Sara Moggi

Mandatory or Not Mandatory Reporting? Insights From Italian Bank Foundations

In the Italian nonprofit field, bank foundations face an increasing demand to account for their grant activity in forms that go beyond traditional financial statements. Consequently, bank foundations have developed specific reports in accordance with a 2001 Italian law that requires a mission report to be included within financial statements. This study investigates the peculiarities of social reporting documents in terms of standards used and formal characteristics, revealing different adoption levels. Contributing to an ongoing debate, the analysis of the reporting practices underlines how the due by law on social accounting could hamper the disclosure in nonprofit organizations.

When the Law Shapes Nonprofit Boards The Key Role of Local Stakeholders

The study investigates how governance mechanisms can affect community representation within nonprofit organizations, focusing on Italian Bank Foundations where the community is on board by law. To investigate what governance arrangements increase substantive and symbolic representation, the study adjusts Guo and Musso’s framework by considering several formal mechanisms for appointing board members and the residence of board members as a new aspect of descriptive representation. A content analysis of the statutes and an email survey show that formal mechanisms contribute to substantive representation, whereas descriptive and participatory arrangements enhance symbolic representation. In addition, this study explores the moderating influence of local stakeholders in appointing board members, offering a wider point of view on the relationships among the five dimensions of representation.

Public vs. Private in Hospital Efficiency. Exploring determinants in a competitive environment

ABSTRACT This study investigates the determinants of efficiency in an Italian regional health system and estimates the effect exerted by ownership on hospitals’ performance. To achieve this aim, the Veneto region was considered as a case study and a full dataset (2011–2012) containing nonpublicly available technical data and cost and income items was analyzed. Efficiencies are measured applying a three-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA). Our results suggest that private hospitals perform better than public hospitals in productivity and cost saving, not considering the effect of other environmental and operational variables such as length of stay and beds per capita.

Innovation for Sustainable Development by Educating the Local Community. The Case of an Italian Project of Food Waste Prevention

Service oriented perspectives represent an opportunity of innovation and an answer to current challenges for social welfare, sustainable development and everyday life. The prevention of food waste requires new networked and collaborating competences, in the light of the increasing inefficiencies of modern economic growth models and the improvement of new paradigms for sustainable development. This research presents the case of a project that, while addressing food waste at the level of several organizations throughout the supply chain, implemented a recovering process to reduce food impairment. The project (R.e.b.u.s.) applies the efficiency system originally developed for school and university canteens to other food donors. In order to support this project, a far-reaching educational program for sustainable development was started in schools, universities and through public events. By educating the local community and enhancing processes that drive a change in behaviour, this initiative proved essential for the successful prevention of food waste.

Stakeholder Accountability Through the World Wide Web: Insights from Nonprofits

Accountability to stakeholders has always been pivotal in supporting nonprofit organizations in legitimizing their existence within local communities and building public trust. The development of Web-based accountability tools has offered growing possibilities to communicate and engage in dialogue with stakeholders. However, nonprofit organizations are not yet fully exploiting the potential of the Web. By focusing on Italian bank foundations, this study explores the use of the Web as a tool for discharging accounts to stakeholders and involving them in dialogue. The data show that most of the foundations do not use websites to communicate interactively with their stakeholders, and communication is limited to one-way disclosure of information. The results suggest more steps can be taken to ensure increased responsiveness to community needs.

The New Era of Stakeholder Engagement: Gaining, Maintaining, and Repairing Legitimacy in Nonprofit Organizations

ABSTRACT The need for nonprofits to foster legitimacy within their communities has led to growing calls for mechanisms of sound governance based on the engagement of stakeholders in organizational activities. Previous studies have investigated the mix of governance mechanisms used by nonprofits to manage legitimacy, without paying attention to the different challenges of legitimacy these organizations face. Aiming to fill this gap, this article employs a multiple case study methodology to explore how mechanisms for engaging stakeholders in governance can be shaped by the need to gain, maintain, or repair legitimacy. The findings show that formal mechanisms based on the direct designation of board members by local stakeholders play a pivotal role in repairing legitimacy. Gaining legitimacy requires actual participation of stakeholders, while maintaining legitimacy calls for formal mechanisms that balance representativeness and competencies of the leadership.

Accountability for a place in heaven: A stakeholders’ portrait in Verona’s confraternities

This article describes the accountability features of confraternities in Verona during the “Long Seventeenth Century”. These charities, driven by a common and deep Christian spirit, played a pivotal role in a period of great depression, helping the local community. The accounts relating to their activities display precision and are rich in analytical detail, enabling the painting of a portrait of Verona’s confraternities and their economic and charitable actions as strictly bound by a spiritual aim. Using the stakeholder theory lens to analyse the archival documents of the 53 confraternities revealed by the Appraisal Book of 1682, this article highlights a complex network of relationships among these organizations and their stakeholders in light of their power, legitimacy and urgency attributes. We conclude that these confraternities’ accountability was the result of the most powerful stakeholders’ influence, and underlines confraternities’ pivotal role in supporting the poor in the local community and encouraging the salvation of souls, supporting their entrance into heaven.

Social and Environmental Reporting in the Italian Higher Education System: Evidence from Two Best Practices

The increasing need of accountability to key stakeholders, and the demand for new tools that are useful for governance at universities, have led to the development of new forms of reporting, including social and environmental reports (SERs), which are helpful in the implementation of knowledge and building awareness of sustainability issues. SERs are not only a useful tool for reporting but are a way to educate organizations and stakeholders to a greater sensitivity to SD topic, building virtuous circles that involve students, professors, employees, and community. This study presented a picture of the development of SERs in the Italian Higher Education sector, the main frameworks spontaneously developed, and two selected best practices where SER was improved significantly: Universita di Macerata and Universita di Ferrara. To reach this aim, the main informants involved in the reporting process on the governance level, as the sustainability responsible, or the rectors of the universities were interviewed. The findings outlined the peculiarities of this process in two successful cases, such as governance compliance and the sharing of knowledge.

Exploring Accounting-Sustainability Hybridisation in the UK Public Sector

A growing amount of attention is being directed to the potential role of accounting-sustainability hybrids, but only a small part of the literature presents an empirical analysis of how these hybrids interact with government strategies and, as mediating instruments, drive a sustainability transformation. In this article, the authors develop a holistic framework on the mediating and governing (transforming) role of accounting-sustainability hybrids based on an in-depth analysis of the prior literature on this issue. The transformative role assumed by the hybrids in the governing practices and policies is analysed through the four dimensions of the framework: their local programmatic discourses; the construction/selection of the mediating tools for sustainability into the practice; the embedding of these tools in the governing processes; and the translation of these social-accounting hybrids into the governing process. The holistic view of this framework permits both a wide picture of the studies related to these tools and their role in facilitating sustainable transformations. The authors then apply their framework to analyse the role of accounting-sustainability hybrids in the embedding of sustainability in two important UK public organisations: the Environmental Agency and the West Sussex County Council. In doing so, the study builds a bridge between accounting for sustainability and public administration studies, investigating how government strategies are operationalised into the day-by-day operations. The main findings provide several insights on the hybrids’ mediating role between accounting and sustainability. For instance, the authors highlight that these organisations ‘have accounting-sustainability hybrids tailored to their strategic priorities and service delivery imperatives’ (p. 471) and illustrate how resource constraints could help in the selection of hybrids as mediating tools. The employees involved in the process positively accepted such hybrids because of the increasing perceived legitimacy of the local programmes. Furthermore, the authors underline how the programmatic discourses related to sustainability played an important role in driving the future strategies of public organisations. From their findings, the authors stress the importance of hybrids in easing the process of sustainable transformation, and call for further empirical studies on the ‘“sustainability case” for business’ rather than the ‘more restrictive “business case” for sustainability’ (p. 473). The article touches upon the wide range of literature on accounting, governmentality, hybridisations and sustainability, and draws a comprehensive picture of the links among these topics in the public sector. In lack of studies on how these hybrids are designed and used as helpful mediating tools, the authors provide a pivotal contribution to understanding the complex development of social-accounting hybrids and their role in shaping and reshaping sustainability practices.

Composition of the Boards

This chapter focuses on the composition of bank foundations, a key element for good governance in nonprofit organizations. We consider some main aspects regarding the number and gender diversity of members belonging to the policy-making and administrative bodies, the people who select them, and the process of designation. Then, in line with a multistakeholder approach, we propose a map of the main bank foundations’ stakeholders and explain how they are involved with governance, underscoring the important relationship among local stakeholders, governance stakeholders, mission stakeholders, and the bank foundations. In particular, we focus on the local stakeholder groups directly engaged in selecting members of the Board of Trustees. Finally, we conclude by considering some issues related to incompatibility and conflicts of interest within boards.