Purpose: This study aims to examine the potential effect that business ethics (BE) in general and corporate social responsibility (CSR) more specifically can exert on the voluntary disclosure (VD) of intellectual capital (IC) for the ethically most engaged firms in the world.Design/methodology/approach: The research design is based on an inductive approach. As part of the global quantitative investigation, the authors have analyzed the impact of BE and CSR on the transparent communication of the IC. The data under analysis have been investigated using multiple linear regression.Findings: Based on a sample of 83 enterprises emerging as the most ethical companies in the world, the results have revealed that the adoption of ethical and socially responsible approach is positively associated with the extent of VD about IC. This finding may help attenuating the asymmetry of information and the conflict of interest potentially arising with corporate partners. Hence, IC-VD may stand as an evidence of ethical and socially responsible behaviors.Practical implications: Global and national regulators and policymakers can be involved by these results when setting social reporting standards because they suggest that institutional and/or cultural factors affect top management's social reporting behavior in the publication of the IC information.Social implications: Direct and indirect stakeholders, if supported by ethical and socially responsible behaviors of the company, could assess more in detail the quality of the disclosed information concerning the IC.Originality/value: Most of the studies that have been conducted in this field have examined the effect of BE and CSR on the firm's overall transparency, neglecting their potential effect on IC disclosure. This study is designed to fill in this gap through testing the impact of ethical and socially responsible approaches specifically on IC-VD.

The paper aims to examine the moderating role of gender diversity within a corporate board on the relationship between tax aggressiveness and a firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) approach. This analysis was conducted using a set of indicators of financial statements of 168 Italian listed firms between 2011 and 2018. In addition, the sustainability reports of the same companies were observed. To perform the analysis a logit regression model is used. This paper shows different empirical results. First, this study notes that there is not a direct relationship between tax aggressiveness and CSR reporting. Second, gender diversity in a board of directors increases the orientation of companies to CSR disclosure, but does not have an impact on the relationship between tax aggressiveness and CSR disclosure. Instead, CEO gender has a positive influence on the relationship between corporate tax planning and CSR reporting in accordance with Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards. This study emphasizes the key role of gender diversity in the growth of the CSR approach and the reputation of companies. Therefore, governments and policymakers of major countries should promote gender diversity in corporate decision-making bodies, which contributes to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Purpose: Nowadays, the agri-food sector is facing several challenges due to a rapid technological change which calls for knowledge sharing (KS) practices to enhance businesses’ performance. This has spurred a collaborative approach and the creation of networks. Since there still is a paucity of research on the quality degree of KS, the purpose of this study is to offer an empirical research on the quality degree of KS by exploring outcome expectations and social exchange dimensions. Theoretically, it is examined by a double lens of social capital and social cognitive theory.Design/methodology/approach: This study offers an empirical analysis of 313 directors of 11 “consortia” in the agri-food sector in Italy by using the fuzzy expert system. The model allows to aggregate multi criteria dimensions of KS and rates its quality.Findings: As resulted, the quality degree of KS is influenced by outcome expectations – personal and community expectations – and three forms of dimensions of social exchange: structural, relational and cognitive. The paper ends with a discussion of research findings, its limitations and implications.Originality/value: As there is still a paucity of research on the determinants of quality degree of KS, the research adopts a double lens of social capital and social cognitive theories to explore what are these determinants.

Purpose: Building upon the insights of the resource-based view and internationalization theories, the purpose of this paper is to examine the role networks play in SMEs' readiness for internationalization. By investigating three different types of knowledge sharing, namely economic-setting, market-specific and customer-specific, the study analyzes their effect on SMEs' readiness for internationalization.Design/methodology/approach: The four research hypotheses derived by from the analysis of the literature have been investigated by applying the multiple regression technique. By means of an online survey, 300 valid questionnaires were collected and information from a sample of Italian SMEs belonging to 11 agro-food consortia have been analyzed.Findings: The results suggest that SMEs' readiness for internationalization could be supported by sharing customer-specific, market-specific and economic-setting knowledge with other firms operating within the same agro-food consortium. Additionally, data analysis highlights a negative relation between the risk perception in the process and readiness for internationalization, suggesting the importance of knowledge sharing in reducing the criticality issues of being a newcomer entering international markets.Originality/value: From a theoretical perspective, this study aims to fill the gap in knowledge management and international relationship marketing literature. Since proposes a combination of different kinds of knowledge that contribute to reducing the criticalities SMEs must face by identifying useful information to be conveyed within the network. From a managerial perspective, the study provides useful insights for the agro-food sector, highlighting how experiential and network knowledge constitutes a pre-condition for managing internationalization complexity and discovering opportunities on foreign markets.

Purpose: The link between wine and tourism is increasingly important for the competitive advantage of the territory and its productions, and it must be adequately communicated, in particular, online. Therefore, monitoring the level of convergence between online brand identity and online brand image is increasingly important to implement an efficient strategy of recall of a territory. This paper thus aims to propose an operative framework – assessing Web convergence (AWC) – designed to detect and analyse the online brand image and compare it with online brand identity. Design/methodology/approach: The AWC framework is designed to extract information from the Web, process it through text-mining techniques – cluster analysis – and interpret it from three perspectives – functional, holistic and sensitive. The operative framework was applied to Napa Valley because it is the most frequently cited wine destination on the top 100 travel blogs. Findings: The empirical application shows that the proposed logical framework can yield important reflections even in cases such as Napa Valley’s, a destination that already enjoys strong notoriety. In spite of the apparent qualitative homogeneity of the topics discussed, observation of their composition in terms of the three dimensions revealed the existence of a gap on some topics identified between what is communicated by the wine tourism destination and what is perceived and in turn communicated by bloggers. Research limitations/implications: The limitation of the research is represented by the application of the operative process to a single case study (Napa Valley). The contribution given to managerial studies is the ability of the framework to provide an operative vision of the importance of knowing the blogger’s perception of the brand identity communicated by the company. Testing the framework in other contexts will confirm that the protocol is generalisable. Practical implications: The identification of the themes that characterise brand identity and brand image in the Web provides a flow of information that, if interpreted according to the functional, holistic and sensitive perspective, transforms the themes into useful knowledge for decisional purposes. Originality/value: The managerial literature has highlighted, as in today’s communication environment, a strong brand can be created and maintained by strengthening the linkage between identity and image. The proposed framework may be considered an important protocol because it allows a tourism destination to increase the flow of information on which to build or strengthen the brand identity by aligning with the brand image. This could be particularly useful for smaller and less-popular destinations.