This study aims to analyze the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the Water–Energy–Food (WEF) nexus under the lens of institutional, stakeholder, and innovation theories. Specifically, this study focuses on AI as the technology adopted by companies to promote Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A structured literature review has been conducted on 94 articles published from 1990 to 2021 in ISI Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. This study develops an in-depth review of the literature on the main articles arguing about these issues. The findings highlight the increasing relevance of AI in the water, energy, and food industries individually considered, but the study of AI as a connector between water, energy, and food to achieve SDGs is still under investigation. Research on AI for WEF nexus management has adopted mostly a technical perspective, neglecting the relevance of management tools and the business model concept. Most of the articles did not adopt a specific theoretical lens, but scholars recognize the need to adopt a multi-stakeholder approach and the important role played by AI and other digital technologies to address the WEF nexus challenge. This study proposes an integrated approach for managing the nexus through AI technologies to meet sustainable and responsible business models. The gap between research and policy making could be filled by combining scientific data and policy needs with inclusive tools that are technically viable for sustainable resource utilization.

Fashion firms have transferred their manufacturing processes to Asia, seeking minimum labor costs, supported by the academic literature’s proposals for alternative supply chain configurations to maximize profits. Fashion industry has undergone public analysis, facing demands for greater transparency about environmental and social sustainability. The growing public awareness of sustainability issues has led firms to declare their commitment to sustainable resources, but few changes have been registered. United Nations Economic Commission for Europe listed technological innovation as a key tool for making the fashion industry transparent and traceable regarding sustainability and circularity. The research and responsible innovation framework indicate appropriate ways to manage innovation from a responsible and ethical perspective, according to ethical corporate behaviour (ECB), particularly in the industries characterized by productive phases processed in more countries, such as the fashion industry. However, the linkages between responsible innovation, ECB towards innovative and sustainable business models, and their conceptualization, are still unclear in the fashion industry, achieving the goals included in the UN 2030 Agenda. This study draws on bibliometric analysis and systematic review of the literature on 114 articles published between 1990 and 2021 allows to identify the above issues in the research domains, and outline the evolutionary trajectories, as well as to explore the literary corpus about responsible innovation (RI) in the ethical corporate behaviour (ECB) of the fashion industry and its Asian suppliers. The results highlight that fashion brands strive to develop RI and ECB along their supply chain. Still, the misalignment of corporate ethics and cultural values represents a significant obstacle to the adoption of business models, especially to achieve the goals of UN 2030 Agenda. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that discusses RI as enabling driver in the ECB for fashion companies also defining a future research agenda including RI, ECB, iSBMs towards SDGs.

This article aims to investigate the role of digital technologies for sustainable waste management in the cruise industry to meet the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda. These issues are analyzed through the sustainability disclosure of the major cruise corporations. Under the lens of the corporate social responsibility framework and legitimacy theory, this study construed sustainability reports of four major cruise corporations published from 2015 to 2019 and their website pages by using the Leximancer text-mining software to map the underlying main research topics with the visual concepts range and manual content analysis. The results highlight the increasing commitment of cruise corporations to reduce the environmental impact by meeting sustainable development goals (SDGs) included in the UN 2030 Agenda by investing in digital technologies on-board ships. Using a double level of sustainability reporting analysis, this study, compared to previous studies, seeks to determine best practices on operational processes on-board ships regarding waste issues, including the digital technologies as an enabler to sustainability, especially SDGs. This study opens the way to scholars about waste processes and financial investment in technology issues, as well as the role played by the regulatory framework. In addition, this study highlights the insufficiency of the theory of legitimacy alone to identify best practices related to broader waste issues. Likewise, the practitioners find in this study a key roadmap about the need to involve crew and cruisers in the waste digital process thanks sharing of programs to define the waste practices. Practitioners also find the address to the factors that will make them aware of the current weakness of nonfinancial disclosure in sustainability reporting. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study represents the first time an empirical analysis conducted through sustainability reporting and other non-financial documents allows to identify “best practices” adopted on-board cruise ships to meet sustainability goals in digital waste management. Moreover, the use of two levels of analysis, by Leximancer and manual content analysis about the text documents companies make available to stakeholders, allows for identifying the high-level concepts and key ideas without bias, well as being able to define the perimeter of good practices linked to the orientation of cruise corporations toward new technologies.

Sustainability has become one of the key hubs around which the actions conducted by international economic operators revolve. This new perspective, perhaps better defined as “requirement”, given its specific weight in the global context, needs analysis of firms’ behaviours with regard to sustainability disclosure and the corporate governance (CG) mechanisms influencing the information released. Board of directors and CSR committee are critical CG mechanisms in that sense. This paper aims at investigating the relationship between specifics board characteristics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure. More specifically, the study investigates the relation between board independence and CSR disclosure, and how this relationship is moderated by the presence of a CSR committee. The analysis has been conducted on a sample of 119 Italian non-financial listed companies. The results obtained, using OLS regression method, show the existence of a positive and significant relationship between board independence and CSR disclosure. Moreover, the findings reveal that the presence of a CSR committee positively moderates the previous relationship, showing the complementary role played by board independence and CSR committee. These results have critical implications for boards, managers, regulators, and policymakers operating to define better corporate governance mechanisms, highlighting the importance of the joint effect of board independence and CSR committee in improving firms’ CSR disclosure practices. Our study also has relevant implications for researchers, evidencing the need to study the complementary effects of different CG mechanisms, rather than the single effect, on influencing CSR disclosure.