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This study aims to analyze how sustainability, through an efficient knowledge management (KM) system, can serve as a driving force with respect to corporate culture and reputation. The research questions that guided this study are mainly the following: Are KM and sustainability related? Can culture strengthen the link between KM and sustainability? Can the link between KM and sustainability be affected by reputation?

The methodological approach adopted corresponds to qualitative research of analysis on the reference literature in the international field, also supported by empirical analysis.

In this study, the authors show that there is no explicit correlation between sustainability and KM. This relationship, in fact, is not underlined in nonfinancial reporting because it is absent or because it is not considered relevant. Too often sustainability is reduced to a mere relational and reputational tool, ignoring the fact it must be considered a consequence and not the main goal to improve companies’ culture.

The sample studied by the authors refers to the top 40 companies listed on the Italian market, not allowing to generalize the findings across the international context.

The practical implications that could result from making explicit the relationship between sustainability and KM are multiple: the substantial benefits of the reputational aspect, an increase in the economic value related to sustainability; to ensure the going concern of the company and implement its ability to produce and share value in the long term.

The social benefits of a stronger relationship between sustainability and KM are related to the possibility to improve the wealth of all the stakeholders.

This paper analyzes the links between sustainability and KM to understand the influence of these factors on corporate culture and reputation.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Whilst there is an expectation for there to be a connection between sustainability strategies in firms and their knowledge management practices, this appears not to be the case.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

This study aims to examine the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on banks’ capital, value and risk by investigating its impact on capital inflows and asset quality. The authors aim to investigate the value-protective characteristics of socially responsible performance.

This study uses a two-stage least squares approach with instrumental variables, with bank and year fixed effects to address concerns regarding endogeneity, specifically reverse causality and unobservable factors.

The results confirm a positive association of CSR with capital adequacy, including higher quality Tier 1 Capital. The authors find strong evidence that banks with higher CSR scores are associated with greater bank value and lower risk. The extended analyses find that the improvement in capital is from annual growth in capital and lower risky assets.

The research advances the field by providing new empirical evidence of a positive association between CSR and capital, including high-quality Tier 1 Capital. This study complements the prior research by simultaneously examining the dynamic links between CSR and capital, bank risk and bank value. The findings are consistent with the view that there is a dynamic link in which CSR affects the operations of banks.

Platforms have often been considered an excellent example of innovation with an incredibly fast diffusion rate due to network effects. Notwithstanding, in many cases, they match the definition of resistant innovations, requiring a significant change in the consumers' behavior that may slow down the process of diffusion. How can network effects be leveraged to disseminate resistant innovation based on a platform structure?

This research focuses on the car-sharing industry as a single case study, involving five different providers and two service aggregators operating in Milan, Italy.

First, this research shows how direct network externalities on the providers' side may play a vital role in the dissemination process, increasing the value perceived by the potential new entrants. Second, it shows how co-opetition dynamics, eventually encouraging multihoming phenomenon, may play – in the first phases of the diffusion process – a pivotal role to let the industry flourish.

This research contributes to the growing literature on platforms and two-sided platform showing how this model may be applied more broadly to network businesses to understand competitive dynamics.

This study offers insights to managers and practitioners dealing with network services, showing the potential benefits of coopetitive strategies while facing the initial phases of the dissemination process.

This paper gets together resistant innovation, two-sided platforms and network effects offering novel insights on the dynamics of network services – such as the car-sharing – while giving fresh insights taking the perspective of the service providers.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a global digitalization of organizational activities: the pandemic forced people and organizations to profoundly review values, purposes and norms. However, the research on how digital technologies impact human relationships and interactions at work results fragmented. Still, the importance of understanding which behaviors and norms enhance social interactions and organizational performances in digital environments remains critical, especially after COVID-19 advent. Therefore, this study explores how human relationships change in a wholly digital environment and what to expect for the new normal.

The study first explores the research gap through a systematic literature review to clearly understand what emerged so far. Second, through semi-structured interviews and a focus group, an empirical analysis was conducted.

Findings suggest that both work and emotional dimensions are crucial to nurturing human relationships in a digital environment. More precisely, the study unveils the need for innovative leaders to review their approaches to communication and the work experience and consider the emotional dimension in terms of community purpose and individual well-being, while identifying rituals as an overlapping tool. Finally, the authors propose a parallelism between these results and the agile revolution to inspire leaders to rethink their leadership and behaviors getting closer to the agile approach, which may represent a valuable way to rethink human relations in our professional environment.

The paper sheds light on an ongoing phenomenon that touches the lives of each organizational actor. The two-step structure hopes to provide both a structured base of the knowledge developed to date, proposing a systematic view of what has been studied since the outbreak of the pandemic to date and to provide insights for future developments.

During the transition to parenthood, the gender division of paid and unpaid work undergoes a profound redefinition in response to both attitudes and resources. These attitudes may be concordant or discordant between two partners, they may or may not clash with perceived financial or labour market constraints, and they may or may not provoke explicit conflicts and negotiations. In this study, by combining quantitative and qualitative data, we focus on Italian couples with young children or in transition to first child, and we explore what happens when partners have discordant views. The findings show that the division of domestic and care work seems more resistant to change and more responsive to the husband’s attitudes than does the division of paid work, as the latter is mainly driven by the woman’s education and attitudes. The findings also show that very few couples overtly disagree. If they do so, the main issue in dispute is the allocation of domestic work and the main solution consists more in hiring external help than in obtaining the husband’s greater participation. Compared with domestic work, the allocation of care is a less disputed and more flexible issue: when women start negotiations on a more equal sharing, men are more willing to increase their participation. However, when a more equal sharing is not attained, couples’ narratives tend to give the “cause” to the constraints of the man (typically his work) than of the woman, while they point at a redefinition (for the best of the family) of her rather than his preferences.

In response to environmental uncertainty, organizations rely on independent, empowered teams to increase their responsiveness to change. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how objectives and key results (OKRs) can contribute to creating a shared vision which keeps the different, empowered teams aligned.

Through a qualitative study, this paper develops a conceptual model of how OKRs lead to a shared vision. The authors interview professionals in nine organizations differing in size and industry who recently introduced agile, focusing on the main hurdles encountered and benefits obtained from the methodology.

The findings confirm that OKRs are an effective goal-setting methodology and suggest that their successful implementation builds on the new ways of organizing introduced by the agile methods. Moreover, the findings suggest that OKRs contribute to developing a shared vision and increase the alignment: first, the organizational vision becomes clear and its definition is participatory; second at the team level, individuals align around a shared team vision through participative definition of objectives.

The contribution of the paper is two-fold: this study provide an overview on the methodology, which is diffused from a practice perspective, but has not yet been addressed from a theoretical point of view. And this study connects OKRs to extant theory on goal-setting and vision development. This study shows they act as a coupling mechanism which helps empowered and independent teams together.

Drawing upon notions of agency and the body, the purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of agency as a gendered concept through a consideration of women sex‐workers. Specifically, the paper analyses how far women sex‐workers may be regarded as social agents. It then considers how far notions of agency, in relation to sex‐workers' embodied boundaries, may be gendered.

The paper reviews existing literature on sex‐workers and sex‐work practices, looking at indoor sex‐work (massage parlours), outdoor sex‐work (street sex‐work) and trafficking. It considers these types of sex‐work in relation to agency, gender and the body.

The paper acknowledges the diversity of women's experience within different aspects of the sex trade. The paper recognizes claims that treating sex‐workers as “victims” could further jeopardize their social position. However, the paper finds that the “options” available to sex‐workers are severely constrained. Specifically, the lack of capacity among sex‐workers to set embodied “rules of engagement” with clients makes the notion of agency problematic. The paper contends that “agency” is itself a gendered concept not only in relation to sex‐work, but also in the context of women's work more broadly.

Through the idea of agency as a gendered concept, the paper offers alternative ways of exploring agency, the body and women's work.

The paper puts forward the notion of agency as a gendered concept. This opens up possibilities for further research on women's “choices”, and who “makes the rules” within different labour markets.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence that social media usage has on the online purchases of wine and to examine whether objective and subjective knowledge moderates this relationship.

A structured questionnaire was completed by a sample of 2,597 Italian wine consumers. A multinomial logistic model was used to assess how the investigated variables influenced online purchasing behavior.

Social media usage was found to be positively related to online wine buying, and consumer’s objective and subjective knowledge moderates the relationship between social media usage and online wine purchasing.

Wineries should acknowledge the relevance of social media in favoring online wine buying and adopt integrated multi-channel marketing strategies. Given that knowledge moderates the relationship between social media usage and online wine buying, in order to optimize the channel management, wineries should segment customers and prospects based on subjective and objective product knowledge.

The study represents one of the first attempts to investigate social media use and online wine purchasing behavior in Italy. In addition, it sheds light on previous research on the influence that objective and subjective knowledge has on consumer behavior.

The study tests a model that considers online brand trust in different nonbrand-owned touchpoints as a multifactorial construct constituted by: social network influencers, bloggers, online retail platforms and brand-related user generated content. Furthermore, it examines the influences that offline and online brand trust exert on consumer buying intention.

A convenience sample of 3,335 total individuals participated in the survey. Structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses.

Online brand trust is significantly influenced by trust in all investigated nonbrand-owned touchpoints. Both offline and online brand trust positively influence buying intention.

Whereas brand trust is considered a multidimensional construct that includes both cognitive and affective aspects, in addition to individuals' personality traits, the present study only investigated the rational dimension of the brand trust paradigm. Moreover, this study examined the influence of brand trust on consumers' buying intention and not overt behavior. In addition, even though the extant literature suggests that the relation between trust and behavioral outcomes may vary across cultures, no test of the possible influences that culture exerted on brand trust and BInt was run. Finally, given the convenience sampling method used in this research, statistically significant surveys would provide a more solid basis for the investigated phenomenon, and they would enable an appropriate generalization of the findings.

To build brand trust and favour buying intention, marketers should monitor and influence the online touchpoints that are partially under or totally out of their control, and reconceive and manage physical stores.

This paper contributes to the stream of literature on online brand trust by proving that it is a multifactorial construct resulting from trust in different non-proprietary online entities and pointing out the prevalent role that physical stores play in shaping consumer buying intention. It also indicates that a trust transfer effect takes place between different online information sources and offline outlets.