Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyze a case study of an ethical strategic alliance operating in a depressed territory belonging to the South of Italy, with the aim to investigate whether an alliance guided by ethic principles could be effective in recovering a territory while pursuing, at the same time, economic aims for the alliance itself and for the whole territory.

The paper uses a case study approach. The analyses of the case data, including in-depth interviews and documentary evidence, interpreted by the authors and supported by literature review, allow for the main research question to be addressed: “Could ethical networks contribute to recover a territory?”.

The case analysis delivers new insights into the relationships between business and ethics. The findings also provide evidence that it is possible, even in a depressed area, to conjugate ethics and business with reciprocal advantages for the organizations and the territory, in the light of the creed of the Magna Grecia, kalokagathìa (the good and the beautiful).

The findings of the GOEL strategic alliance provide evidence of the role that could be played by networks in supporting social innovations, thus highlighting clear implications for policy makers, as there is still scarce empirical evidence available to inform governments on how they can influence, support and facilitate the formation of networks.

This is one of the few studies adopting an ethical perspective in studying alliances and, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the first study pursuing the aim to investigate how and whether an ethical network can succeed in recovering a depressed territory.

The scope of the study is to analyze an Italian family firm operating in the transformation and marketing of durum wheat to investigate the degree of accountability of the integrated reporting (IR) disclosed by the organization.

The paper uses a case study approach proposing a specific research template to evaluate the implementation of IR depicting the role of three main dimensions: stakeholder involvement, business model and integration.

The paper enriches theoretical conceptualization of the implementation of IR proposing a new conceptual model that adds empirical findings to the literature on IR and at the same time addresses the call for studies of Dumay et al. (2016) to engage more with practice and development on IR.

The use of a specific research framework constitutes both the main strength of the paper and also its main limit, as the dimensions of the framework have been chosen by the authors, and the observations and conclusions are based on the authors’ analysis under an interpretative approach.

The implementation of the same research framework to other organizational IR documents could allow comparisons to be expressed on the quality of the IR disclosed by different organizations and on the same organization in different periods of time.

The main originality of this paper is the creation and the employment of a specific template to analyze the degree of accountability of the case study selected representing a non-listed Italian company operating in the food industry.

The aim of this paper is to provide evidence of the relationship between the governance structure of universities and the universities' knowledge transfer (KT) performance outcomes measured in terms of university spin-off firms university spin-offs (USOs).

The universities' board of directors has been analyzed under three profiles: the incidence of internal directors belonging to the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) faculties, the incidence of women directors and the incidence of external directors.

The findings provide evidence of a significant and positive association, for southern Italian state universities, of the presence of university STEM directors and the establishment of university spin-offs (USOs).

The article is original as, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study, except for the paper by Meoli et al. (2019), examined the governance of universities in relation to the establishment of academic spin-offs.

This paper aims to draw on a family business perspective to explore the historic accounting records of an Italian liquorice juice business. The applicability of the three-circle model of family business systems to such an historic context is examined.

Using archival records, the Cassa accounting book of the business is studied. Its transactions are examined to distinguish family and business items over the period from 1875 to 1920.

Through an analysis of the accounting records, the family, ownership and business systems are shown to overlap more than typically expected in a contemporary setting.

Contemporary literature suggests the three-circle model of a family business is relatively static, but it has not been applied to an historic context. This study suggests that the model can be applied in historic studies, but it is not static over time with its elements needing refinement.

The purpose of this article is to analyze intellectual capital (IC) measurement, management, and reporting practices at organizational level, with the aim to address a relevant research question: are IC reports used as accountability or as image-building tools? The article presents a single in-depth case study of an Italian nonprofit organization (NPO) which has been measuring and reporting its IC for several years. The research project was conducted using an interpretative approach, by analyzing organizational IC reports in the light of a framework, derived from corporate social responsibility (CSR) and IC literature, able to provide researchers with useful insights to interpret the role played by IC report in the investigated organization. The lenses provided by the designed framework give researchers the opportunity to offer a skillful interpretation of the information provided by the IC report. From the analysis, it results that the investigated NPO use IC report more as a managerial rather than an accountability tool. Even though the use of a single case study provides in-depth and rich data, it also limits the generalizability of the observations to other companies. Moreover, the results obtained can be influenced by the model built and adopted to address the research question. The findings can support companies to enable IC reporting practices and readers to understand the orientation of the companies towards a reputation or an accountability approach by reading the IC report using the research model. The article fills a gap in the research of voluntary disclosure of NPOs from a different approach (i.e., to analyze IC reports to make evident the approach followed in disclosing IC information). So doing, the article contributes to narrowing the gap between IC theory and practice and offers new insights on the reasons why NPOs disclose IC.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a method to measure intellectual capital (IC) in firms involved in strategic alliances, an area that has received scant attention in the literature, as existing research is focused mainly on organizational level mainly and increasingly on macro-level unit such as regions or nations. There are very few works at the meso-level (i.e. alliances, clusters), and the paper aims to fill this void, by providing researchers and practitioners with a tool capable of combining measurement and management aims, developed at organizational level with the active participation of the researchers.

The method of analysis is based on a model formalized through a fuzzy expert system (FES). The FES are able to merge the capabilities of an expert system to simulate the decision-making process with the vagueness typical of human reasoning, maintaining the ability to still have a numeric value as a response. Its construction requires the participation of experts, whose knowledge of the problem is accumulated in the form of blocks of rules. These features make it possible to formalize the decision-making process related to the IC valuation, handling qualitative and quantitative variables, and exploring the cognitive mechanisms underlying this process.

The outcome of the application is a system designed to measure the intangible performance deriving from participation in a strategic alliance using FES. This study contributes to the broadening of the research community’s understanding regarding the alternative measurement of IC created within strategic alliances.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, IC literature lacks methods expressly designed to measure the incremental value of IC originating from collaboration among firms. From a measurement perspective, the results may be regarded as valuable proof that IC performance within strategic alliances can be measured quantitatively.

On the management side, the possibility of retracing the determinants of different IC intermediate indicators composing the final IC index allows strategic alliances managers to use this information for decision-making purposes.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first study applying FES to measure IC in a firm belonging to a strategic alliance. In the authors’ opinion, fuzzy logic methodology, recently applied in empirical work designed to evaluate IC, represents a reliable methodology because of the “fuzzy” nature of IC.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the integrated report (IR) of a South African public university (UFS), by comparing it with the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) framework, to verify whether UFS IR matches the IIRC framework main aims, which is integrating IC and non-IC information into a single report for stakeholders.

The paper employs the case study approach, which is appropriate when a researcher needs to conduct a holistic and in-depth analysis of a complex phenomenon in its real-life context. As such, this method is particularly suitable for exploring intellectual and social capitals, which is complex and context-dependent by nature.

UFS IR includes the content elements of the IIRC framework as labels, but it does not deepen their meaning. As regards the IIRC guidelines principles, the analysis of the UFS IR shows that it does not seem to follow them. Briefly, the data do not have an outlook orientation, the information is not interconnected, the stakeholder relationships are not highlighted and the organisational ability to create value is not disclosed.

The implications based on the “bad” experience of UFS IR aims to extend the findings of the case study by shedding light on the levers and the barriers that managers have to face when implementing an IRing project in their organisations.

To the best of the knowledge the research is the first investigating the IR theme in the public sector, specifically the higher education sector, dealing with disclosing IC (and non-IC) information within a new reporting mode: the IR.

The article aims to investigate whether the integration between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and intellectual capital (IC) reports could be a plausible issue. To address this aim, the paper posits three main research questions: whether there is a theory able to explain the relationship between IC and CSR (RQ1); whether empirical surveys provide evidence of the links between CSR activities (CSRA) and IC (RQ2); and whether organizations have started to disclose social and intangible issues in a single document within the Italian context (RQ3).

To answer the RQs, we decided to arrange three different literature reviews. In detail, to address RQ1, we searched for theoretical studies focussing on an resource-based view (RBV) perspective of IC or CSR or both. To address RQ2, we searched for empirical studies addressed to test the links between CSRA and the creation and development of organizational IC. To address RQ3, we searched for empirical studies focussing on companies’ experiences of integration of CSR and IC reports or on surveys on this theme in the Italian context.

All the three literature reviews provide evidence that the trend to move towards an integration of social and IC issues in a single report is a plausible issue, from a theoretical, management and disclosure point of view.

The main limit of the research lies in its theoretical nature; however, the study can provide an impulse for further research on the existing trend in the real-life context, and can also provide the theoretical basis on which to build a model that, starting from the relationships among the different kinds of voluntary reports, provides the criteria and methods to integrate the firm’s corporate voluntary reports in a single report. For researchers, this result also has an implication to control for intangibles, for example, assessing the relationship between CSR and corporate performance may explain some of the mixed findings that have occurred in the past.

The article inserts CSR and IC within the RBV theory. Such recognition provides managers the theoretical framework to treat them conjointly, being aware that these two dimensions are intertwined. The article also provides evidence that CSRA impact on IC creation and development. The main implication for company managers is that, when developing a strategy aimed at strengthening IC, they should consider not only all components of intellectual capital but, above all, also include CSR actions and attributes in strategy formulation. Finally, the article provides evidence of a trend towards an integration of CSR and IC reports within the Italian territory. An integrated CSR–IC approach could have relevant implications on the development of the Italian territory characterized by a large number of SMEs and networks of firms that are an integral part of the local community, whose success is often related to their capability to acquire consensus from local stakeholders such as employees, public authorities, financial organizations, banks, suppliers and citizens.

The article provides three main contributions: first, the paper suggests that the integration of the two different perspectives IC and CSR finds its theoretical justification in the RBV theory, which is scarcely applied to explain the link between these two perspectives; second, the article provides evidence of the real effects that investments in CSR have on the maintenance and developing of organizational IC; third, it provides evidence that there is a trend moving towards an integration of social and IC issues in a single report in the Italian context.

Intangibles are the main value drivers of a firm. This consideration implies that it becomes more and more important/urgent to measure and report intellectual capital. The new reporting statement (intellectual capital report) is not yet commonly used by firms, but many, on a voluntary basis, already publish environmental, social and sustainability reports, which contain much information on intangibles. Starting from this point, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that it is possible to integrate the information contained in both reports in a single ad hoc integrated document, having both external and internal communication aims.

The paper addresses three research questions: whether the theoretical premises exist for the integration of the two different frameworks; which frameworks should be chosen as a starting point; and which features should have an integrated framework. Theoretical premises for integration have been found in the research‐based view (RBV) theory. To chose the social report and intellectual capital report (ICR) framework to use as starting points, the authors analyze the frameworks from the intellectual capital (IC) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature; then choose the frameworks (GRI3 and Meritum reports) founded on an evolved notion of, respectively, corporate responsibility and IC, which share the same features – the orientation towards stakeholders, the managerial approach, and the focus on intangible activities that a new integrated framework should respect.

Starting from the selected CSR and ICR frameworks, the authors planned and designed a new, ad hoc model of corporate communication, able to integrate the social and intangible dimensions in a single document, named the Intangible Global Report (IGR). The IGR framework is composed of five dimensions, three derived from the ICR (human capital, structural capital, relational capital) and two from the GRI report (environmental, social). The different aspects of each dimension are surveyed in terms of intangible resources, activities and impacts, measured by financial and non‐financial indicators.

The main originality of the paper consists in providing a general framework for firms to integrate all their intangible information in a single document – the IGR framework – focused on the firm's strategy, which allows the stakeholder to visualize all the firm's intangibles, how a company conducts its activities and the impacts that such activities have on the environmental, social and IC dimensions.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the IC reporting practices of an Italian non‐profit organization (NPO), the ANPAS Piemonte, selected as it is one of the few cases with a longstanding experience in issuing IC reports.

This is an exploratory, qualitative case study focused on a single case study organization. The study took place over eight years. The case description and analysis are based on the IC reports published by the company.

This paper concludes that the ANPAS Piemonte is an organization that has expended considerable focus and effort in developing an IC measurement and reporting model. It has a well‐established IC reporting procedure, but a comprehensive view of IC and of the synergies among IC subcategories is lacking.

The study focuses on a single case study of a NPO providing public interest services in Italy. The main limitation therefore lies in the difficulties in generalizing the ANPAS Piemonte's experience to other NPOs. From the IC management point of view, the distinction between different industries may be as important as the profit orientation, as well as the operations of the third sector may vary across countries.

The contribution of the article lies in its analysis of the IC reports of an organization in the context of the NP sector, as few prior studies have examined the third sector from an ICR perspective.