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This study aims to test the role that organizational sociopsychological variables may play in influencing job stress and work engagement in an organizational identity change scenario.

On a sample of 118 employees of an Italian company in the personnel training services sector, multivariate statistical analysis tests a pattern where organizational variables such as work support (by supervisors and coworkers, independent variables) – moderated by corporate identification (moderating variable) – and mediated by organizational trust (mediating variable) – boosts employee work engagement and lowers psychosocial risks (dependent variables).

The mediating effect of “organizational trust” is significant in the relationships of “supervisor social support” and “coworker social support” with the “absence of psychosocial risks.” Moreover, an increase in supervisor social support can lead to a statistically significant increase in work engagement. This occurs only for employees with low or medium identification and not in highly identified individuals.

The findings from the analysis on moderation are of primary importance because they show us a new perspective that can play the role of a guiding and practical principle on how to act on an organization’s human resources, specifically targeting those with lower or medium corporate identification.

In 2020, UNICEF Canada released Report Card 16 revealing that Canada ranks in the bottom tier compared to other wealthy countries in terms of child and youth well-being. The Report Card highlights that promoting participation is required to improve this ranking. Recognising the connection between child well-being and participation, this chapter explores youth-serving institutions in Canada to understand how participation materialises in these settings. Through interviews with provincial and territorial Canadian child and youth advocates, this chapter first explores advocate offices that serve young people facing challenges. These are the only group of child and youth advocates in Canada that have formal legal mandates to implement children's rights at the provincial and territorial level. Comparatively, through interviews with justice-involved youth we analyse the youth justice system. By adjusting the setup of the court space and attempting to minimise power imbalances, we discuss how Canada's first and only Aboriginal Youth Court (AYC), promotes participation and engagement. Through a comparative case analysis, this chapter explores where barriers exist in terms of conceptualising and implementing participation rights, and where opportunities and best practices may be leveraged across child and youth serving institutions in Canada.

Building on perspectives from the study of multilevel governance, migrants' inclusion and emergency management, this article asks how differences across national regulations for foreign residents, work eligibility and access to national emergency supports intersected with local approaches in responding to migrants.

This article examines national policy adjustments and parallel subnational governance early in the pandemic for three groups of foreign residents: international students, technical interns and co-ethnics with long-term visas, primarily Brazilians and Peruvians. It uses Japanese-language documents to trace national policy responses. To grasp subnational governance, the article analyzes coverage in six Japanese regional newspapers from northern, central and western Japan, for the period of April 1 to October 1, 2020.

National policies obstructed or enabled migrants' treatment as members of the local community but did not dictate this membership, which varied according to migrant group. Migrants' relationship to the community affected available supports.

The article brings together perspectives on multilevel governance, emergency management and migrants' inclusion. It exposes how different migrant groups' ties to the local community affected access to supports.

Within the interface between power and charity, the purpose of this paper is to enhance an understanding of the role of charities in the administration of poor in local government and to explore how accounting operates in such a context. In this investigation, the paper considers accounting, referring to both financial and non-financial information, inserted in a complex of technologies accomplishing the “government of poverty”.

The paper is based on a historical study referring to the case of MIA, an Italian charity, investigated during the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, adopting Foucault's “governmentality” framework in a diachronic perspective. This approach, coordinating views coming from Anglo-Foucauldian scholars with alternative Foucault effects expressed in Dean's works, represents a novelty of this investigation.

The paper shows the interface of power (municipality) and charity (MIA) in the “government of poverty”, in a context of ancien regime, pointing out how this interplay was a key element within the “discourse of poor”. The pivotal function of MIA as an “agency of police” and the constitutive role of accounting as a technology of “government of poverty”, representing a social practice able to allow the preservation of the social equilibrium, emerge.

The research is based on a single case study and it shows the need for both comparative and interdisciplinary analysis in order to increase an understanding of the interface of power and charity in ancien regime contexts, as well as in contemporary situations of crisis or emergencies.

For the first time in the accounting history literature, the work presents an extension of “governmentality” analysis into the domain of the “government of poor” through a series of Municipality Orders and their operationalisation by a charity, which adopted accounting to realise a control on people and resources contributing to reach local government equilibrium aims. The work also offers a reference within the contemporary accounting literature in relation to the debate about the role of charities or similar non-profit organizations in the context of the current financial crisis affecting the world, or in situations of emergencies.

Chatbots represent one of the most relevant trends within the communication settings and the management of relationships with consumers. New generations, such as millennials are favourable to interact with chatbots instead of human service assistants as they recognise the benefit linked to the technological advancements. Based on these premises, the paper intends to investigate what are the main factors affecting the quality of millennials–chatbots relationships and the new generations’ attitude and intention of using them within a specific industry such as the fashion one.

In order to achieve the aim, an online survey based on Likert-scale items from previous research has been implemented to test developed hypotheses. Construct reliability and discriminant validity of the hypothetical research model has been tested. Additionally, a partial least square analysis technique has been used with a bootstrapping technique for evaluating the significance level of path analysis.

A total of 191 responses have been collected. Most of millennials have familiarity with the concept of chatbot (52.4%). Perceived ease of use (PEOU) and perceived usefulness (PU) of chatbots positively influence the attitude towards using them by millennials. Attitude towards using chatbots positively influence the behavioural intention to use chatbots. Finally, also perceived trust and perceived risk affect the behavioural intention to use chatbots.

This study enriches the stream of research focused on investigating the acceptance of new technologies and their use for the development of high-quality relationships with customers. This study presents some limitations: the research model has been tested by using a convenient sample; then the study has been tailored for investigating millennials' perceptions in a specific industry; finally, the study focused on relational variables as determinants of using chatbots.

This study provides professionals operating in the fashion industry with practical and managerial insights relating to the perceptions collected among a precise customer cluster represented by millennials.

The paper investigates millennials' perceptions about chatbots within a specific industry related to the fashion system. Additionally, the paper explores at what extent relational variables such as trust and risk could affect the quality of millennials–chatbots relationship.

In this study, we investigated the dilemma of devising an operational family business definition in the SME context. The existing family business literature mostly agrees with the validity of a theoretical model called F-PEC, which identifies family businesses by evaluating three dimensions: power, experience, and culture. Nonetheless, empirical studies on family SMEs still use just one or a few elements with many different thresholds to operationally define family SMEs, highlighting an unsolved definitional divergence among scholars, which limits the possibility of investigating the potential effects of family attributes on firms’ goals, structures, processes, and performance.

Employing ancestry searching, online databases, and issue-by-issue searches from two decades (1990–2019), we analyzed 255 empirical studies that specified a family business’s operational definition (despite posing different research questions) and used a sample of small-sized and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Results showed ownership and governance/management are the most used elements in the operational definitions provided in the literature to date, but that there still is not a universally adopted operational definition of family SMEs in use today.

This paper is one of the first to comprehensively analyze and review the operationalized use of family SME definitions in the literature.