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This paper aims to investigate the strategic governance of the digital transformation of the accounting environment in cultural organizations, with a specific focus on practices of social responsibility and stakeholder engagement in virtual museums.

By adopting a multiple case study approach, this study investigated five Italian virtual museums and their digitalization processes. Data were collected and triangulated from multiple sources, including documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with 16 key informants.

Considering the digitalization of the accounting environment as a paradigmatic change, the authors identify three key transitions for its strategic governance: from the static, technical and physical to the relational, emotional and digital; from bureaucratic managerialism to value cocreation; and from traditional CSR to integrated external engagement. Moreover, the authors found that social responsibility and stakeholder engagement practices are used in a limited way, and that the use of social media appears to be increasingly important and to be carried out through an emergent rather than a deliberate strategy.

The paper draws from a limited sample of case studies in one country and is based on exploratory research. This paper calls for more comparative studies using a longitudinal approach to investigate the impacts of digitalization on the accounting environment of cultural organizations.

This study is one of the few studies concentrating on the effects of digitalization on the accounting environment of cultural organizations.

This paper aims to analyse stakeholder sentiment about the corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions implemented by Italian companies between February 20, 2020 and April 20, 2020, which was the first peak in the outbreak of the COVID-19 health emergency in Italy.

Using sentiment analysis, the impact of COVID-19 on CSR actions is analysed through reactions to the news published on Twitter by a sample of Italian news agencies.

The analysis indicates that the actions most appreciated are those that are more radical, e.g. where the company has converted part of its production to make goods that are useful in dealing with the COVID-19 emergency. The study identifies a new category of actions definable as “crisis-shaped CSR.”

This is one of the first studies concerning the effects of the pandemic on both CSR actions and organizational legitimacy.

This work explains which strategic approach to CSR is the most effective in supporting corporate reputation in times of crisis, this study identified which of the CSR initiatives adopted by companies in Italy were more effective in stimulating positive interactions and sentiment among the general public.

The paper discusses the evolution of leadership practices performed by local political leaders in the last decade (2009–2019, a period which we might call post-global financial crisis and pre-COVID-19). It offers some new theoretical concepts to make sense of emerging contemporary public leadership practices, namely: leaders-hip hop; charismatic followership; and digital fabrication of charisma (digital charisma).

The paper is based on a single case study, and it relies on qualitative data coming from multiple sources and collected at different points of time, specifically interviews, participant and non-participant observations from an ethnography conducted in 2009; interviews conducted between 2019 and 2020, and an analysis of the posts made within one Facebook group between February and May 2016.

The paper focuses on three stories of local political leadership at three different points in time which describe three leadership practices: political managerialism; charismatic followership; and hands-on relational leadership. It highlights the importance of hands-on relational leadership through popular acts of leadership which are performed face to face and/or on social media and the shift in the dominant technologies of local political leadership from the logic of managerialism toward the logic of social media.

The paper is focused on a limited temporal (2009–2019) and sociocultural context (North Italy). Findings are presented as three stories, although other ways of showing qualitative data could have been used.

Practical implications deal with the attempt to enable a reflexive view of local governance and public leadership attentive to soft and sociocultural variables. It is important to consider these implications for the purposes of training and learning.

The paper introduces new concepts to understand contemporary public leadership practices; it combines insights from a decentered theory of governance and collective theories of leadership; and it makes use of storytelling as a method for analyzing and reporting the findings.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of mandatory inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) in small Italian municipalities. Data from 280 small Italian municipalities on the effects of IMC in terms of higher efficiency, better effectiveness of local public services, and greater institutional legitimacy of the small municipalities participating in IMC have been investigated against four variables: size, geographical area, type of inter-municipal integration, and IMC membership (the presence in the IMC of a bigger municipality, the so-called big brother).

Data were gathered from a mail survey that was sent to a random sample of 1,360 chief financial officers acting in municipalities of under 5,000 inhabitants, stratified by size (0-1,000 and 1,001-5,000) and geographic area (North, Center, and South) criteria. To analyze the dependency relationships between the three potential effects of participating in IMC and possible explanatory variables, the authors used a logistic regression model as the benefits were binarily categorized (presence or absence of benefits).

The findings show that in more than two-thirds of the municipalities participating in IMC, there were benefits in terms of costs reduction and better public services, whereas greater institutional legitimacy was detected in about half of the cases. The statistical analysis with logistic regression highlighted that IMC type is particularly critical for explaining successful IMC. In particular, the positive effects of IMC were mainly detected in those small municipalities that promoted a service delivery organization rather than participating in service delivery agreements or opting for mixed arrangements of joint public services delivery.

The paper focuses on small municipalities where studies are usually scant. The analysis highlighted that the organizational setting is particularly critical for explaining a successful IMC.

The paper aims to offer a viewpoint on how governmental budgeting needs to be reconsidered after the COVID-19 outbreak.

Building on extant research, and drawing on the Italian context, the paper provides reflections on four interrelated aspects: (1) how budgeting and reporting processes and formats are being modified; (2) how budgeting may enhance governments' financial resilience; (3) how citizens are involved in the budgeting cycles and (4) how emergency responses may produce opportunities for corruption.

To tackle COVID-19 related challenges, budgeting, rebudgeting, reporting processes and formats need to be reconsidered and supported by the development of new competencies. Governments will need to put stronger emphasis on the anticipatory and coping roles of budgeting to reduce public organizations' exposure to shocks and support governmental resilience. The involvement of citizens has proven critical to face the pandemic and will become increasingly relevant due to the financial impacts of COVID-19 on future public service provision. Greater attention to the risks of increased corruption is also needed.

Drawing lessons from one of the countries most hit by COVID-19, the paper offers a viewpoint on a timely topic of international relevance by looking in an integrated way at interrelated topics such as budgeting, rebudgeting, reporting, financial resilience, coproduction and corruption.

This paper aims to understand stakeholders' sentiments with respect to company policies in the water utilities (WU) sector and to explore if and how these sentiments could be a source for organisational learning.

This study investigates the use of social media in WUs’ and stakeholders’ reactions as a source of data for organisational learning. This paper relies on a mixed-methods approach based on sentiment analysis of Facebook (FB) pages and semi-structured interviews with sustainability managers from a sample of Italian WUs.

Findings show that WUs increasingly use FB mainly to promote and disclose environmental issues and as a source of information for organisational learning. A longitudinal analysis of environmental disclosure via FB reveals a growing trend of both companies’ posts and stakeholder interactions and significant differences among organisations in their ways of using information and knowledge obtained from social media.

Theoretically, this paper builds an original link between disclosure via social media and organisational learning processes. Empirically, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to identify the quantity and quality of environmental disclosure via FB and the related stakeholders’ reactions.

The purpose of this paper is to review previous research on public appointments to systematize existing knowledge, identify gaps and discuss implications for future research in this field.

This paper is based on a systematic literature review, carried out using the Scopus database. We selected academic articles published in journals ranked in the 2018 CABS Academic Journal Guide plus public administration articles in journals classified by Google as falling within the areas of public policy and administration. The papers were analysed according to four categories: geographical area, theoretical framework, research method and organizational setting.

Results show the lack of research regarding areas like Latin America or East Asia; from a theoretical viewpoint, given the lack of explicit theoretical approaches, future research should have more formal and clear theoretical frameworks. Moreover, given the dominance of case study and review/reflection studies, alternative research methods, such as surveys or mixed methods are suggested for future works.

We identify a new research agenda to revive the focus on public appointments as a tool for intra- and inter-organizational governance in the public sector. Specifically, we argue that how the process of public appointments is managed has huge democratic implications, and public managers have a key role to play in that respect by designing effective governance systems and organizational procedures. The selection of papers has been limited to articles published in peer- review journals ranked in the 2018 CABS Guide; no distinctions have been made regarding journals' positioning in the ranking. Moreover, this work takes a managerial and organizational approach, while the research on public appointments is clearly interdisciplinary, with previous contributions coming mainly from political scientists.

Despite the relevant body of literature on this topic, this study represents the first manuscript to summarize the state of the art of this theme, providing a research agenda on this very relevant but quite neglected issue in public governance.

This article sets out a new research agenda for decentered public leadership. Nested in the concept of decentered theory, it examines the messy and contested nature of public leadership practices in different contexts. Drawing on recent empirical studies that have adopted a decentered approach to examining public leadership, it sets out a future research agenda that places individuals, history and context at the heart of explanations for public leadership in action.

The purpose of this paper is to foreground place as a critical and central concern for public leadership research, development and practice.

This invited essay draws on the author’s own research and development work engaging in collaborative place-based interventions with academics, policy makers and practitioners.

Place is one of six heuristic lenses in a Leadership Hexad that has been developed to interrogate and better understand leadership in a multi-dimensional manner. Place can provide an important theoretical and practical fulcrum for bridging both collaborative governance and collective leadership and public and political leadership as well as facilitating cross-sectoral leadership.

This essay argues that more time and effort should be invested into researching and developing place leadership to complement the already extensive efforts to promote collaborative governance and place-based policy initiatives. Place leadership development should be genuinely cross-sectoral in its ambition and should focus on developing emerging and established leaders from the public, private, not-for-profit and indigenous sectors to tackle place-based problems and opportunities.

This essay draws on experience undertaking academic research and conducting leadership development that draws from and feeds into policy and practice. It utilises research from geography, leadership studies, public management, public policy and political science to gain a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between place and public leadership and how this can be harnessed to improve economic and social impact.