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That on accountability in public organizations is quite an old debate. Its introduction in judicial systems is, however, still viewed with some suspicion, due to its potential trade-off with independence and impartiality. Nevertheless, the need to respond to the demands for greater transparency and accountability has also pushed judicial organizations to establish a dialogue with a wide range of subjects. This study aims to explore the understanding and the current practices of sustainability reporting currently in place in judicial systems.

The study adopts a comparative approach, conducting an online survey in two European countries (Italy and Poland). The survey was built around the research questions and literature and administered between February and March 2020. Specifically, 804 courts were involved, of which 430 are in Italy and 374 in Poland.

Findings show that the current practices are still not widespread and there is still a lack of understanding of what sustainability reporting is, and therefore, of what its potential usefulness within the courts could be. Moreover, many differences between the two countries are pointed out, so it is possible to assume that the different cultural and institutional settings influence sustainability reporting practices. Finally, some interesting implications for policymakers are provided.

Judicial organizations are still poorly investigated in the literature, despite being at the center of a wide public and political debate. Moreover, the international comparative perspective adopted constitutes a further aspect of novelty.

This study aims to explore to what extent stakeholder engagement affects the sustainability reporting (SR) process and if it succeeds in facilitating the encounter between demand and supply of accountability, as well as the main challenges of this practice, by focusing on a crucial and under-investigated public sector area, the judicial system.

The study adopts an action research (AR) approach. Specifically, it focuses on a specific phase (i.e. stakeholder engagement) of the broader project that was carried on from 2019 in an Italian Public Prosecutor’s Office. Data were collected from multiple sources, i.e. written notes and reports gathered during meetings, the survey administered to stakeholders and the published sustainability reports.

Stakeholder engagement may be a valuable and effective tool for improving the level of accountability, as it increases the responsiveness of SR to the informative needs of stakeholders. However, the study also highlights some critical points that must be addressed to exploit this fully. Among these is the need to act upstream of the process by working on an accounting system that goes beyond the economic dynamics and can effectively answer the accountability demand.

The study contributes to theoretical and empirical knowledge by exploring a topic and a public sphere still limited investigated, i.e. the stakeholder engagement in sustainability in the judicial sector. The AR approach also presents some originality points, as it is low widespread in management and accounting literature.

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.

This paper aims to investigate the literacy corpus regarding the potential of big data to improve public decision-making processes and direct these processes toward the creation of public value. This paper presents a map of current knowledge in a sample of selected articles and explores the intersecting points between data from the private sector and the public dimension in relation to benefits for society.

A bibliometric analysis was performed to provide a retrospective review of published content in the past decade in the field of big data for the public interest. This paper describes citation patterns, key topics and publication trends.

The findings indicate a propensity in the current literature to deal with the issue of data value creation in the private dimension (data as input to improve business performance or customer relations). Research on data for the public good has so far been underestimated. Evidence shows that big data value creation is closely associated with a collective process in which multiple levels of interaction and data sharing develop between both private and public actors in data ecosystems that pose new challenges for accountability and legitimation processes.

The bibliometric method focuses on academic papers. This paper does not include conference proceedings, books or book chapters. Consequently, a part of the existing literature was excluded from the investigation and further empirical research is required to validate some of the proposed theoretical assumptions.

Although this paper presents the main contents of previous studies, it highlights the need to systematize data-driven private practices for public purposes. This paper offers insights to better understand these processes from a public management perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a picture of the state of the art in social and environmental accounting research applied to the public sector, highlighting different streams and the main gaps in current literature and providing input for future research.

A bibliometric method was used to analyse the characteristics, citation patterns and content of 38 papers published in international academic journals.

The findings show that the research on social and environmental reporting in the public sector is still at an early stage. Current investigations, although slowly on the increase, are still very few and localised. Most papers are about the reasons why public organisations report, what and how they report, but there are so many aspects that need to be investigated more in-depth or require extra validation in order to open new directions for future research, among which the relationship with and the differences between other non-financial type of reporting, namely ICR and IR.

The study shows some limitations, mainly related to the adoption of the bibliometric method. Indeed, it does not take into account books and chapters but only papers published in international and academic journals. This leads to exclude a significant part of the existing literature and other relevant contributions on the field.

Social and environmental reporting practices are quickly spreading in the public sector. The field is particularly interesting, given the specific connotations of this kind of organisations. However, the literature is clearly not exhaustive and there is not a comprehensive and systematic review of the state of the art on the subject.

The paper aims to reach a better understanding of accountability and social reporting in the Italian justice system, by examining the state of the art of both literature and practice. The case study highlights the critical elements in drawing up the social report of one of the most important Prosecutor Offices in Italy.

The case study analyzes the activities of the actors involved in the report building process by detailing all the steps involved in a research diary, in order to examine such process from the inside, thus reversing its perspective.

The study shows that both the lack of guidelines for judicial administrations and a consolidated trend of transforming administrative facts into documents useful to stakeholders slow down the evolution of practices, which are stuck in a perpetual trial stage.

The limitations are mainly related to the adoption of a single case study, which does not include any comparison with other reporting experiences in the justice sector.

This paper adds evidence to the theoretical debate on social reporting in the justice sector which has so far received the attention of a limited number of scholars. Furthermore, unlike other studies focusing exclusively on the final report while overlooking the process that turns input into output, this research deals with the core of the social reporting process and practices in their development, capturing their most intimate and controversial aspects from the inside.

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.