Turning Farmers into Business Partners through Value Co-Creation Projects. Insights from the Coffee Supply Chain

This study examines the empowerment of low-power, vulnerable stakeholders of global, complex supply chains as one effective strategy to increase value co-creation and to moderate the vulnerabilities that threaten supply chain resilience. Previous scholars have indicated the necessity of investigating the concept of value co-creation further by including various stakeholder perspectives and suggesting systems of evaluation. This research thus focuses on low-power smallholder farmers within the coffee supply chain by qualitatively evaluating the effectiveness of value co-creation projects. The study also analyzes the extent of development and the nature of empowerment initiatives designed conjointly by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and coffee roasters that are addressed to farmers. The mixed qualitative methodology includes a literature review, interviews, focus groups, and content analysis of 20 value co-creation projects conducted in various developing and emerging coffee-producing countries. The research proposes a theoretical framework employed to conduct focus groups with Brazilian coffee farmers. This framework empirically demonstrates that these farmers are in the process of becoming business partners of the coffee supply chain thanks to various empowerment initiatives, common to most of the analyzed projects, that appear to moderate specific vulnerabilities of the coffee supply chain and therefore benefit supply chain resilience

Young Stakeholders' Perception of Public Companies Responsibility: An Empirical Study on Business-to-Customer Markets

The present research aims to investigate business-to-customer Italian public companies and their relationship with young stakeholders. The focus is to analyse the correlation between young stakeholders' perception of company environmental and social sustainability and the market capitalisation. The approach of the present research has been used to structure the literature and to conduct an empirical analysis on a sample of public companies chosen among the Italian larger 150 in terms of market capitalisation. Through a qualitative research based on focus groups and individual interviews, a sample of 33 public companies has been selected and tested by using an online survey of 420 Italian youth. The analysis of firms' young stakeholders' responsibility perception has taken to confirm those authors and managers sustain that the more the firm market capitalization is, the more the organization is perceived as responsible