding of knowledge translation mechanisms in university–industry research settings. It investigates the concept of projects as powerful knowledge translation mechanism in a dynamic and longitudinal perspective. Our contribution provides insight, reflecting on how the use of projects may represent a way to facilitate knowledge transfer and build up new ideas and solutions.

This paper aims to study knowledge integration mechanisms in an interdisciplinary research project. It develops the theoretical literature on the concept of knowledge integration, particularly the adoption of different organizational mechanisms. The research helps to explain how to adopt different integration mechanisms in the various steps of a typical university industry research project.

This research relies on a case study. The authors used three data collection techniques: internal document analysis, observation/site visits and semi-structured interviews. Documentary analysis was used to understand the organizational structure and to identify knowledge integration issues. Observation and site visits at university research laboratories were used to increase understanding on particular issues. Staff interviewed included managers and academic researchers.

Findings are primarily related to a better understanding of choices of knowledge integration mechanisms in a university industry research project. A crucial aspect was the level of mutual understanding of specialist knowledge. When project members were derived from different sides of the university-industry border, there was a major need for recurring to more structured knowledge integration mechanisms, even if the scientific background of participants was homogeneous.

Previous studies on the relationships between university and industry deals with the issue of governing the knowledge exchange on the border at a macro level; conversely, an interesting research gap is represented by knowledge integration mechanisms to be deployed on the university-industry border, especially at micro level. In this paper, the authors do not cope explicitly with university-industry coordination mechanisms but use the University-Industry border to study knowledge integration in interdisciplinary setting. The study is exploratory, which may be useful in generating future research hypotheses, connecting the features of research projects with the need to achieve knowledge integration.

This paper aims to investigate the link between accounting, religion and art to understand the managerial approach of the Confraternity of Corpus Domini of Urbino and the phenomenon of art commissioning between 1465 and 1513.

This study is based on the interpretive historical method used to understand, through accounting, the managerial role of confraternities within the economic activity of art commissioning. To this purpose, the present analysis is based on a primary source, represented by the book of revenues and expenses, named B1 (1465–1513).

The analysis has provided evidence of the role of Urbino’s Confraternity in supporting art commissioning and its capacity to invest significant resources in favor of the social, religious and institutional environment of the time. Results show the connection between Urbino’s Confraternity and painters based on their commissioning agreements, the relation between painters and the Ducal Court and, finally, the role of the Duke of Urbino in funding the Confraternity’s initiatives for painters. Thus, this study highlights the major role played by Urbino’s Confraternity in art commissioning, an instrumental part of the Confraternity’s mission.

This paper presents a unique case study that brings out the managerial approach in art commissioning through accounting documents which make activities and links visible.