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The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and discuss the main features and key challenges of an original post-graduate education program designed according to an innovative theoretical framework promoting design thinking in a rhizomatic approach. By involving different stakeholders, the aim of this entrepreneurship education program is to disseminate rhizomatic, design-based learning competencies and thereby contribute to revitalizing a region’s socio-economic fabric.

Through the use of a pilot case, the paper exemplifies the application of the design thinking approach combined with the rhizomatic logic. Design thinking enables dealing with the complexity, uncertainty, and ill-defined problems that often characterize a business reality while the rhizomatic process combines the production of collective knowledge through a non-linear, complex and emergent path that nurtures innovation.

This entrepreneurship education program exemplifies a viable strategy to deal with a regional economic crisis by engaging different local actors including enterprises, local institutions, municipalities, and universities. It demonstrates the potential value of a new educational approach as a powerful lever to activate the energy of people, their competencies, relationships, shared projects, and new entrepreneurial ventures. The first edition of the program offers ideas, practices, and challenges to all stakeholders of potentially similar education projects.

The depicted pilot case allows us to exemplify how a design thinking framework reinterpreted on the basis of a Deleuzian rhizomatic perspective can enable developing innovation as a way of overcoming difficulties and succeeding, an essential prerequisite for many entrepreneurial organizations today.

This manuscript explores the evolving roles of HR professionals amidst global megatrends and organizational transitions, focusing on the Italian context, which has experienced disruptive adoption of new forms of work such as remote and hybrid work. In this challenging scenario, our research aims to uncover if and how HR professionals are transforming their roles or maintaining the status quo in navigating organizational changes, dealing with the upcoming working scenario, and challenging conventional perceptions of HR practitioners.

The study employs the social-symbolic work lens, that contributes to a deeper understanding of how HR professionals work to construct organizational life, the identities of employees, and the societal norms and assumptions that provide the context for organizational action. This perspective highlights HR professionals’ personal efforts, consisting of the emotional labor entailed in steering organizational transformations and, eventually, maintenance in a context where remote work has become prevalent. Data was collected through 16 online focus groups involving 76 HR professionals from Italian organizations.

Our research offers two interrelated contributions to HR literature. First, we provide pieces of evidence on how HR practitioners act as agents of change in two emerging roles: the “Wannabe Hero” and the “Ordinary Hero”. This challenges the prevailing rhetorical discourse about the so-called HR business partner. Secondly, we delve into the persistent obstacles that hinder HR professionals from making a substantial impact in addressing radical changes. These findings will provide useful insights into effectively engaging HR practitioners as agents of change in organizational transformation, shedding light on praxis, structures, and their emotional work.

The paper analyzes HR professionals’ social-symbolic work, which offers an original contribution to the comprehension of the activities they carry on in practice and the emotions they have been experiencing. These influence both the way HR professionals play their role and the organizational and institutional environment.

This study adopts the popular culture lens to investigate the collective understanding behind the human resources (HR) occupations.

The empirical study analyzes 129 characters from 87 movies, television (TV) series, books and comics. The measurement model was tested using structural equation modeling and cluster analysis identified five HR representations in the popular culture.

Popular culture reflects five HR representations: The Executor, the Hero, the Buddy, the Bore, and the Good-time person. Results suggest that public opinion pays scarce attention to the so-called HR “strategic position” while underlining the need for a more socially responsible HR approach.

The authors' study serves as a means for integrating past research on HR role and reputation, occupational image, self-identity and popular media. While most scholars have addressed popular culture as a single case and paid almost no attention to the HR domain, this article complements the literature by offering a fruitful way to distil HR summative popular culture representations, thus advocating for both a theoretical and a methodological contribution.

The research and practice agree that social media are reshaping strategy and organization rules across industries. Nevertheless, how social media can become a source of competitive advantage remains under-investigated and there is no evidence about which capabilities and competencies can effectively and strategically exploit social media. By merging the literature on social media management and hospitality, the authors develop and test a theoretical framework that identifies the most relevant capabilities and competencies for using social media in the food service sector. The paper aims to map them and understand which ones are relevant according to different strategic choices of social media use.

The authors adopted a qualitative methodology using semi-structured interviews to managers or owners of 14 restaurants in a big city in Northern Italy.

The theoretical framework suggests that social media could be strategically used for different aims by relying on specific capabilities and competencies. The authors tested it and found that, though nowadays restaurant managers mainly focus on a narrow set of social media competencies linked to relational and marketing capabilities, some also rely on social media to promote organizational change and innovation.

The authors propose a theoretical framework and preliminary evidence on capabilities and competencies declined for the food service sector. The model considers different uses of social media and related capabilities and competencies by mapping them accordingly to their strategic use. The authors preliminarily validate our framework and highlight the competencies possessed by the restaurant managers of our sample and their alignment with the strategic use of social media.

Despite much rhetoric about the need to be strategic, HR professionals have often had difficulty in establishing themselves as credible contributors to organizational performances, facing a legitimacy issue in their relationship with line managers. Adopting a social cognitive theory framework, the present study explores the HR professionals’ perceptions and expectations of the changing roles that HR professionals and line managers could play in a near future scenario where a set of smart technologies will be applied to HRM.

The research design is based on a two-wave survey: it involves 53 HR professionals belonging to the HR department of the Italian branch of one of the biggest international consulting companies which is about to implement a wide digital transformation.

Preliminary findings prompt reflections into the role of digital practices in reshaping the relationship between the HR department and line managers, especially in consideration of the role of HR professionals’ technology readiness and tenure. They suggest that HR devolution is not a matter of “all or nothing,” but it requires different solutions, which also depend on the nature of the specific HR practice. From a managerial perspective, the chapter suggests the paramount importance of sustaining the digital mindset of the HR professionals and their professional image.

The aim of this chapter is to explore employee behaviors and expectations of the role of social media when searching for jobs, to offer recruiters and companies valuable insights to design and manage appropriate web-based employer branding and recruitment strategies.

The research strategy is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews involving 34 central informants: talented Gen Yers and social media recruitment experts and mangers. The project focuses on the Italian context, an exemplary country with the highest social media penetration rate.

The results demonstrate the “bounded” popularity of social media as a recruitment tool among Gen Yers who implement up to five active and passive behaviors, albeit not all widespread, according to varying patterns and using different social media for different purposes: receiving, seeking, sharing, leading, and experiencing. Gen Yers, with aims that vary in line with various staffing phases, collect and share rumors and voices from both internal and controlled organizational sources but also, and above all, from external and organizational sources that companies do not control directly.

Social media seem to offer appealing and valuable opportunities to attract and engage talented young individuals, sustaining the quality, quantity, and fairness of employment relationships. Conversely, they also involve some organizational risks and costs. The chapter offers some managerial cautions and advocates a radical change in the prevalent HRM mindset for the improved management of transparency that social media solutions entail.

Results contribute in understanding how social media can better sustain employer branding and recruitment activities, especially considering the needs and expectations of talented young employees and professionals in the Italian context. Italy is an emblematic context, where the social media potential appears to be extremely interesting, considering its high rate of social media penetration.

The chapter explores if and how online and face-to-face organizational environments can interact, and if and how this interaction could foster managerial practices to sustain personal growth, organizational development, and employee–organization relationships.

Research project is based on an emblematic case study: Fubles.com is a social sport sharing platform with one of the most active sport communities in Europe. This case is representative of a novel initiative, useful in understanding how social media drive organizational results.

Social media activities do not always substitute face-to-face relationships; online connections can enhance relationships, in terms of quantity, quality, and fairness, generating comprehensive reconfiguration of people practices, before and after the game. Thanks to social networks, organizations can support interpersonal contacts, enabling people to organize collective activities both virtually and physically.

The case advocates three levels of possible organizational reconfigurations through social media (individual, collective, and organizational) that can foster the quality of the employee–organization relationship.

Results suggest that social media are sources of new and innovative ways to interact within and across organizations, reinforcing not only the online interactions, but especially traditional face-to-face connections through a process of reconfiguration of people practices.

Based on stakeholder theory, human resource management literature, and the main research streams on engagement, this study aims to develop and validate a scale of stakeholder engagement specifically suitable for the social enterprise domain. Despite the evidence that stakeholder management is crucial and specific for the social enterprise domain, there is not yet an established measure of stakeholder engagement that can be used to foster the design of the effective organizational practices to manage the specific stakeholder relationship in the social enterprise context.

A survey among 328 social enterprise stakeholders working in a variety of enterprises, roles, jobs (i.e., employees, social entrepreneurs, and volunteers) enables us to validate a comprehensive and multidimensional scale of stakeholder engagement.

The new measure includes dimensions of job, enterprise, organizational formula, professional, and social engagement. Results advance some practical and theoretical considerations both for the social enterprise research and for the engagement literature.

The purpose of this study is to examine, drawing on organization studies and stakeholder theories, the organizational configuration that enables the social enterprise to succeed by combining social and economic imperatives in a sustainable way.

The research project is based on the analysis of a multiple cross-national case study consisting of seven social enterprises that are active in the drug rehabilitation context. Multiple rounds of data gathering and analysis combined with within-case analysis and cross-case comparison enabled the authors to evaluate the perceived, declared and subjective organizational perspectives.

Results suggest that organizational performance – measured as the ability to achieve social goals, generate resources and pursue sustainability over time – depends on the implementation of a participative organizational configuration defined by the interaction of six organizational components (i.e. time and space designed for collective activities, low degree of formalization, social control, centralized decision-making processes, transformational leadership style and a workforce structure based on social stakeholders as workers). The involvement of social stakeholders emerges as a distinctive feature in the social enterprise domain.

The study contributes to extending the configuration approach to the social enterprise domain, also as a fruitful method to manage social stakeholders and to advance the discussion on hybrid organizations.