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The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of accounting in the enactment of the Napoleonic imperial project in Tuscany and the Kingdom of Naples in the early nineteenth century.

The study adopts the Foucauldian theoretical framework of governmentality and a comparative approach to highlight similarities and differences between the two regions.

The presence of different cultural understandings and structures of power meant that in Tuscany accounting mirrored and reinforced the existing power structure, whereas in the Kingdom of Naples accounting practices were constitutive of power relations and acted as a compensatory mechanism. In the Kingdom of Naples, where local elites had been traditionally involved in ruling municipalities, control of accounting information and the use of resources “re-adjusted” the balance of power in favour of the French whilst letting local population believe that Napoleon was respectful of local customs.

The ability of accounting technologies to act as compensatory mechanisms within governmentality systems paves the way to further investigations about the relationships between accounting and other governmentality technologies as well as the adjustment mechanisms leading to accounting resilience in different contexts.

By identifying accounting as an adaptive instrument supporting less obvious practices of domination the study helps unmask a hidden mechanism underlying attempts to know, govern and control populations which still characterises modern forms of imperialism.

The comparative perspective leads to a new specification of the multifaceted roles that accounting plays in different cultural and political contexts in the achievement of the same set of imperial goals and enhances understanding of the translation of politics, rhetoric and power into a set of administrative tasks and calculative practices.

Within the theoretical framework of Regional Innovation Systems, the purpose of the paper is to introduce an innovative methodological scheme for strategic planning decisions in public administrations, based on foresight, roadmapping and large participation processes.

Starting from the main literature contribution on Regional Innovation Systems, foresight and decision-making processes, an innovative methodology has been elaborated for strategic planning, based on innovation and large participation processes. A practical application is also described with regards to strategic planning in Tuscany (IT) for Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3).

On a practitioner perspective, the methodology elaborated addresses strategic planning uncertainties, both when problem setting and in solution finding; a detailed application is provided, easily to be adapted to other regions, and main findings are related to regional innovation governance enforcement.

Being the Tuscany S3 in the implementation phase, it is not possible to verify the adequacy of alternatives selected. Only mid-term evaluations will allow a deeper insight on the effectiveness of the methodology adopted.

The methodology represents a useful tool for public administrations in charge of strategic planning and in particular for S3, as an ex ante requirement for European Structural and Investment Funds. The description of the case of Tuscany provides practical hints for the methodology application.

The methodology presents interesting social implications related to the large involvement of stakeholders and quadruple helix within regional strategic planning.

Within the framework of Regional Innovation Systems, strategic planning decisions are addressed with a scheme based on foresight and large participation processes. European Commission requirements are fully taken into consideration by the methodology. The methodology is easy to be adopted and customised to specific needs of other regions.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the enduring, fundamental contributions of accounting practices in the pursuit of decentralization by governments, with an examination of Peter Leopold’s reform of the municipalities in the late eighteenth century in Italy.

An extensive textual analysis of the very comprehensive collection of primary sources of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany during the de’ Medici and Hapsburg-Lorraine’s rule identified the reasons for Peter Leopold’s decision to decentralize his government’s authority and responsibilities. A systemic comparison of the 1765–1766 and 1775–1776 financial reports of the Municipality of Castrocaro and Terra del Sole disclosed the importance of the micro-practices of accounting and reporting for the reform.

In the context of the eighteenth century enlightenment, Peter Leopold legitimized his reform by the introduction of a modern style of government based on the rationalization of the municipal administrative system and decentralization of central authority and responsibility. The reform was made feasible by the substitution of a birth right principle with an economic discourse which linked tax payments to property ownership. This had the unintended consequence of increased taxes, higher municipal expenditures and possible inequalities between municipalities.

The findings of the study are dependent on the resources which have survived and are now preserved in the official archives of Galeata and Florence. This work contributes to the extant literature on administrative reforms in a crucial period for the redefinition of sovereignty by the ruling classes, with the rise of the modern State. It extends historical understanding of the public sector with a focus on local government in the eighteenth century in a non-Anglo-Saxon context.

The examination of the reform of Peter Leopold contributes to an enhanced understanding of present-day decentralization by governments in the context of the new public management (NPM). It provides to NPM advocates a broader temporal and contextual understanding of the impact of current decentralization reforms.

Few accounting studies have considered the micro-aspects of decentralization reforms at the municipal level and tried to identify their impact on the wealth of the population. Moreover, Peter Leopold’s reform is considered one of the most innovative and enlightened of the eighteenth century, while the remainder of Europe was still overwhelmingly committed to the centralization of administrative apparatuses. Finally, this study relates to the multi-disciplinary debate about the recognition, qualification and accountization of the impact of decentralization of responsibility for the delivery of government services.

In some settings, sharecropping is associated with large extended families, high fertility, and early age of marriage. These demographic practices are often considered to be labor strategies for working extensive share‐tenancies. Where agricultural production is primarily labor intensive, landlords can increase their income, within certain limits, by maximizing the number of adult workers. If landlords hold considerable power over their tenants, they may have a large influence on demographic practices. Although this relationship between sharecropping and some of these demographic practices is found throughout much of history in northern Italy, the evidence is less clear for fifteenth‐century Tuscany. Herlihy and Klapisch‐ Zuber's study of the Catasto of 1427, a set of tax declarations, found no relation between household structure and land tenure. Some of their work suggested that fertility was higher among sharecroppers, but this relationship was not specified in detail. They did not consider the relationship between land tenure and age of marriage. This paper reconsiders the relationship between land tenure, household structure, fertility, and age of marriage. To try to correct for problems with Herlihy and Klapisch‐Zuber's land tenure variable, their data were aggregated to the administrative unit of analysis. The aggregated data show that sharecropping in rural Tuscany in 1427 was associated with household extension, high fertility, and early age of marriage, although the magnitude of this relationship was not large. Possible reasons for this weak relationship are discussed.

Rural tourism agents and operators occupy a central role in the use and diffusion of certain social representations of rurality through the mobilization and utilization of specific (yet increasingly global) signs and symbols that, in the urban imaginary, characterize typical and traditional rural settings. Rural tourism promotional materials may contribute to the reconfiguration of the countryside more in accordance with an idealized rural than with the reality of local features. This chapter examines how rural areas and rurality are presented and commodified, using an exploratory content analysis of online and offline materials combined with a survey directed at rural tourism entrepreneurs in five municipalities of two different Italian regions – Campania and Tuscany. Evidence strongly suggests a discrepancy between the real and the portrayed rurality, pointing at the emergence or reinforcement of rural reconfiguration processes, shaped by external and often global images and imaginaries.

Value-based healthcare suggested using patient-reported information to complement the information available in the medical records and administrative healthcare data to provide insights into patients' perceptions of satisfaction, experience and self-reported outcomes. However, little attention has been devoted to questions about factors fostering the use of patient-reported information to create value at the system level.

Action research design is carried out to elicit possible triggers using the case of patient-reported experience and outcome data for breast cancer women along their clinical pathway in the clinical breast network of Tuscany (Italy).

The case shows that communication and engagement of multi-stakeholder representation are needed for making information actionable in a multi-level, multispecialty care pathway organized in a clinical network; moreover, political and managerial support from higher level governance is a stimulus for legitimizing the use for quality improvement. At the organizational level, an external facilitator disclosing and discussing real-world uses of collected data is a trigger to link measures to action. Also, clinical champion(s) and clear goals are key success factors. Nonetheless, resource munificent and dedicated information support tools together with education and learning routines are enabling factors.

Current literature focuses on key factors that impact performance information use often considering unidimensional performance and internal sources of information. The use of patient/user-reported information is not yet well-studied especially in supporting quality improvement in multi-stakeholder governance. The work appears relevant for the implications it carries, especially for policymakers and public sector managers when confronting the gap in patient-reported measures for quality improvement.

This paper explores questions of value and the just price for two groups of farming families in southern Tuscany. As sharecroppers or small-holders they experienced the slow shift from subsistence farming to creating most of their livelihoods by selling the products or their labour. This created a complicated legacy in their views about the relationship between use-value and monetary value since the interaction of different spheres of the economy (what Gudeman calls mutuality and the market) continued to impact significantly on their material well-being and cultural values. This emerges in many contexts, from decisions to continue producing food for home consumption, to abandoning the investments of previous generations. In each case the quantitative questions (what does it cost? what is it worth?) play out alongside qualitative questions about use-values, values which are embedded in issues about the continuation of social and cultural relations. Two main points then emerge from this ethnography. First that in many circumstances local views about the just price cannot be understood by restricting the account to the market sphere. Even the innovative farming households who have moved to the production of high-quality foodstuffs find themselves in a market which eulogizes non-commercial values. Second, views about the just price mostly arise as part of a critique of the powerful forces shaping markets, and often draw on older political traditions concerned with social justice.

The study investigates the use of early forms of environmental accounting in the implementation of environmental strategies in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany between the 16th and 17th centuries.

The study adopts the Foucauldian concept of raison d’État to shed light on the ways in which environmental accounting practices were used by Tuscan Grand Dukes to form a detailed knowledge of the territory to be governed and act accordingly.

Financial and non-financial information relating to environmental issues enabled the Grand Dukes to “visualise” the territory to be managed as an enclosed disciplinary space whereby the conduct of people living therein could be decisively influenced. Accounting practices as a tool for the implementation of environmental strategies did not merely aim to protect the environment but were a means to reinforce the power of the State.

The paper can inform future works that investigate the ways in which environmental policies and accounting are used to pursue far-reaching governmental goals. It encourages scholars to examine further the origins of environmental accounting and its early forms.

The study documents how environmental strategies and the related use of accounting can have a significant influence on how individuals are allowed to conduct themselves. It also shows that environmental accounting practices can be an important tool in a State’s machinery of power.

The study offers a novel perspective on the use of environmental accounting information as a tool in the exercise of State power. It explores explicitly the interrelations between accounting, sustainability and power. It also adds new evidence to historical research that has engaged with early forms of environmental accounting.

Wine packaged tours as a specific aspect of wine tourism have so far been neglected in research, for this reason, the purpose of this study is to study the key elements for the success of the wine tour in Tuscany (Italy), evaluating the points of strength and weakness.

The study combines approaches of text mining, sentiment analysis and natural language processing, drawing on data from the TripAdvisor platform, obtaining through an automatic procedure 9,616 reviews from 600 tours in the years 2010–2020.

The authors identified six elements of successful wine tours expressed by research subjects: tour guide; logistical aspects; the quality of the wine; the quality of the food; complementary tourist and recreational activities; the landscape and historic villages. The key strength associated with success was the integration of the leading wine product with food, landscape and historic villages, while the main criticisms were concerned with the organization and planning of the tour. Furthermore, the tour guide also plays a fundamental role in consumer satisfaction.

The limitations of the method were linked to the origin of the data used. The main one is that TripAdvisor does not allow you to have social and personal information about the tourist who wrote the review; therefore, the methods are substantially complementary to the traditional survey through questionnaires.

The proposed model can be used both by professionals to improve the quality of their products and by policymakers to promote the territorial development of quality wine-growing areas.

The proposed model can be useful for policymakers to promote the territorial development of quality wine-growing areas.

The methodology we tested is easily transferable to many countries and to the authors’ knowledge, for the first time attempts to combine multidimensional scaling, sentiment analysis and natural language processing approaches.