RISULTATI RICERCA

This article aims at analysing the role of Instagram in the treatment of eating disorders. Theobjective is to investigate how people with anorexia nervosa use Instagram. The hypothesisto be verified is whether the use of this social media by those who are trying to cure eatingdisorders may pose risks to the healing process. Therefore, a simultaneous, multi-methodstudy was performed. The core component of the research was the content analysis of a sampleof posts (images and captions) selected by Instagram, while the supplementary componentwas a focus group with people suffering from eating disorders, treated by a specialized Italiancentre. The study highlighted the prevalence of potentially risky contents. Images and textsseem to reveal an inclination to the spectacularisation of the disease itself, offering contentsmainly referable to risk-taking behaviours such as the obsessive control of food intake, food’sweight or calorie content.

The paper is structured as follows: first, a brief survey of the literature relating to Icts and their impact on education performance is presented. The methodology is then established, and the specifications of the models are defined in order to present data analyses on the impacts of different uses of Icts on Pisa scores in Reading, Mathematics and Science for 15 European countries. The following sections outline the results of descriptive, comparative and statistical analyses and present partial correlation coefficients in order to assess the impact of Icts on educational performance. The final section provides concluding remarks and some policy implications.

Relatively little research has addressed questions on how companies integrate corporate social responsibility (CSR) and management control, and this study attempts to respond to recent calls for further investigation. Taking the perspective, advanced in the extant literature, that CSR can be regarded as a form of management control, the study has the objective to show how a socially responsible initiative, such as the implementation of an employee welfare plan undertaken by a SME, can address control issues. In particular, the company has designed the employee welfare plan as an incentive system. The study adopts an interventionist research (IVR) approach to accomplish with the research objective, and the results of the interventionist case study are interpreted based on the Merchant and Van der Stede object-of-control framework. In particular, results indicate that the implementation of the welfare plan has enabled the application of different types of control and provided incentive-related benefits, suggesting the potential impact of CSR as a management control device.

The purpose of this study is mainly to investigate the use of Target Costing (TC) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) to support New Product Development (NPD) strate-gies in large international companies. Another purpose is to determine how com-panies apply the TC concept and why this strategic costing technique is adopted to support NPD strategies. The study involves interviews in 7 organizations based in Europe and the United States and operating in Italy. It appears that TC, together with value engineering (VE) activities, is used in all 7 organizations in supporting NPD strategies, while only 2 organizations tend to use LCC. The contributions of this study to the accounting literature pertain to its research content and design. In particular, the paper offers new evidence for the debate concerning the relevance of strategic costing techniques, such as TC and LLC, in supporting NPD as a cen-tral dimension of the corporate strategies of the companies.