RISULTATI RICERCA

This article highlights features of Canada’s private sponsorship program and ex-plains its consequences and performance. It explores which actors were involved in the private sponsorship, how domestic circumstances stimulated the application of the program, and it discusses its intended and unintended consequences. The author examines the profile of the Syrian refugees and discusses how personal characteristics may affect integration trajectories. Private sponsorship is consid-ered more effective than government-assisted sponsorship as it ensures a smooth-er, faster, and long-term integration of refugees. However, the author argues that personal profiles could play a critical role in integration process, and therefore, measuring the program’s performance by only comparing it with a government-assisted program could be challenging.

The change in markets’ dynamics occurred during the last 50 years led to a signifi-cant transformation within the cost structure of companies, resulting in a gradual loss of cost control systems’ effectiveness. This caused a progressive shift from cost control to cost management (CM), involving the use of innovative tools and approaches that provide more suitable cost allocation methods, cost computation logics, and allow to detect value-creating costs in order to support the decision-making process. The present work aims at exploring the current state of CM application in the Ital-ian context, identifying the main mechanisms implemented and the key percep-tions of organizations concerning the upsides, downsides and innovativeness of CM logics. The findings show that the level of CM diffusion has increased in the most recent years compared to the evidence of prior research, but most companies still don’t use CM systems. Processes and activities-based approaches are increasingly ap-plied; however, besides traceable costing logics, the traditional full costing methods are still highly used. Companies benefited from the implementation of CM sys-tems, since they supply data that allow to understand which are the main causes of complexity, what costs really create value and facilitate participation in the de-cision-making process. However, the high quantity of resources required for the system’s development and the resilience of people to the process of change still represent barriers that hinder the diffusion of CM. The main implication of the study is raising awareness about the importance of using suitable CM systems to evaluate costs as well as signaling the potential chal-lenges of their application. The twofold role of human resources in the process of CM innovation is explored.

This study investigates the relevance of cash flow information in predicting corpo-rate bankruptcy in Italian private companies. The results indicate that while the cash flow-based model exhibits a high predictive capacity, it is less effective than the accrual-based model. In addition, cash flow-based ratios do not improve the predictive capacity of the accrual-based model. From a theoretical perspective, this study enriches existing literature on the relevance of cash flow information in predicting corporate bankruptcy by extending the investigation to the Italian con-text, which has not yet been sufficiently studied. From a practical standpoint, it provides Italian companies with new bankruptcy prediction models and offers pre-liminary suggestions regarding the relevance that should be attributed to cash flow information within the organizational, administrative, and accounting structures that they must establish to promptly detect crises and undertake appropriate initia-tives in a timely manner to comply with the requirements of the new legislation on business crises.

This study provides a first conceptualization of the Metaverse from a strategic management perspective and advances performance measurement approaches for the Metaverse value creation. Specifically, the study aims to provide an in-depth analysis of Metaverse and the related implications on the value creation processes of the companies. In order to achieve this goal, we performed a detailed literature review on digital transformation, Metaverse and performance measure-ment topics. Thus, we have developed a theoretical framework useful to facilitate the implementation of successful strategies in the Metaverse and subsequent mon-itoring and evaluation of achieved results. The paper provides relevant contributions in theory and practice. From a theoreti-cal perspective, the results contribute to the strategic management and perfor-mance management literature streams, extending them to the dimension of the “digital world”. From a practical perspective, the results identify new performance measurement and new indicators useful for companies and practitioners to under-stand the link between Metaverse and value creation paths. Future studies should integrate the theoretical analysis with explorative empirical investigations.

This paper investigated if high digitalisation exposure allows companies to reduce their environmental impacts. Further, the study also deepened the critical role of available slack resources by analysing their possible moderating effects on the relationship between the firm’s higher digitalisation exposure and environmental performance. Adopting the unbalanced panel data approach, the authors performed 5 years fixed-effects regression analysis on a sample of 5,481 non-financial listed companies’ data derived from the Refinitiv ESG universe, as well as considering the annual constituents lists of the STOXX® Global Digitalisation index. Findings showed digitalisation positively affects specific environmental performance. Moreover, results highlighted that available slack resources negatively moderate the relationship between the firms’ higher digitalisation exposure and the sustainable management of resources in internal business and procurement processes. Accordingly, slack resources could stress the profit maximisation logic penalising corporate sustainability.