RISULTATI RICERCA

Afghanistan has been an understudied country despite its current difficulties stemming from political conflict for decades and its adverse impact on the country and society, such as food security. This article presents firsthand findings on the potential of collaborative agribusiness initiatives as part of Afghanistan’s food system to address food security challenges.These embody an emerging body of literature known as alternative food networks, as part of the Slow Food movement that prioritizes community wellbeing, as a solution to food security. Findings are drawn from selected interviewees who are key Afghan stakeholders, ranging from farmers to experts in the agribusiness sector, relating to collaborative agribusiness initiatives which play a crucial role in fostering food security in Afghanistan. Specifically, it argues that through collaborative initiatives among farmers and the integration of marginalized groups, agricultural productivity increases, which ultimately leads to better food security. Three components emerge – resilience, resource enhancement and revelation (3Rs) – as the conceptual contribution. This approach of alternative food network improves access to markets and resources, particularly for smallholder farmers in remote regions and provinces.

The research examines integrating the Slow Food Movement (SFM) with Ireland’s lobster industry, emphasising preserving local culinary heritage as crucial for Sustainable Food Systems. This heritage includes both tangible elements, like agricultural practices and intangible ones, such as traditional food preparation. Slow food aims to protect these traditions from the homogenisation of food production. Using Social Practice Theory, the research analyses lobster consumption in Ireland, underscoring its symbolic importance in Irish culture to develop a novel framework adapted from the Social Practice Framework. The study combines qualitative interviews and secondary data analysis to explore lobster’s role in Irish culinary heritage and its potential for promoting sustainable seafood consumption. Results from the study highlight the critical role of Irish lobster fishing communities in maintaining cultural food heritage, with traditional practices contributing to ecological and economic sustainability. The SFM influences lobster consumption, supporting sustainable and culturally important food practices. This research underscores the intricate link between tradition and sustainability, suggesting a model to balance cultural integrity with sustainable practices, contributing to a more culturally informed and environmentally conscious food consumption approach.

Internet purchases are no longer a new form of purchase, but they are successfully complementing conventional product sales channels. This study aims to understand factors, such as: product performance risk, distance, trust and risk reduction that affect consumer’s intention to buy food products online. The following data was collected through a structured questionnaire.Confirmatory Factor Analysis was used to develop measures and Structural Equation Modelling was used to test hypotheses. The results show that trust and risk reduction have a positive effect on the consumers’ intention to buy food products online.Product performance risk has a negative effect on the intention to buy food products online, meanwhile distance does not show any significance on their intention to buy food products online. These findings provide significant insights into what limits consumers to consider the online channel as a complementary alternative of shopping for food products.

Recently, the Alps have been experiencing new social phenomena, as a return to agriculture. In this context, the alpine food heritage has been reconsidered after a period of neglection, and is now under application to UNESCO Register of good safeguarding practices in the frame of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. This paper reflects on a specific case study, the cultivation of red berries in the Entremont region (Switzerland), in the light of an action-research at the Centre régional d’études des populations alpines (CREPA) in Sembrancher (Switzerland), also financed by the Interreg project Living ICH - Cross-border governance instruments for the safeguarding and valorization of the Living Intangible Heritage. The extent of the red berries from the 1930s to the 1990s shows the importance of this cultivation for the local economy in the last century. Nowadays, there are few evidences of the red berries, due to the preponderance of the meadows used for mowing but, after several decades of abandonment, a reconsideration of the cultural, social and economic values of these berries seems to be in order.

This study aims to understand how the individual elements of the food system relate to sustainability through a meta-synthesis. Changes in food production and consumption in recent decades have had a detrimental effect on human health and the environment. This study helps to explain the existing gap that affects the entire process from food production to the final consumer by discussing the elements that comprise the food system dimensions of a healthy and sustainable diet. The meta-synthesis approach makes it possible to capture elements and their relationship to each other and to generate explanations about theoretical relationships. With this in mind, searches were conducted in the Scopus database, initially selecting 1,362 studies that contained previously selected search descriptors. Subsequently, an exploratory analysis of the titles and abstracts of the articles was conducted, resulting in a set of twenty case studies centered on the topic of interest. After applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, twelve studies remained to make up this meta-synthesis. The elements that emerged from the analytical synthesis of the articles favor or hinder the transition to healthy and sustainable food systems and have an impact on four dimensions: Production, supply, marketing and consumption, as well as on the food system as a whole. As a theoretical contribution, this study explains the elements and stressors of sustainable food systems. As a practical contribution, based on these stressors, action plans can be developed involving different stakeholders and public policies to develop public policies that promote healthy and sustainable diets.

This paper studies the importance which farm managers attach to the investment in the milking system in terms of their (management) objectives and expectations. According to a survey of 455 Swiss farm managers, the main reasons for investment decisions for all milking systems were to reduce labour and physical stress. For parlours, income objectives and animal welfare were more important than for other milking systems. In the case of automatic milking systems (AMS), the focus was on making working hours more flexible and increasing family time. According to farm managers, these objectives were largely achieved. The study shows, that higher income or production volume become less important reasons over the observed time period and that AMS are implemented by older farm managers.

The special issue, ‘Revisiting the Slow Food Movement: Three Cases of Heritage Innovation and Sustainability in Alternative Food Networks’, explores the integration of Slow Food principles within Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) to enhance sustainability and cultural heritage preservation. By analysing case studies from Afghanistan, Ireland, and Switzerland, the editorial illustrates how AFNs can address food security, local communities’ social adherence, economic viability, and environmental sustainability. The Afghan case emphasises collaborative agribusiness for resilience and market access, the Irish study focuses on sustainable lobster fishing practices, and the Swiss example highlights the revival of traditional red berry cultivation. Utilising the Triple Bottom Line framework, this editorial explores the multifaceted benefits of AFNs in fostering sustainable food systems that align with local cultural practices and innovative agricultural techniques. This special issue provides valuable insights for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars aiming to develop more resilient and equitable food systems globally.

Over the past few decades, European institutions and policymakers have promot-ed gender diversity in management and strategic leadership roles. Prior literature has highlighted the importance of board gender diversity; neverthe-less, previous studies have mainly focused on the private sector, while the public sector – particularly the healthcare sector – remains under-investigated. Hence, to fill this gap, the present paper aims to examine the impact of board gen-der diversity on Italian public health outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic to address the calls for more excellent representation of women in leadership roles. The research methodology uses an OLS linear regression model to examine the re-lationship between the number of women in top positions in Italian Healthcare Or-ganizations (roles of general, administrative, and health managers) and their fi-nancial and non-financial performance. Results show that women’s involvement in governance positively impacts the per-formance of Italian healthcare organisations, while no significant association has emerged regarding non-financial performance. This study could represent a starting point for implementing measures that focus on the health sector. The sector has been experiencing a severe crisis for years and, therefore, needs innovative strategies for its relaunch.

This work aims at analyzing the level of awareness on the topic of planning and control by people with an apical role in research spin-offs, suggesting a framework to increase the survivability of spin-offs. The universities take a strategic role as “knowledge incubators” to ensure competi-tive advantage through the use of their knowledge stock. In this scenario, research spin-offs contribute to the valorisation of intellectual capital in universities. How-ever, Consorzio Netval’s data highlighted that the percentage of spin-offs liquidat-ed from 2000 to 2019 is approximately 72%. The analysis of the literature shows many issues that spin-offs face; however, there is little research on another possible critical issue that this study aims to fill: the difficulties during the phases of research spin-offs’ planning and control, espe-cially in adequately balancing their short and long-term goals. Thus, we submitted a questionnaire to a panel of experts to investigate their view of the management, planning and control systems. Results show a lack of atten-tion to the application of these systems in spin-offs, while acknowledging aware-ness of their importance. On the basis of these findings, we propose a framework to increase the survivabil-ity of research spin-offs, overcoming their main issues. Our framework relies on the application of ambidextrous intellectual capital to spin-offs, considered a valuable solution, given that it combines the attention to the future, typical of spin-offs and start-ups, with the attention to the present, necessary to go beyond the pre-seed phase.

This study examines how the digitalization of information processes embraced by shipping intermediaries (i.e. shipping agencies) within supply chain management (SCM) changes performance management systems (PMSs). This exploratory study uses the lens of stakeholder theory and adopts a case study methodology to investigate a shipping agency based in Italy. It uses primary data collected from semi-structured interviews and secondary data. The data were collected from No-vember 2022 to March 2023. The results indicate that the digitalization of infor-mation accounting processes has boosted the adoption of key performance indi-cators (KPIs) to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of opera-tional processes. The results also reveal that, in the agency relationship between agent and shipowner, the agent does not use the benefits of PMSs to identify stra-tegic KPIs for the business. This study highlights that when adopting PMSs in ship-ping agencies, it is necessary to include both an information accounting and an organizational dimension. Managers should be involved in training programs sup-porting a culture of sharing information through digitalized systems. The main lim-itation of this study, due to its exploratory nature, is the lack of analysis including the shipowner’s perspective and the impossibility of generalizing based on the re-sults. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate digitaliza-tion, PMSs, and SCM in terms of the organizational-accounting frameworks of shipping agencies.