Performance management change in archaeological sites: The case of Herculaneum Conservation Project

This study focuses on the issues relating to the implementation of management accounting systems in complex settings such as archeological sites. The aim is to understand the conditions under which the implementation of performance management systems (PMS) may enable cultural organizations to fulfil their multiple objectives and the factors which play a crucial role in such dynamics. Focusing on the Herculaneum Conservation Project (HCP) the study explains how PMS came to be implemented having been made acceptable to all parties involved. The Middle Range Theory as developed by Broadbent and Laughlin (Accounting control and controlling accounting: interdisciplinary and critical perspectives, Bingley, Emerald, 2013) was utilized to explore how the PMS change took place in the HCP, and focus on the factors influencing this process. The findings reveal that the change in the PMS benefited from the involvement of a multidisciplinary Specialist Work Group. This involvement reduced the natural tendency to resist the forces of change and increased the commitment of the various groups of stakeholders to the new culture. The findings reveal how PMS were developed in the context of a multifaceted approach to change, allowing us to draw both theoretical and practical lessons that may be brought to bear in other complex contexts.     

Students Mobility: Assessing the Determinants of Attractiveness Across Competing Territorial Areas

A central question for education authorities has become “which factors make a territory attractive for tertiary students?” Tertiary education is recognised as one of the most important assets for the development of a territory, thus students’ mobility becomes a brain drain issue whenever there are prevalent areas that attract students from other territories. In this paper, we try to identify the most important factors that could affect student mobility in Italy. In doing that we analyse students’ flows across competing territorial areas which supply tertiary education programs. We will consider a wide range of determinants related to the socio-economic characteristics of the areas as well as resources of the universities in the territories in terms of variety and quantity of the degree programs there available, financial endowments provided by Central Government, and services available to students. The Bradley–Terry modelling approach based on pair comparisons has been adopted to define the attractiveness of competing territories and assess how much the detected divergences can be attributed to factors directly related to the considered characteristics of the universities in the territory and how much is ascribable to inherent characteristics of the areas where the universities are located such as the labour market conditions. Furthermore, the adopted approach allows us to consider uncertainty in defining territorial attractiveness and making comparisons. In this way, we would like to provide some evidences to assess if the rules currently used by the Central Government to finance public universities on the basis of their capabilities to attract students really reward the efforts made by the university system in the area to improve their standard of quality or, on the contrary, reward the territorial features.     

Does Tourism Consumption Behaviour Mirror Differences in Living Standards?

Based on the theoretical foundation of well-being measurement, the study explores differences in living standards by analysing the distribution of tourism expenditure. A mixture of regression models is used to explore the heterogeneity in tourism consumption by identifying groups of families with similar tourism consumption behaviour as a function of certain socio-demographic and economic factors. The empirical analysis, performed on Italian expenditure data, suggests that there are three different patterns of consumption behaviour conditional to the socio-demographic and economic covariates in the tourism market and that differences in tourism consumption between groups of households mirror inequalities in living standards.     

(Sub) Optimality and (non) optimal satisficing in risky decision experiments

We implement a risky choice experiment based on one-dimensional choice variables and risk neutrality induced via binary lottery incentives. Each participant confronts many parameter constellations with varying optimal payoffs. We assess (sub)optimality, as well as (non)optimal satisficing by eliciting aspirations in addition to choices. Treatments differ in the probability that a binary random event, which are payoff—but not optimal choice—relevant is experimentally induced and whether participants choose portfolios directly or via satisficing, i.e., by forming aspirations and checking for satisficing before making their choice. By incentivizing aspiration formation, we can test satisficing, and in cases of satisficing, determine whether it is optimal.     

The dark side of leadership: A systematic review of creativity and innovation

It is believed that workplace creativity and innovation are fostered by positive leader behaviors and positive workplace relationships and hindered by the opposite. However, some challenge this view and argue that creativity and innovation can also be fostered when employees experience what is increasingly referred to as “the dark side of leadership”. Research in this area is sparse, contradictory, and overly confusing. We provide a comprehensive systematic review of 106 empirical studies on this topic. We review research on a broad range of constructs, including abusive supervision, authoritarian leadership, narcissistic leadership, and close monitoring. As might be expected, a larger number of the articles reviewed found a negative relationship, but there are important discrepancies and details. Our review reports the main effects, summarizes the results of the mediating and moderating variables, and highlights methodological shortcomings of the previous literature. On this basis, several recommendations are made to advance this field of research.     

The Service Brand as Relationships Builder

This article examines the appropriateness of the notion and application of relationship marketing in various contexts. Theoretical and conceptual similarities between the broad notions of ‘the brand’ and of relationship marketing as risk reducers, simplifiers of choice and guarantee of quality are uncovered. We put forward a notion of relationship marketing as a further step in the branding process, whereby whenever perceived risk and consumer involvement are high, relationship marketing acts as a supplementary tool enabling consumers to maintain cognitive consistency and psychological comfort. Experts' opinions regarding branding in a service context expanded on these concepts. Especially for more intangible offerings, such as financial services, the experts stressed the use of corporate brand identity as the basis of relationship building both inside and outside the organization and as a means to achieve differentiation and provide the focus for homogeneous and consistent service delivery. Finally, we suggest the concept of the service brand as a holistic process beginning with the relationship between the firm and its staff and coming alive during the interactions between staff and customers.     

Network influence and organizational performance: The effects of tie strength and structural equivalence

We combine theory and empirical evidence to develop and test three related claims about how ties strength and structural equivalence affect interorganizational performance similarity. First, network partners attain similar levels of performance because direct network ties facilitate information and resource sharing, and the diffusion of organizational practices. Organizations occupying similar network positions attain similar levels of performance because they face similar competitive constraints. Second, because mechanisms underlying performance similarity implied by direct network ties and similarity in network positions are different, strength of network ties and network position affect different dimensions of organizational performance. Third, we expect that tie strength will affect aspects of performance that are more likely to be influenced by processes activated by the direct contact between network partners. We expect structural equivalence to affect more strongly those aspects of organizational performance that are more directly influenced by competition. An analysis of interorganizational networks and organizational performance within a regional community of hospitals provides evidence in support of these claims. Models estimated on a sample of 8190 interorganizational dyads suggest that the effects of tie strength and structural equivalence on organizational performance are highly differentiated and contingent on specific aspects of performance. We show that these conclusions are robust with respect to a wide variety of other factors that may be responsible for performance similarity including competitive interdependence, structural homophily, and resource complementarity.     

Functional principal component analysis for the explorative analysis of multisite–multivariate air pollution time series with long gaps

The knowledge of the urban air quality represents the first step to face air pollution issues. For the last decades many cities can rely on a network of monitoring stations recording concentration values for the main pollutants. This paper focuses on functional principal component analysis (FPCA) to investigate multiple pollutant datasets measured over time at multiple sites within a given urban area. Our purpose is to extend what has been proposed in the literature to data that are multisite and multivariate at the same time. The approach results to be effective to highlight some relevant statistical features of the time series, giving the opportunity to identify significant pollutants and to know the evolution of their variability along time. The paper also deals with missing value issue. As it is known, very long gap sequences can often occur in air quality datasets, due to long time failures not easily solvable or to data coming from a mobile monitoring station. In the considered dataset, large and continuous gaps are imputed by empirical orthogonal function procedure, after denoising raw data by functional data analysis and before performing FPCA, in order to further improve the reconstruction.     

Heterogeneity,school-effects and the North/South achievement gap in Italian secondary education: evidence from a three-level mixed model

With the aim of assessing the extent of the differences in the context of Italian educational system, the paper applies multilevel modeling to a new administrative dataset, containing detailed information for more than 500,000 students at grade 6 in the year 2011/2012, provided by the Italian Institute for the Evaluation of Educational System. Data are grouped by classes, schools and geographical areas. Different models for each area are fitted, in order to properly address the heteroscedasticity of the phenomenon. The results show that it is possible to estimate statistically significant “school effects”, i.e., the positive/negative association of attending a specific school and the student’s test score, after a case-mix adjustment. Therefore, the paper’s most important message is that school effects are different in terms of magnitude and types in the three geographical macro areas (Northern, Central and Southern Italy) and are dependent on specific students’ and schools’ characteristics.