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The study analyses how management control supports the organisation's response to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

Video interviews with top and middle-level managers who were directly involved in handling the response to the COVID-19 crisis in late winter and spring 2020 form the empirical base. The object-of-control framework and the distinction between organic and mechanistic management controls inform the exploratory case analysis of a large food retail cooperative in Italy.

Both organic and mechanistic management control mechanisms enabled an immediate response and management of the crisis. The use of cultural, action and results controls supported employees' health and safety coordination, a tight monitoring of financial performance and social interventions in support of the local community.

The study provides original exploratory insights on the use and role of management control in the context of an unprecedented emergency and an unplanned setting (i.e. a pandemic crisis), which is an under-investigated topic in the accounting literature. The study shows how management control operated, linking moral and technical aspects as well as facilitating organisational adaptation and pandemic effects mitigation.

The purpose of this paper is to present a review of the literature on two lines of research, corporate governance and innovation, explaining how different internal corporate governance mechanisms may be determinants of business innovation.

It explores the theoretical background and the empirical evidence regarding the influence of both ownership structure and the board of directors on company innovation. Then, conclusions are drawn and possible future research lines are presented.

No consensus was observed regarding the relation between corporate governance and innovation, with both positive and negative arguments being found, and with empirical evidence not always pointing in the same direction. Thus, new studies trying to clarify this relationship are needed.

Over recent years, interest has grown in the influence of governance mechanisms on innovation decisions taken by the management. Innovation efforts and results depend on factors that are influenced by corporate governance, such as ownership structure or the functioning of the board of directors. Thus, the paper shows an updated state of the art in this field proposing future lines for empirical research.