1,720,994 research outputs found
Gender Equality in the role of Independent Directors. Is it linked to sustainability?
No full textThe growing interest in social, environmental, and ethical aspects of business has underscored the need for a change of course from the typically male composition of Boards of Directors (BoD). Too often, in the past, management and board positions were delegated to men, not only based on competence, but also because of cultural biases and “male traditions”. Falling behind on this issue, and particularly with reference to gender equality related to the concepts of sustainability and ethics, would certainly mean missing new opportunities in value creation for companies. In this sometimes precarious, yet steadily increasing scenario, the important figure of the Independent Director (ID) and his gender, is too often overlooked. This figure, in fact, works concretely in the interest of the company and shareholders, overseeing and guiding the company itself in the right direction. Due to his non-executive role in the board, the ID, as opposed to the internal members of the BoD, enjoys an autonomous point of view.
The purpose of this paper, in a nutshell, is to examine this important profile from a gender perspective in order to observe the statistics with respect to the number, effectiveness, and performance of the female gender in this role. In addition to the phenomenon of detecting the performance of the IDs, the issue has also gained ethical importance, for example, in the same sustainable "good governance" strategies that have arisen in the past fifteen years. For this reason, in our view, the presence or absence of female IDs must necessarily also be read in terms of its impact on sustainability, as its cue for encouragement and outreach. The study concludes with a factual discussion of the empirical analysis conducted on a sample of thirteen banks in the Italian scenario, with reference to the present and the gender of the IDs. Through this statistical study, it was possible to draw a clear picture in support of the literature examined for the relationship between sustainable practices and female IDs, creating also a link between the theory analyzed and the practice identified in this field of research
The Digital Communication in the Fashion Companies: is it a Gender Affair?
No full textThe goal of the paper is to investigate the connections between the prevailing gender of top management in a fashion company and the use of social networks and digital media. Particularly, the main research question is “how does gender affect the relevance of Information and Communication Technologies in the Italian luxury fashion companies?”.
For centuries, Italy has been the benchmark for the high fashion and luxury sector and while the ownership of the firms is often longer totally Italian, the majority of the production is still “made in Italy”. During the financial crisis, the luxury industry has not been affected by downturn much, also thanks to “Millennials”, who assign a symbolic meaning to luxury goods as they endow relevance to virtual windows created by social networks. The brands capable of seizing the opportunity of digital communication (i.e.: e-commerce; social network pages; sponsorships and commercial agreements with “influencers”; etc.) have overcome the adverse economic cycle rapidly.
As digital communication is a resource for the future, is it a male or a female affair in the luxury fashion world? Is gender relevant for the development of social media?
To answer to the above questions, we set a data sample of Italian fashion firms, operating in the luxury segment and equipped with one or more famous brands. For each firm, we collected, in addition to the main financial and economic ratios, some “digital” indicators (such as the number of followers or number of “likes”, usage of e-commerce, partnership with famous “fashion bloggers”, etc.) and some governance and management gender indicators.
Applying statistical techniques to the data set, we demonstrated that the use of technology is not a male prerogative and that even if the use of ICT may positively affect the economic performances of a luxury brand, the management’s gender is not decisive in a firm’s choice to develop revenues through digital communication
Sustainability Reporting: an overview on the current regulatory scenario
No full textThe aim of our study is to provide a key to understand sustainable reporting in
the European and international context. over the past two decades, in fact, this
topic has globally been an evolving and, in parallel, difficult to understand field
of analysis.
To date, however, thanks to the efforts practiced by legislators and international
standard setters, we are witnessing a change of course. Compared to the past, in
fact, is emerging a desire to make the strategy of companies clearer by defining
goals, means, policies and tools related to sustainability. to answer our research
questions, we use a methodology consisting in a “content analysis in communication research” (Berelson, 1952)
The gendered nature of academic institutions: a gender-analysis of Italian Universities
No full textThe academic fields are highly gendered, with men being overrepresented in the highest academic positions, while women tend to occupy the lower and more precarious positions, which indicates the existence of an academic ‘glass ceiling’. Most Italian academic institutions have policies on gender equality and/or diversity, but a common problem is a lack of transparency and gender-disaggregated data. Information such as sex-disaggregated data is essential to carry out gender- equality analysis and to analyse important decision-making processes from a gender perspective. In this paper, we assess the gendered nature of Italian universities by investigating the structure of academic positions by gender at both public and private universities from 2011 to 2017, with the help of gender-disaggregated statistics. Furthermore, we also analyse the gender segregation patterns in the data by geographical area. We document the persistence of a gender gap in a typical Italian academic career. Indeed, the empirical investigation finds that in 2017, while the proportion of women academic staff was 40.2%, women made up only 37.5% of associate professors and 23% of full professors. The results indicate that gender segregation in Italian universities has been reduced over time but is far from eliminated. Despite positive changes achieved in recent years, the study reveals a prevailing vertical segregation in Italian universities, i.e., a significant under- representation of women in the higher ranks of academia
Mothers, Fathers the Formation of Daughters in Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Literary and Pedagogic Analysis
No full textFamily relations within late Victorian/Edwardian bourgeois family represent the core of the vast majority of the novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett. This author managed to put in evidence all the contradictions and the hypocrisy which constituted the inner nature of Victorian and Edwardian family. From this perspective, the main topic approached in this paper will be the relationship between dysfunctional parents, especially mothers, and their daughters in a small yet representative corpus of works by Ivy Compton-Burnett including some of her most prominent novels: Brothers and Sisters (1929), A House and its Head (1935) and Parents and Children (1941). As has been argued, in several works by Burnett, great importance is given to the figure of the governess who usually tends to act as a replacement for an absent or not loving mother. Furthermore, in Parents and Children, the figure of the eldest daughter who acts as a mother for her younger siblings and is in competition with her own mother is displayed. As has been pointed out by several scholars, the distance between mothers and daughters represents one of the pivotal issues of Victorian educational system and, generally speaking, the role of the mother is of crucial importance for the development of the subject formation of daughters. This leads us to the aim of this paper, which is the analysis, both from a literal a psychoanalytic and pedagogical standpoint, with particular reference to feminist critical pedagogy, of the role of the mother and of family relations on the personal developments of daughters during the Victorian age through the lens of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels. To this purpose, we will associate the close reading of the texts giving also great importance to the style, a crucial feature in Compton-Burnett’s works, supported by gender-oriented literary criticism and a pedagogical perspective
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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