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Corruption is a major social problem, and scholars have devoted considerable attention to this phenomenon. However, less attention has been paid to how corruption spreads among organizations and what factors can make its spread more likely. This study aims to fill the gap by modelling corruption as an interorganizational contagion.

The authors used social contagion theory to model corruption as an interorganizational contagion, influenced by the susceptibility of organizations and the strength of contagion sources. The study analysed 736 medium and large Italian municipalities over a five-year period, with 3,146 observations (excluding missing data). The authors conducted a longitudinal analysis using panel logistic regression techniques and performed robustness and endogeneity checks through a dynamic panel data model.

The authors found that municipalities with a higher percentage of corrupt neighbouring municipalities were more likely to experience corruption. The probability of experiencing corruption was also significantly higher for municipalities with weaker organizational resistance to corruption contagion.

Previous studies have not clearly explained the organizational mechanisms behind the spread of corruption at the interorganizational level. The study suggests that corruption contagion at the municipal level occurs via reduced uncertainty in decision-makers and is influenced by the prevalence of corruption locally. The spread can be driven by conscious or unconscious mechanisms. This study challenges the idea that corruption contagion is immediate and inevitable. Organizational resistance to corruption can affect the risk of contagion, highlighting the importance of anti-corruption controls and ethical systems in preventing it.

Acknowledging fiscal crises as critical junctures for policy makers, this paper investigates how the recent fiscal crisis has affected the paradigmatic approach to the design of an ongoing governmental accounting (GA) reform.

This paper analyses the Italian GA harmonization as a peculiar instance of an ongoing GA reform at the crisis outbreak. A longitudinal narrative analysis of official documents is complemented with semi-structured interviews with key policy makers and participant observations.

The fiscal crisis is found to play an indirect role in the Italian GA reform, which, promoting centralization of competencies in the fields of GA, determines the intensification of the approach adopted before the crisis outbreak.

This paper extends the knowledge on the nature of post-crisis reforms by highlighting how fiscal crises can work as catalysts for paradigmatic approaches to ongoing GA reforms. This paper analyses the designing of a GA reform, whereas the long-term adaptations and outcomes of the reform are not taken into consideration.

The tight link between GA and financial management issues featuring the current paradigmatic approaches to reforms suggests the need to design GA reforms consistently with fiscal and financial management policies.

Whereas the extant literature on the nature of post-crisis reforms analyses the latter as responses to the former, this paper enlarges the knowledge on the topic by focusing on a peculiar instance of a GA reform that was ongoing at the crisis outbreak.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons why public sector managers approach either consultants or academics for their help in solving problems related to public sector accounting and management reforms.

A field study based on reactions to real‐life constructs and answers to questions about the experiences of public sector managers in Italian, Dutch and Swedish central government agencies.

Public sector managers approach consultants, due to their experience‐based knowledge, for solving well‐defined practical and technical problems. In the case of tacit knowledge, a strong interaction between the public sector manager and the consultant, denoted as socialization, is the typical way of knowledge transfer. In accordance with expectations, public sector managers approach academics for advice regarding value‐laden problems in their organization. However, academics also give advice about practical and technical issues, usually being the primary domain of consultants, but often when impartial advice is required. Although the authors expected academics to transfer knowledge rather detached from their clients (interiorization), this was not corroborated, because often academics work closely with their counterparts in the client organization.

The theoretical framework was helpful in explaining the role of consultants, but it required refinement in explaining the role of academics as external experts.

The paper contributes to a better articulated set of preferences of public sector managers in asking advice from either a consultant or an academic.

The paper offers a simultaneous and systematic empirical examination of the roles that consultants and academics play in public sector management and accounting reforms.

The paper proposes a conceptual integration between two variables, both considered as capable of affecting public firm performance: technology and intellectual capital.

The analysis is performed by testing a structural equation model (SEM) which allows to measure simultaneously a plurality of variables, highlighting all the possible connections. Data is collected by administering more than 500 paper questionnaires to accountants working within Local Health Firms of Naples and Salerno.

The study seems to align with the considerations according to which intellectual capital expressed through its three dimensions – relational capital, human capital and organizational capital – exert a positive influence on perceived performance of healthcare firms, ultimately impacting on the Employees' Satisfaction.

The study acts as a useful guide from a managerial point of view, because it may support firm decision-making. In fact, public sector managers can leverage an instrument capable of activating functional mechanisms to improve firm performance.

The work allows overcoming the literature gap due to the fact that, although there is a wide recognition of the potential of technology and intellectual capital, there are no studies that synergistically integrate both the aspects in the attempt to understand their value in terms of influence on the performance of public firms, on the one hand, and on employees' satisfaction, on the other. In this vein, the work, in an attempt to provide further scientific support to the link between technology and intellectual capital, is a tool capable of highlighting how this link positively impacts on company performance and employee satisfaction.