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The purpose of this paper is to address financialization in the light of Catholic social teaching (CST) and investigate the issues surrounding corporate governance and the impact that the priority of shareholder value poses for achieving ethical outcomes in routine economic interactions.

The approach ventures beyond an accounting of the enormous costs of the recent global collapse of financial markets in search of an ethical evaluation as to how this all came about. The ethical evaluation proceeds along two tracks: individual action and system of rules.

Six suggestions as to how to reconcile what is known from CST and what is observed in everyday economic affairs have been offered.

The paper is limited to reconciling financialization and issues of corporate governance with CST.

The practical desirability and the ethical goodness of a financialized system are commented on and the paper contributes to a better understanding of the origins of the financial market collapse.

The global collapse of financial markets linked to the introduction of new financial products in which the return is emphasized and the risk glossed over provides a unique opportunity to contribute to the dialogue on what needs to be done to address the broader problem of financialization.

The purpose of this paper is to present the argument that in principle any company can become a good company by adopting certain characteristics which define the good in enterprise affairs and affirm and reinforce everyone with a stake in the company – managers, workers, suppliers, customers, and communities where it operates – in addition to its owners.

To identify the characteristics of the good company the paper turns to Catholic social teaching, with its traditional emphasis on the importance of practising virtue in worldly affairs. In this regard, the paper relies heavily on the writings and public statements of Pope John Paul II, who addressed these matters with great clarity and insight.

In its research the paper finds eight characteristics by which the good company can be identified and which, if embraced by the leadership of a willing and committed enterprise, can help to transform it into a good company. Each of the eight is addressed in some detail.

The paper examines a vast body of writings that, according to Catholic social teaching, identify the good in enterprise affairs. One of the eight characteristics, personalist capital, advances the proposal that the good company routinely maximizes virtue among its stakeholders and thereby enhances its own profitability because the virtuous person is the more effective economic agent.

The paper aims at identifying key information technology enablers for business continuance.

The paper provides an analysis of the issues surrounding communication technology downtime and business continuity.

To be competitive, today's business has to be continuous from a data availability perspective and agile with regard to data access. System and/or application downtime are not an option in modern business since each hour, even minute, of downtime may generate negative financial effects. A framework for the design and implementation of a server operating environment for business continuance is presented.

Analyses an important issue in the business environment.

This research aims to explore whether or how organizations adopt people analytics (PA), its value and potential socio-technical factors that can enable or hinder PA projects by disrupting and reshaping human resource management. We do this by focusing on the Italian context.

We conduct a scoping review of data collected between 2018 and 2022 via Google Alerts (GA), a content change detection and notification service that is gaining popularity in scholarly research.

Our findings suggest that the diffusion of PA applications in Italy, especially those of a descriptive nature, is growing. Most of the existing PA applications are positioned in a positive technocratic light, envisioning the value of PA for both employees and organizations. The value for the latter appears to be direct, while the value for employees is realized through organizational initiatives. The findings also suggest that while enablers can vary between PA application types, the barriers, especially technological and environmental, are generic for both descriptive and predictive/prescriptive PA applications.

Theoretically, we propose a framework for analyzing PA applications, their values, enablers and barriers. Methodologically, we present and describe in detail a novel approach, drawing on GA that can be used to study PA in specific contexts. Practically, our study serves as a helpful point of reference for managers planning or implementing PA in Italy, for benchmarking PA in Italy over time and for comparative international studies.

Review essay on Finn, D. K. (Ed.). (2010). The true wealth of nations. Catholic social thought and economic life. Oxford/New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

This paper investigates the income dynamics of Italian primary sector, during and after the international economic crisis. It focuses on three research questions: what has been the evolution of the main profitability ratios of agricultural enterprises in recent years? After the crisis, have the surviving farms increased their profitability? Has the profitability been different also in relation to the geographic location?

Income dynamics of a sample of companies have been analyzed, obtaining the 10-year evolution of the average value of three income indices (return on equity [ROE], return on assets [ROA] and return on sales [ROS]). Statistical elaborations and the analysis of variance (ANOVA) method have been used.

The years of the international economic crisis are often characterized by higher incomes than the following ones. The descending trend involves all three national macroareas of Italy, although characterized by considerable socioeconomic differences.

The study considers only the society that survived the crisis, so, presumably, the strongest. Moreover, other ratios should be considered in order to have a more complete view.

Public policymakers could use this study for a better intervention in support of agricultural and agro-industrial activities.

The careful economic and financial analysis of the sector favors the relaunching strategies of the Italian primary sector in which many employees work.

The research contributes to the literature by providing a quantitative analysis of the dynamics of the sector, through the comparative information that may be derived from financial statements.

This paper seeks to develop an approach to problem localization and an algorithm to address the issue of determining the dependencies among system metrics for automated system management in ubiquitous computing systems.

This paper proposes an approach to problem localization for learning the knowledge of dynamic environment using probabilistic dependency analysis to automatically determine problems. This approach is based on Bayesian learning to describe a system as a hierarchical dependency network, determining root causes of problems via inductive and deductive inferences on the network. An algorithm of preprocessing is performed to create ordering parameters that have close relationships with problems.

The findings show that using ordering parameters as input of network learning, it reduces learning time and maintains accuracy in diverse domains especially in the case of including large number of parameters, hence improving efficiency and accuracy of problem localization.

An evaluation of the work is presented through performance measurements. Various comparisons and evaluations prove that the proposed approach is effective on problem localization and it can achieve significant cost savings.

This study contributes to research into the application of probabilistic dependency analysis in localizing the root cause of problems and predicting potential problems at run time after probabilities propagation throughout a network, particularly in relation to fault management in self‐managing systems.

Few other managerial innovations have become popular as quickly as has business process reengineering (BPR); however, probably no other innovation has been interpreted in so many different ways either. This paper seeks to discover whether there is a conceptual core which both identifies and differentiates BPR from other practices adopted for organizational change and, also, what value it may really have. After illustrating how the concept of BPR, which was initially elaborated in the context of strategic management of information technology, has been ably reconstructed and transformed into the managerial revolution of the 1990s, this paper goes on to show how this reconstructed BPR cannot be considered to be an innovative and distinct approach to organizational change. Furthermore, it will be highlighted how BPR has served to spread a simplistic and Utopian vision of organizations and of organizational change, and how this requires careful reflection and re‐assessment of management fads.

Norberto Bobbio's Birth Centenary was celebrated in Turin in October 2009. This article acknowledges an important 20th century legal philosopher whose work is yet to be fully appreciated in the Anglo-American context. A short introduction is followed by an overview of his works in English, and intellectual profile. Relevant excerpts aim to convey some understanding of his legal scholarship. Three exemplars of his contribution to law: jurisprudence, legal sociology and the general theory of law are discussed. It is argued that a Bobbian lens can be usefully employed to consider some of the pressing 21st century legal-political and social issues.