Search results

Focusing on the adoption of Total Quality Management (TQM) principles in universities, this research paper explores how the “soft” dimensions of TQM trigger its “hard” dimensions considering them at the individual (micro-) and the university (meso-), and eventually at cluster (system-), levels.

Adopting a qualitative approach, this study presents an in-depth, longitudinal case study of University of Siena, one of the oldest Italian universities, that has been at the core of the research-based cluster on vaccines, today converged in the Tuscan Life Science Cluster. In particular, data were collected between 2018 and February 2022 and consists of archival data (press articles, websites, books), nine interviews to key informants, multiyear experience of the Life Sciences sector by two of the authors and other material put at disposal by university offices, and emails. Data analysis relied on a timeline, a coding procedure that considered three levels of analysis (individual, organization and cluster). Finally, the authors looked at the “how” and “why” the emerged themes have contributed to academic excellence.

This paper unveils how “soft” and “hard” sides of TQM are blended across multiple levels for reaching academic excellence. The grounded model emerged enlightens the importance of an individual “soft” dimension, academic passion (composed by its three subdimensions of individual research, teaching and entrepreneurial passion) and also sheds light on the organizational “soft” and “hard” sides that the university has been able to design for encouraging research, teaching and third mission quality. Academic excellence has been possible thanks to the capitalization of the individual and organizational “soft” sides into real outcomes as represented by the organizational and individual “hard” sides.

The paper suggests the importance of TQM principles applied at universities' level, providing an in-depth description of “soft” and “hard” sides dimensions of TQM and their impact on all the three pillars of academic excellence. The study findings suggest implications for managers and professionals in the higher education domain as well as for policymakers emphasizing the importance of supporting the individual and organizational soft sides of TQM. The authors provide practical implications recommending universities to consider not only the organizational dimensions but also individual ones when pursuing higher education excellence. In particular, individual passion plays a crucial role and universities need to identify ways of nurturing it. The authors also recommend policymakers to think about new ways to sustain universities as crucial actors in boosting a cluster development, as well as to consider higher education institutions, especially in more rural areas, as a privileged player not only capable of nurturing academic excellence but also able of creating an internationally renowned cluster.

TQM principles have been intensively analysed from an industrial perspective focusing on manufacturing and services, while this paper focuses on TQM in universities, presenting a grounded model that blends the individual and organizational “soft” and “hard” sides.

This study analyses the literature on artificial intelligence (AI) and its implications for the agri-food sector. This research aims to identify the current research streams, main methodologies used, findings and results delivered, gaps and future research directions.

This study relies on 69 published contributions in the field of AI in the agri-food sector. It begins with a bibliographic coupling to map and identify the current research streams and proceeds with a systematic literature review to examine the main topics and examine the main contributions.

Six clusters were identified: (1) AI adoption and benefits, (2) AI for efficiency and productivity, (3) AI for logistics and supply chain management, (4) AI for supporting decision making process for firms and consumers, (5) AI for risk mitigation and (6) AI marketing aspects. Then, the authors propose an interpretive framework composed of three main dimensions: (1) the two sides of AI: the “hard” side concerns the technology development and application while the “soft” side regards stakeholders' acceptance of the latter; (2) level of analysis: firm and inter-firm; (3) the impact of AI on value chain activities in the agri-food sector.

This study provides interpretive insights into the extant literature on AI in the agri-food sector, paving the way for future research and inspiring practitioners of different AI approaches in a traditionally low-tech sector.

Focusing on the Agri-Food and Beverage sector, the paper investigates the direct effect of worldwide mandatory non-financial disclosure on several financial dimensions as well as its moderating effects on the relationship between sustainability and financial performance.

The authors performed fixed-effect regressions on a sample of 180 global listed companies, considering a period of eight years. The authors also tested the moderating effects of non-financial disclosure regulation on the relationship between sustainability and financial performance.

The authors found a positive direct impact of mandatory non-financial disclosure on Operating Return on Asset, Return on Equity and Return on Sales. The analysis also highlighted the negative moderating effects of non-financial reporting regulation on the relationship between sustainability issues and financial performance. As for the Cost of Debt, the authors found mixed results.

This study considers a short-term perspective focusing on a limited sample composed of companies playing a key role in the global agri-food system.

The paper identifies which financial performance dimensions are positively or negatively affected by mandatory non-financial disclosure. Accordingly, managers can rearrange corporate activities to deal with further reporting normative requirements concurrently preserving financial performances and fostering corporate sustainability.

This study recommends fostering mandatory non-financial disclosure to increase corporate transparency fostering the sustainability transition of the Agri-Food and Beverage industry.

The paper highlights global mandatory non-financial disclosure effects on financial performance considering a sector that is cross-cutting impactful on plural sustainability issues.

This paper aims to investigate the relationships between business slack resources and environmental performance and considers the possible effects that management commitment, corporate strategy to sustainability and innovation intensity can have on such interactions.

We performed partial least squares path modeling regressions on a sample of 697 non-financial listed companies worldwide, considering a time frame of 13 years.

Operational and financial slack resources are both detrimental to environmental performance in the short term. Nevertheless, financial slack resources are useful to boost innovation that enhances environmental performance. Environmental performance improvement seems to be more a matter of managerial commitment and strategic approach towards sustainability, rather than the availability of slack resources.

Due to literature shortcomings on which effects slack resources can have on environmental performance, this paper sheds some light on the topic while also highlighting the role of management commitment, corporate sustainability strategy and innovation.

Managers should use financial slack resources in innovation activities to improve environmental performance. In doing so, they need to create retaining earnings to offset any costs using financial slack resources.

Adopting a holistic and net of endogeneity analytical perspective, this paper highlights some virtuous and critical interactions between the managerial commitment and strategic approach to sustainability, the availability of slack resources, innovation intensity and environmental performance to understand which aspects may foster or hinder the ecological transition of businesses.

This study aims to explore the engagement between accounting and music in the social and relational construction of accountability. The authors conceive this construction as a dynamic and recursive interplay between the giving of different accounts and the responses that these accounts provoke. The authors investigate the emotional dimension of this interplay, as it is also triggered by music, feeding back into how accountability is constructed and evolves over time.

This study relies upon a historical analysis of archival and secondary sources about the main music concert organized in 1913 by the founder of “Accademia Chigiana”, one of the leading music academies in Italy. The concert celebrated the first centenary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi, a worldwide famous Italian music composer, and icon of Italian national sentiment.

This study shows that music and accounting were profoundly intertwined in the social and relational construction of accountability for the 1913 concert. Accountability evolved through different accounts, also linked to music, and the complex emotional reactions these accounts provoked in the audiences, citizens, media and institutions, leading to always further responses and accounts in the ongoing construction of accountability.

This study extends prior literature on the chameleonic nature of accountability, as well as on its relational and emotional dimensions. The study shows that accountability is relationally constructed and evolves over time through the giving of accounts and the emotional reaction they provoke from others, feeding into further responses and accounts of the accountable subject. The authors show how the chameleonic nature of accountability permeates not only the accounts and the relations of accountability but also the subjects giving and demanding the accounts: these subjects change as chameleons through their interactions and emotions, feeding into the dynamic construction of accountability. The authors also show how arts, like music, can participate in the chameleonic nature of accountability and of its subjects, precisely by engaging with their emotional reactions and responses.

This paper aims to investigate possible interdependencies affecting short-term profitability between internal and process business aspects which can play a critical role in sustainability operationalisation.

The authors adopted the panel data approach to perform a partial least square structural modelling equation analysis on a sample of 391 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) non-financial-listed companies, considering a timeframe of five years.

Corporate sustainability is a result of interplays between managerial commitment, strategy, slack resources’ exploitation, innovation, the sustainable management of internal production and procurement processes that managers can catalyse to foster short-term firms’ profitability.

The study is focused on internal process business determinants of sustainability, and the analysis is limited to a short-term timeframe and on non-financial OECD-listed companies.

Managers searching for trade-offs between financial and non-financial performances should enhance their commitment towards sustainability by defining appropriate strategies suitable to employ mainly slack resources derived from core business activities enabling innovation processes, which, in turn, are able to foster sustainability of internal production and procurement processes.

The execution of sustainability is a complex process that needs to be investigated using a holistic approach net of endogeneity biases to better appreciate those interrelationships within multiple drivers determining the firm sustainable growth.

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are increasingly recognized among technologies potentially driving the digital innovation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Nevertheless, the implications of AR/VR adoption in innovation processes have yet to receive much attention to date, with the need to explore the issues facilitating a systematic implementation in the SME context. This study aims to investigate the possible innovation paths of SMEs as a result of AR/VR adoption.

The authors performed a multiple case study research involving six Italian SMEs in manufacturing and service sectors that are investing in AR and/or VR solutions and are digitally innovating thanks to these technologies.

AR/VR solutions lead to different types of innovation in SMEs, i.e. for innovating product or service offerings, business processes or even the business model, when AR/VR extends to the company business logic. SMEs demonstrate being able to leverage internal sources with the essential commitment of top management and low resistance of employees in all kinds of AR/VR-enabled innovations. Conversely, they involve different external innovation sources according to the type of innovation pursued. Organizational issues emerged as more relevant than technological issues.

Results contribute to the literature on digital transformation of SMEs and provide managerial guidance on innovation sources and organizational issues to be considered to effectively deploy AR/VR solutions into specific innovation paths.

This study explores the impact of emergent technologies in the innovation process along with multiple perspectives, degree of complexity, and strategic importance in the SME context.

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.

This paper aims to inform the discussion on why and how non-profit organizations can experience a hybridization process to address the criticism that would assume hybridity as an intrinsic characteristic of all organizations. Specifically, by referring to the academies of intellectuals as the non-profit setting in which investigating the emergence of hybridity takes place, this paper aims at exploring, first, to what extent this emergence could be induced by institutional conditions, and, second, which structural innovations could sustain the academies’ “motion” towards hybridity.

This paper relies on the institutional logics perspective and adopts the case study method applied to a historical context. The case under analysis is the Academy of “the Immobili”, which, in spite of its name, experienced a hybridization process in 1720 because of the decision to involve an impresario in the management of its theatre.

The findings highlight the significant role played by institutional conditions in inducing the emergence of hybridity, even in presence of internal resistance to any “motion” from the non-profit setting. Moreover, the analysis of the innovations associated with this emergence detects the intertwined action of the different decision makers involved in the hybridization process, in spite of their formal separation. These findings strengthen the conceptualization of hybridity within non-profit organizations.

Besides referring to a historical period that is still little explored in terms of hybridity within organizations, the paper focuses on an original context, i.e. academies, representing an ancient typology of cultural organizations. Therefore, the paper also provides the first insights into the hybridization process of cultural organizations from a historical perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a generalization of the time-varying correlation elliptical copula models and to analyse its impact on the tail risk of a portfolio of foreign currencies during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The authors consider a multivariate time series model where marginal dynamics are driven by an autoregressive moving average (ARMA)–Glosten-Jagannathan-Runkle–generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (GARCH) model, and the dependence structure among the residuals is given by an elliptical copula function. The correlation coefficient follows an autoregressive equation where the autoregressive coefficient is a function of the past values of the correlation. The model is applied to a portfolio of a couple of exchange rates, specifically US dollar–Japanese Yen and US dollar–Euro and compared with two alternative specifications of the correlation coefficient: constant and with autoregressive dynamics.

The use of the new model results in a more conservative evaluation of the tail risk of the portfolio measured by the value-at-risk and the expected shortfall suggesting a more prudential capital allocation policy.

The main contribution of the paper consists in the introduction of a time-varying correlation model where the past values of the correlation coefficient impact on the autoregressive structure.