The sustainability debate in the food sector has exposed the current food system to critics, encouraging the significant growth of Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), new ways of food production, distribution and consumption that aim to shorten the food chain. Our study is focused on Food Assembly (FA), a special kind of AFN combining the culture of social entrepreneurship and digital innovation to achieve sustainability and a high social impact. The coexistence of a digital platform and a weekly farmers’ market triggers, within this network, mechanisms of knowledge sharing and self-organisation. To date, however, few studies have focused simultaneously on online and on-site interactions within AFNs, especially with quantitative studies. Our paper aims to test the hypothesis that online and on-site knowledge sharing affects the success of a FA measured by customer sustainable behaviour change. To do so, we developed a quantitative analysis based on a regression model. We collected data via a questionnaire submitted to 8497 Italian FA customers, of which 2115 responses were included in our analysis. The results show that online knowledge sharing significantly affects customer change towards more sustainable purchasing and consumption behaviours, while on-site knowledge sharing positively affects sustainable purchasing behaviours.

This paper feeds the literature about investors’ reaction to the release of going concern modified audit reports, which is abundant and controversial among scholars. Moving a step beyond the solely detection of abnormal stock returns at and around the event date, as done in the only two previous studies on the Italian setting, we perform an OLS multiple regression to test the informativeness of CARs and the influence of variables as selected firms’ accounts, auditor characteristics, the market capitalization and specific measures of financial distress to gather evidence whether investors react adversely to elements different from going concern modifications (GCMs). Based on our findings, investors react negatively to GCMs attached to qualified opinions and, surprisingly, positively to GCMs attached to clean opinions, reversing the prevailing evidence found out in the literature, especially in the USA. We attribute these results to the rough knowledge of Italian naïve investors of the going concern (GC) issue. The study detects how disclosure features conceived for large equity markets can lead to different investors’ behaviours in small ones on the one hand; on the other hand, it cannot lead to unequivocable generalization, even within similar countries, in light of sub-specific country features. The piece of evidence achieved suggests, for further research, to make an investors categorization to analyse market reactions, which takes more into account three main features stressed by the prevailing literature of small equity markets: high ownership concentration, the higher presence of institutional investors and the poorer reputation of BIG4 auditors.

The issue today is no longer to further investigate the “rules and mechanisms” of corporate governance, that have already been largely examined. It is more on reading through the lenses of corporate governance the new important issues that are challenging our world. The ten papers included in this issue discuss many different and interesting topics related to corporate governance and sustainability. We can see some common elements that certainly represent three emerging and relevant trends that characterize our contemporary world.The first one is obviously fundamental for our journal and is represented by the evolution of sustainability trends. The second common element that can be recognised in some papers of this issue is related to a global perspective approach and globalization. A third element that connects various papers of this issue and which constitutes an absolutely crucial and strategic trend for our world is represented by digital innovation and ICT.