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The authors propose that the lessons learned by women business owners in Saudi Arabia during the pandemic can provide a model of strategic engagement for gender, work and organizations moving forward, where the acknowledgment of women's dual roles inside and outside of the home can provide paths for creative adaptation by employers in order to recruit and retain more diverse workers in the future.

The authors conducted in-depth interviews with 15 female entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia during the lockdown and soft reopening of the economy in the summer and fall of 2020.

The authors’ findings provide evidence that some female business owners were already equipped for resilience during the lockdown as they relied on business models that allowed for flexible hours, working from home, and online collaboration. Entrepreneurs further refined their business models as the lockdown continued, and these changes intersected with ongoing adaptations by government institutions and clients, which were designed to adjust to the realities of moving commerce online. Business models that relied on traditional masculine approaches of in-person interaction with clients outside the home, or on global supply chains materially affected by lockdown disruptions, were the least able to adapt.

Rather than focusing on the strategies of individual entrepreneurs, the authors show how cultural context shapes both business models and adaptations of entrepreneurs from cultures that emphasize women's roles inside the home.

This study aims to examine the impact of corporate board characteristics and country-level legal system on corruption disclosures mandated by the recent European Union (EU) Directive No. 95/2014.

Based on a sample of 234 European listed companies and covering the 2017–2018 period, this study uses regression analyses to empirically test the association of independent directors, board gender diversity and country’s legal system with disclosure of corruption information.

The presence of independent directors and female directors is positively associated with corporate corruption disclosures. The association between independent directors and corruption disclosures is especially strong when firms are operating in the common law environments.

This study is exclusively focused on larger European listed firms and therefore the findings may not be valid for small and medium firms.

This study provides important information to policymakers to have a better understanding of the factors that influence firms’ disclosure policy on corruption-related activities. It also offers useful information to investors because it shows firms’ propensity to disclose corruption information that would enable them to evaluate their risk and return better.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that evaluates firms’ response to the EU Directive No. 95/2014 in disclosing corruption information after its implementation in 2017. It documents the effective role played by female directors in influencing firms’ information disclosure policies. It also confirms that common law environment is more conducive to disclosures.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

This study aims to deepen knowledge of consumers’ attitudes towards circular economy products by focusing on the enabling factors that influence their behaviours. The success of the closed-loop economy depends not only on innovation but also on the active participation of the consumer. In these models, the authors witness the transition from the centrality of production to the centrality of use. This paper investigates Italian consumers’ tendency to purchase second-hand products in the clothing sector, one of the most polluting industrial sectors, focusing on the enabling factors that influence their behaviours, the reasons for their purchases and the existence of differences between market segments.

To accomplish this aim, a two-step investigation was carried out: a literature review and a quantitative analysis through a snowball survey involving 963 individuals, noting that non-random sampling restricts the validity of the findings within the considered sub-set of the Italian population. Statistical analyses were performed using the R 4.1.2 software environment along with Rstudio IDE v.1.4.1106 and the packages FactoMineR for cluster analysis and vcd for mosaic plots.

Environmental knowledge/awareness and solidarity values have a significant positive effect on consumers’ attitudes and purchasing behaviour towards circular products within the selected sample. A strong statistically significant association (p-value ≪ 0.01) is confirmed between those who consciously purchase sustainable clothing and those who are members/supporters of environmental associations, know sustainable brands and the advantages of the circular economy. Significant relations also emerged in reference to gender and age. In detail, the purchasing of sustainable clothing was found to be positively associated with females and generation Y respondents. Theoretical, institutional and managerial implications stem from the experimental findings of this study.

This study investigates the point of view of demand. From this perspective, this paper proposes a consumer engagement paradigm that highlights the motivations and enabling factors prompting participation in circular economy processes and affecting purchasing practices and attitudes towards second-hand clothing products with regard to Italian consumers.

Media and academic attention on Airbnb focuses on user experiences, implications for traditional accommodation establishments and negative sociocultural impacts. The purpose of this paper is to explore the views of Barcelona residents who have been impacted by the proliferation of Airbnb rentals.

A qualitative approach was adopted, involving semi-structured interviews with residents of Barcelona.

It highlights the problem of unregistered Airbnb rentals throughout the city, carrying implications for the gentrification of neighbourhoods, the displacement of local residents and anti-social guest behaviour. This study points to a consequent rise in anti-tourist feeling. It also reveals that the authentic experience promised by the sharing economy is illusory.

This paper presents a model that highlights a clash between the vaunted benefits of the sharing economy for hosts and tourists and the negative implications for a city’s residents.

This paper proposes an analysis of occupational accidents in Italy at the regional level. For this purpose, our panel is composed of 20 regions over the 2010–2019 time span.

We apply different econometric estimation techniques (pooled OLS model, panel fixed and random effects models and semiparametric fixed model) using INAIL and ISTAT data. Our models investigate workplace accidents at the regional level by accounting for socioeconomic, labour market and productive system variables and controlling for possible underreporting bias.

Overall results reveal the existence of a relevant under-notification phenomenon of accidents at work with respect to moderate accidents, that is higher especially for the southern regions of Italy. However, when considering as outcome variable an alternative set of more severe workplace accidents our model specification remains highly jointly statistically significant. Among our main findings, the analysis shows that worker skills (blue collar) strongly affect the regional pattern of workplace accidents, i.e. an increase of 1% of low paid employees generates about an increase of 1.8 severe workplace accidents per thousand workers. Moreover, we provide evidence that the size of the firm is inversely related to the occupational accident rates. Finally, our results highlight a nonlinear relationship between GDP and occupational accidents for the Italian regional context, confirmed by the high statistical significance of the quadratic term in all the estimated linear models and by the semi-parametric analysis.

A first element of originality of our study consists of investigating the macro determinants of occupation accidents at a regional Italian level. Second, the empirical literature (Boone and Van Ours, 2006) highlights the possible bias of underreporting behaviours on nonfatal accidents in contrast to fatal accidents that are always reported. From this perspective, we have identified a few analyses (namely, Boone et al., 2011) considering different accident sets characterised by different severity degrees. Thus, this paper contributes to the literature considering five alternative subsets of accidents stratified by degree of severity (i.e. moderate, severe, moderate plus severe, severe plus fatal and total accident rates) to test for possible underreporting bias affecting our econometric model.

Technological innovation, digitalisation and the Industry 4.0 revolution radically changed business management and contributed to the achievement of sustainability goals. While many studies analyse technological innovation, and Industry 4.0 in particular, the technical aspects of its contribution/impact on sustainability remains partially analysed, especially in relation to Industry 4.0 enabling technologies. This study investigates the contribution of Industry 4.0 enabling technologies on sustainability in innovative firms.

The sustainability reports of the 50 most innovative companies based on Boston Consulting Group (BCG)'s 2022 raking is analysed through a content analysis. In the reports, enabling technologies are analysed in relation to their contribution to sustainability.

The results shed light on the application of Industry 4.0 enabling technologies in sustainability practices based on the communication in the firms' sustainability reports. The results indicate that enabling technologies support the three pillars of sustainability in different business processes.

The results have theoretical and managerial implications that broaden the study of enabling technologies and sustainability while also suggesting a future research agenda.

This study aims to address the gap in the literature regarding the contribution of Industry 4.0 enabling technologies to sustainability.

In this paper, we present a study about an automated system for monitoring underwater ecosystems. The system here proposed is based on the fusion of different deep learning methods. We study how to create an ensemble based of different Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models, fine-tuned on several datasets with the aim of exploiting their diversity. The aim of our study is to experiment the possibility of fine-tuning CNNs for underwater imagery analysis, the opportunity of using different datasets for pre-training models, the possibility to design an ensemble using the same architecture with small variations in the training procedure.

Our experiments, performed on 5 well-known datasets (3 plankton and 2 coral datasets) show that the combination of such different CNN models in a heterogeneous ensemble grants a substantial performance improvement with respect to other state-of-the-art approaches in all the tested problems. One of the main contributions of this work is a wide experimental evaluation of famous CNN architectures to report the performance of both the single CNN and the ensemble of CNNs in different problems. Moreover, we show how to create an ensemble which improves the performance of the best single model. The MATLAB source code is freely link provided in title page.

This paper aims to unveil colonial racist elements related to the cases of racism in advertising judged by the Brazilian Council of Advertising Self-Regulation (Conar), from 1980 until 2020.

A qualitative critical and historical research was developed, based on a decolonial perspective, with the use of critical discourse analysis (CDA).

By analyzing such phenomenon, the present study can discuss how self-regulatory codes that are based on the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) 1937 Code are not equipped to deal with racist issues.

Discussions that focus on how racial elements in advertising are treated by a regulatory agency are scarce. Despite the focus being on the Brazilian case, this phenomenon should not be understood as a particularity of this country, since problems related to racism in advertising in countries that also have ICC-type self-regulatory codes are frequent.

Purpose – This chapter aims to analyze the pandemic situation in a legal and political point of view, to find what measures have been adopted by States to face the spread of the contagion, and whether those measures have been determinant in the redefinition of democracy. Emergency dispositions were enacted when an “emergency state” was declared, containing a series of dangerous elements for the correct application of the rule of law.

Methodology/Approach – The approach considers a “pluralistic methodology” that refers to a comparative law study, but also uses the approach of political science, history of institutions, and sociology. From this point of view, this chapter regards similarities and differences, between two or more legal systems, as coincidences or dissonances, comparing cases in a diachronic and synchronic way at the same time to evidence what is the democratic erosion.

Findings – This chapter doesn’t want to provide a mere chronicle of what happened during the COVID-19 situation, but it finds that in some peculiar cases emergency affected a degeneration of democratic institutions, and an acceptance of a new model of state, with hypertrophic executives, weak legislative bodies, not equilibrated balance of fundamental rights, and a rise of technocracy.

Originality/Value – Based on other studies focused on state-by-state oversights during the pandemic, our theory intends to enlighten the COVID-19 as a “black swan” in the international political and legal scenario, or a sort of turning point in an inevitable and unstoppable transformation of the state model that appears to aspire to a return of some autocratic attitudes.