Search results

This research aims to analyse the perceptions of practitioners in three regions regarding the challenges faced by their firms during the pandemic, considered a black-swan event. It examines the strategies implemented to mitigate and recover from risks, evaluates the effectiveness of these strategies and assesses the difficulties encountered in their implementation.

In the summer of 2022, an online survey was conducted among supply chain (SC) practitioners in France, Poland and the St. Louis, Missouri region of the USA. The survey aimed to understand the impact of COVID-19 on their firms and the SC strategies employed to sustain operations. These regions were selected due to their varying levels of SC development, including infrastructure, economic resources and expertise. Moreover, they exhibited different responses in safeguarding the well-being of their citizens during the pandemic.

The study reveals consistent perceptions among practitioners from the three regions regarding the impact of COVID-19 on SCs. Their actions to enhance SC resilience primarily relied on strengthening collaborative efforts within their firms and SCs, thus validating the tenets of the relational view.

COVID-19 is (hopefully) our black-swan pandemic occurrence during our lifetime. Nevertheless, the lessons learned from it can inform future SC risk management practices, particularly in dealing with rare crises. During times of crisis, leveraging existing SC structures may prove more effective and efficient than developing new ones. These findings underscore the significance of relationships in ensuring SC resilience.

Aligning industrial operations with sustainable development has become a pressing need for organizations, as they recognize the mounting environmental challenges, social inequalities and resources scarcity. The transformations brought by the industry 4.0 have revolutionized supply chain operations to achieve sustainability and circularity. The aim of this chapter is to explore and map the supply chain 4.0 opportunities for sustainability. An extensive literature review of theoretical and empirical studies linking the supply chain 4.0 technologies and sustainability is conducted. Descriptive and content analysis are employed to scrutinize and categorize the knowledge extracted from the literature. Then, a conceptual framework is developed to highlight the role that each technology plays in promoting sustainability and circularity in the context of supply chain. This study provides new perspectives for theoretical researches and guide decision-makers to implement sustainability-based technologies in the supply chain 4.0. Future research can investigate the opportunities of supply chain 5.0 for social sustainability and circular business model.

Unplanned urban mobility causes negative effects on the population and the environment. This study aims to understand how higher education institutions (HEIs) are managing the transportation issues related to their activities and how they are implementing actions towards more sustainable practices in this regard.

A systematic review and bibliometric analysis were performed using the Proknow-C method, and the bibliographic portfolio was evaluated to answer guiding questions about distribution of articles over the years and around the world, the most relevant and frequent topics, the travel behavior of university life and the main methodologies used. The meta-analysis was modeled using a programming language in R to execute Bibliometrix package.

Sharing systems, active transport, public transport, urban planning, car parking management and travel behavior are the most relevant topics related to sustainable mobility in HEIs. Different strategies to reduce car use are adopted, and the geographic location of the university and the availability of housing and shopping services in close proximity directly influence travel patterns. As a result, seven guidelines and strategic actions associated were proposed to promote the engagement of institutions in the development of sustainable transport and guide future studies about new solutions to promote sustainable university commutes.

This paper presents a new perspective by performing a critical literature review based on the experiences reported by several isolated studies on the subject. Initiatives of sustainable transport guidelines can be used by academics, urban planners, higher education administrators and other stakeholders to make universities more environmentally friendly, inclusive and accessible.

The main objective of this study is to analyze consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for country-of-origin (COO) labels of two processed food products, disentangling the value of information (VOI) that consumers place on COO information from the value they place on specific countries of origin.

A convenience sample of 96 university students completed a face-to-face experiment that included a multiple price list and a discrete choice experiment. Data are analyzed employing interval censored regressions, and random parameter logit models.

Our results indicate that, on average, consumers place a higher value on origin information when a country name is explicitly mentioned. Furthermore, COO information is, on average, more relevant to consumers for products with low involvement than for products with high involvement. Finally, the effect of ethnocentrism is heterogeneous across product categories.

Mandatory COO labeling may or may not reinforce domestic bias, depending on the rationale behind consumer support. If consumers are driven by blind ethnocentrism, it may lead to market inefficiencies. However, if they use COO as a cue to align their stated preferences with their choices, it will not. For this alignment to occur, consumers must be fully informed about product attributes, which requires new and smart methods of communicating product attributes.

The present study contributes to the literature on COO food labels, being the first in Italy to disentangle the VOI consumers place on origin information itself from the value they place on specific countries of origin. In addition, it is the first study that applies this methodology across different product categories, each of which has a different level of cultural sensitivity to consumers.

When CEOs are publicly weighing in on sociopolitical debates, this is known as CEO activism. The steadily growing number of such statements made in recent years has been subject to a flourishing academic debate. This field offers first profound findings from observational studies. However, the discussion of CEO activism lacks a thorough theoretical grounding, such as a shared concept accounting for the heterogeneity of sociopolitical incidents. Thus, the aim of this paper is to provide an archetypal framework for CEO activism.

The authors used a multiple case study approach on 145 activism cases stated by CEOs and found seven distinct statement archetypes.

The study identifies four main structural design elements accounting for the heterogeneity of activism, i.e. the addressed meta-category of the statement, the targeted outcome, the used tonality and the orientation of the CEOs’ positions. Further, the authors found seven distinguishable archetypes of CEO activism statements: “Climate Alerts”, “Economy Visions”, “Political Comments”, “Self-reflections and Social Concerns”, “Tech Designs”, “Unclouded Evaluations” and “Descriptive Explanations”.

This typology classifies the heterogeneity of CEO activism. It will enable the analysis of interrelationships, mechanisms and motivations on a differentiated level and raise the comprehensibility of research-results.

The framework supports executives in understanding the heterogeneity of CEO activism and to analyse personality-fits.

To the authors’ knowledge, this marks the first conceptualisation of activism developed cross-thematically. The work supports further theory-building on CEO activism.

This paper draws on the thinking of the nineteenth-century Italian philosopher and poet Giacomo Leopardi and scholars who studied his thoughts on the relationship between nature and humans. Leopardi's philosophy of nature recognizes the alienness of nature in relation to humankind, thus challenging human governance of the planet. The poet’s thoughts align with the dilemma identified in the Anthropocene literature: who speaks for nature? This dilemma has accounting implications in terms of the frameworks and disclosures to be adopted. Therefore, Leopardi’s thoughts can become the basis for a more articulated and complex understanding of some key concepts and issues at the roots of SEA.

The paper utilizes content analysis to examine four essays by Giacomo Leopardi, which serve as the source of our data.

Leopardi recognizes the alienness of nature with respect to humanity and the voicelessness of nature as a generative of conflict. He also warned of the consequences of human governance that does not take nature’s needs into account. These findings open a discussion on the complex accounting implications of the distance between humanity and nature. They can inspire SEA scholars to change the status quo by developing new accounting frameworks from the perspective of nature and adopting forms of governance of nature that recognize the need to protect it as a voiceless stakeholder.

Through Leopardi’s humanistic and poetic philosophy, the perspective of nature can be infused into SEA studies, thereby promoting the need for a multidisciplinary and complex approach to the discipline.