RISULTATI RICERCA

Consistently with the rapid and disruptive growth of digital transformation (DT), many studies in the field of accounting have investigated how digital technologies are used to improve reporting quality, effectiveness, timeliness, and other similar attributes. Conversely, there is a research gap concerning the features (and the respective preparers behaviors) of non-financial disclosure about the DT process experienced by the companies. To this end, integrated reports, which contemplate a section dedicated to comment about the business model (BM), might be suitable documents to be investigated. There is still little relevance attributed to the information disclosed to represent the impacts of DT on BM elements and on the relationship with stakeholders. Hence, this study proposes an exploratory approach mapping the DT reporting that a sample of Italian listed companies disclosed by adopting the principles issued by the International Integrated Reporting Council - IIRC (now Value Reporting Foundation). This research shows how BM reporting can help to understand whether and how companies implement a DT strategy. It also demonstrates that the representation of the relationship DT/BM is shallow and incomplete and that it is mainly used with the aim of enhancing legitimacy.

In the current digital economy, every sort of organization today must invest in dig-italization in order to remain competitive, to enhance business operations, and to increase profitability. Even within professional football clubs, the use of new tech-nologies has become essential, both from a sports point of view, to improve play-ers’ performance and team results, and, from an economic point of view, to im-prove company management and increase revenues. The objective of this study, which employs a quantitative research approach, is to identify the sporting, economic, and financial performance measures on which the digitalization of these sectors has a significant impact. Digitalisation was analysed from the perspective of intellectual capital, a general indicator of digitalization was created and calculated for each of the 20 Serie A clubs. It was then associated with the key economic, financial, and sporting performance factors. The analysis showed a significant positive correlation with the following variables: i) final placement; ii) number of goals scored in the season; iii) turnover; iv) annual costs of players and coaches; and v) annual costs of players and coaches plus their depreciation. These results provide insight into how digitalisation is pivotal for professional football clubs and may prove useful for managers and board mem-bers of such clubs, academic researchers and practitioners.

Controls are used to ensure “that resources are obtained and used efficiently and effectively to achieve the organization’s objective” (Merchant and Otley, 2007, p. 788). Hybrid workplaces, which include flexible work arrangements like working from home, working outside of regular business hours, having flexible work hours, etc. (Stirpe and Zarraga-Oberty, 2017), are characterized by spatial and/or tem-poral separation. This presents control challenges because controlling requires that employee behaviour be in line with the company's goals (Snell 1992). Strict con-trols signal a compromise on trust (Christ et al., 2008), and loose controls dilute subordinates getting strong and clear directives (Long, 2010). Through a quasi-experiment utilizing the theoretical underpinning of Simon’s levers of control (1995, 2000), this study explores the types of controls which enable hybrid firm’s competitiveness. According to Widener (2007), the levers both individually and collectively drive firm-level knowledge production and attention direction, and be-cause they interact with one another, their effects are intricately entangled. This entanglement causes tension for organizational actors, who are largely interested in knowing which types of controls are effective in the hybrid firm’s context and how these controls relate to each other. The results of the experiment identify that the best possible combination to enable hybrid firm competitiveness is ‘High IC and High DC’. The findings establish a significant role of high IC and high DC, in ensuring hybrid firm competitiveness.

Migrants are a heterogeneous group concerning their residence sta-tus, which determines their different ability to cope with economic cri-ses. Migrants in an irregular condition are considered the most vulnera-ble, but empirical evidence to support this hypothesis is scarce. Using survey data from the Regional Observatory for Integration and Multi-ethnicity of Lombardy Region, this paper analyses the risk of transition to unemployment or inactivity status between 2011 and 2021, confirm-ing the association with legal status. However, different trends emerge when comparing the effects of the Great Recession and the pandemic crisis. While the irregular component was more exposed to the risk of losing its job during the Great Recession, the pandemic years show the opposite trend.

The Italian immigrants’ inclusion model has been described as a "low unemployment, bad jobs" equilibrium: immigrants have relatively high employment rates but tend to be segregated in low-quality jobs. However, as these jobs are also unstable, so is the equilibrium: during periods of recession, immigrants may face higher risks of labor-market exclusion. This paper investigates immigrant penalties in terms of employment probabilities, job loss, labor-market (re)entry, and job quality throughout the first year of COVID-19 crisis, by analyzing data from the 2019 and 2020 ISTAT Labor Force Survey. We find that the pandemic crisis accelerated an already ongoing erosion of immigrants’ relative employment advantage, while at the same time increasing their segregation in low-quality jobs. The deterioration of immigrants’ employment chances is chiefly driven by increased barriers in (re)entering the labor market which, especially for women, might be due to self-selection into inactivity. These findings suggest that the structural factors that have historically facilitated the activation of immigrant workers might have become factors of instability.