Engaging stakeholders through Facebook. The case of Global Compact LEAD participants

Facebook has deeply modified the way people communicate and interact. From a business perspective, Facebook has enormous potential as a means of communication and stakeholder engagement. It enables companies to share contents rapidly and efficiently with a large number of stakeholders worldwide. People can personalise their Facebook profile to receive updates from selected companies. Moreover, people can reply to such posts or simply manifest their approval by liking or sharing the posts. In this way, people also propagate corporate information among their own friends. The dramatic diffusion of Facebook should encourage companies to virtually interact with a network of stakeholders 2.0, using Facebook as a stakeholder engagement tool. The evolution to Web 2.0 goes with a general change in the social and business environment. In today’s world, both policy makers and the public expect that companies work in a sustainable way and consult their stakeholders about corporate strategies, operations and performance. The discussion should concern social and ecological cares as well as economic issues. In this sense, the engagement of the Facebook community could considerable enlarge and improve the dialogue. This paper offers a theoretical and empirical analysis to answer the following research question: do sustainability-oriented companies use Facebook as an effective means of stakeholder engagement? The paper contains an investigation based on UN Global Compact LEAD members, characterised by strong commitment and cooperation with governments, civil society, labour and the UN in order to promote sustainable practices. To evaluate the contribution of Facebook to the dialogue on sustainability, the investigation considered the types of contents published by the LEAD companies on their Facebook pages in 30 days. According to the subject, seven categories of posts emerged from the analysis: human rights and social citizenship; labour; environment; anti-corruption; strategy, business activity and economic performance; news on products and services; other. To evaluate the use of Facebook for stakeholder engagement 2.0, the investigation verified how many “likes”, comments and “shares” each post received and how often the company replied. The analysis showed that some LEAD members did not have a Facebook profile, which is unacceptable nowadays. Moreover, the companies with an official page rarely covered all three perspectives of sustainability (social, environmental, and economic issues). Furthermore, companies rarely replied to stakeholders’ comments. Based on the empirical evidence, most LEAD participants should modify the way they used Facebook. Therefore, the results of this research may help them improve stakeholder engagement 2.0

Risk Management Standards in Global Markets

Organizations face internal and external risks, which can affect their ability to achieve the established objectives and to satisfy stakeholders’ expectations. However, implementing an integrated risk management system can contribute to avoid risks or reduce their consequences for corporate effectiveness. This paper describes the most important frameworks and standards of integrated risk management, emphasizing the increasing harmonization of best practices all over the world

The Governance of Credit Rating Agencies in the European Regulation: the Right Way to Enhance Market Competition?

Since 2007 financial markets worldwide have been suffering from a confidence crisis which has emphasised the discussion about the Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) and the opportunity to enhance the competition in such a highly concentrated sector. The reform process, carried out by European and American regulators, aims at reinforcing the external surveillance on CRAs and, at the same time, improving the governance of the agencies in terms of board composition, internal control systems and disclosure. After an in-depth and comparative analysis of the legal rules, the article shows and discusses the results of an investigation focalised on the contents and quality of the disclosure of 32 selected CRAs, with the purpose of foreseeing the future competitive conditions in the European rating market, since the new European Regulation should break the oligopoly of the largest American agencies by introducing minimal governance requirements

Sustainability and Convergence: The Future of Corporate Governance Systems?

In today’s world, a sustainable approach to corporate governance can be a source of competitive advantage and a long-term success factor for any firm. Sustainable governance requires that the board of directors considers economic, social and environmental expectations in an integrated way, no matter what ownership structure and formal rules of corporate governance apply to the company: this mitigates the traditional differences between insider and outsider systems of corporate governance. Previous studies failed to consider the contribution of sustainability in the process of corporate governance convergence. Therefore, the aim of this article is to fill the gap in the existing literature by means of a qualitative analysis, supporting the international debate about convergence of corporate governance systems. The article describes the evolution of outsider and insider systems in the light of the increasing importance of sustainability in the board’s decision-making and firm’s operation to satisfy the needs of all the company’s stakeholders. According to this, a qualitative content analysis developed with a directed approach completes the theoretical discussion, demonstrating that sustainability can bring de facto convergence between outsider and insider corporate governance systems. The article aims to be a theoretical starting point for future research, the findings of which could also have practical implications: the study encourages the policy makers to translate the sustainable business best practices into laws and recommendations, strengthening the mutual influence between formal and substantial convergence

Corporate governance ed efficacia della comunicazione con gli stakeholder (Tesi di dottorato)

Da alcuni anni nei sistemi economici avanzati l’attenzione degli investitori, delle autorità di vigilanza e di regolamentazione dei mercati finanziari, degli analisti e – non ultimo – del legislatore, si sta concentrando sui problemi connessi ad un efficace governo delle imprese. In effetti, gli interessi coinvolti nel governo aziendale tendono oggi a crescere nella numerosità e nella varietà, tanto che l’approccio incentrato sulla soddisfazione degli shareholder risulta ormai limitato. Si rende indispensabile, invece, una visione di più ampio respiro, che ponga enfasi sulla necessità di un consenso diffuso da ricercare presso tutti gli interlocutori sociali, realizzando un equilibrato contemperamento degli interessi convergenti nell’impresa. Tale consenso va ricercato non soltanto sui risultati conseguiti ma anche, e soprattutto, sui principi che ispirano l’azione degli organi istituzionali.Gli scandali che, in tutto il mondo, hanno investito le grandi imprese, con ripercussioni significative per gli shareholder di minoranza e per l’ambiente economico in generale, giustificano la richiesta insistente di legalità, responsabilità, equità e trasparenza, quali presupposti per una corretta gestione dei sistemi aziendali e delle relazioni con tutti gli stakeholder. È dunque cresciuto l’interesse per la corporate governance, ovvero per il complesso di principi e modalità da adottare nella direzione e nel conrollo delle imprese e, più in generale, nell’interazione con gli interlocutori sociali al fine di raggiungere gli obiettivi prefissati sotto il profilo economico, competitivo e socio-ambientale.La necessità di recuperare – o di consolidare – la fiducia degli stakeholder ha portato a rafforzare l’efficacia dei sistemi di corporate governance, in particolare nelle imprese a proprietà diffusa.tale scopo gli ordinamenti nazionali sono stati in parte riformati dai rispettivi legislatori, in parte integrati attraverso le previsioni contenute nei codici di autodisciplina, ponendo enfasi: 1. sulle responsabilità, sui compiti e sul funzionamento degli organi istituzionali; 2. sui sistemi di controllo interno; 3. sulla completezza e sulla veridicità dell’informativa di carattere istituzionale. Con specifico riferimento alla comunicazione istituzionale, tanto il legislatore quanto il mercato esercitano pressioni affinché si diffonda una reale cultura della trasparenza nei vertici aziendali. In effetti, la tutela delle attese di tutti gli stakeholder passa attraverso la ferma volontà di offrire una chiara ed esaustiva rappresentazione delle finalità perseguite, dei principi che animano il governo economico dell’impresa, dei risultati raggiunti e della conseguente capacità di distribuire valore agli interlocutori sociali. Tra le comunicazioni istituzionali di recente introduzione si segnala la relazione sulla corporate governance delle società quotate. Dopo un'ampia trattazione teorica dei sistemi di governance delle società quotate, in Italia e all'estero, il lavoro presenta un'indagine empirica riferita alle imprese quotate in Borsa Italiana, in particolare nei mercati MTA e MTAX. Lo studio ha ad oggetto la comunicazione sulla corporate governance diffusa dalle imprese indicate, che sono sottoposte a requisiti stringenti di trasparenza e di corporate governance. In particolare, l’analisi è condotta, dapprima, sui siti web aziendali, con l’obiettivo di valutare la completezza delle informazioni messe a dispo-sizione degli stakeholder per quanto attiene alle strutture ed ai processi di governance. Successivamente, l’attenzione si concentra sulla relazione di governance, di cui ven-gono approfondite l’efficacia espositiva e la completezza

Evidence for Sub-Haplogroup H5 of Mitochondrial DNA as a Risk Factor for Late Onset Alzheimer's Disease

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease and the leading cause of dementia among senile subjects. It has been proposed that AD can be caused by defects in mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation. Given the fundamental contribution of the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) for the respiratory chain, there have been a number of studies investigating the association between mtDNA inherited variants and multifactorial diseases, however no general consensus has been reached yet on the correlation between mtDNA haplogroups and AD. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We applied for the first time a high resolution analysis (sequencing of displacement loop and restriction analysis of specific markers in the coding region of mtDNA) to investigate the possible association between mtDNA-inherited sequence variation and AD in 936 AD patients and 776 cognitively assessed normal controls from central and northern Italy. Among over 40 mtDNA sub-haplogroups analysed, we found that sub-haplogroup H5 is a risk factor for AD (OR=1.85, 95% CI:1.04-3.23) in particular for females (OR=2.19, 95% CI:1.06-4.51) and independently from the APOE genotype. Multivariate logistic regression revealed an interaction between H5 and age. When the whole sample is considered, the H5a subgroup of molecules, harboring the 4336 transition in the tRNAGln gene, already associated to AD in early studies, was about threefold more represented in AD patients than in controls (2.0% vs 0.8%; p=0.031), and it might account for the increased frequency of H5 in AD patients (4.2% vs 2.3%). The complete re-sequencing of the 56 mtDNAs belonging to H5 revealed that AD patients showed a trend towards a higher number (p=0.052) of sporadic mutations in tRNA and rRNA genes when compared with controls. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that high resolution analysis of inherited mtDNA sequence variation can help in identifying both ancient polymorphisms defining sub-haplogroups and the accumulation of sporadic mutations associated with complex traits such as AD

Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

Background: In an era of shifting global agendas and expanded emphasis on non-communicable diseases and injuries along with communicable diseases, sound evidence on trends by cause at the national level is essential. The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) provides a systematic scientific assessment of published, publicly available, and contributed data on incidence, prevalence, and mortality for a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive list of diseases and injuries. Methods: GBD estimates incidence, prevalence, mortality, years of life lost (YLLs), years lived with disability (YLDs), and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) due to 369 diseases and injuries, for two sexes, and for 204 countries and territories. Input data were extracted from censuses, household surveys, civil registration and vital statistics, disease registries, health service use, air pollution monitors, satellite imaging, disease notifications, and other sources. Cause-specific death rates and cause fractions were calculated using the Cause of Death Ensemble model and spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression. Cause-specific deaths were adjusted to match the total all-cause deaths calculated as part of the GBD population, fertility, and mortality estimates. Deaths were multiplied by standard life expectancy at each age to calculate YLLs. A Bayesian meta-regression modelling tool, DisMod-MR 2.1, was used to ensure consistency between incidence, prevalence, remission, excess mortality, and cause-specific mortality for most causes. Prevalence estimates were multiplied by disability weights for mutually exclusive sequelae of diseases and injuries to calculate YLDs. We considered results in the context of the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a composite indicator of income per capita, years of schooling, and fertility rate in females younger than 25 years. Uncertainty intervals (UIs) were generated for every metric using the 25th and 975th ordered 1000 draw values of the posterior distribution. Findings: Global health has steadily improved over the past 30 years as measured by age-standardised DALY rates. After taking into account population growth and ageing, the absolute number of DALYs has remained stable. Since 2010, the pace of decline in global age-standardised DALY rates has accelerated in age groups younger than 50 years compared with the 1990–2010 time period, with the greatest annualised rate of decline occurring in the 0–9-year age group. Six infectious diseases were among the top ten causes of DALYs in children younger than 10 years in 2019: lower respiratory infections (ranked second), diarrhoeal diseases (third), malaria (fifth), meningitis (sixth), whooping cough (ninth), and sexually transmitted infections (which, in this age group, is fully accounted for by congenital syphilis; ranked tenth). In adolescents aged 10–24 years, three injury causes were among the top causes of DALYs: road injuries (ranked first), self-harm (third), and interpersonal violence (fifth). Five of the causes that were in the top ten for ages 10–24 years were also in the top ten in the 25–49-year age group: road injuries (ranked first), HIV/AIDS (second), low back pain (fourth), headache disorders (fifth), and depressive disorders (sixth). In 2019, ischaemic heart disease and stroke were the top-ranked causes of DALYs in both the 50–74-year and 75-years-and-older age groups. Since 1990, there has been a marked shift towards a greater proportion of burden due to YLDs from non-communicable diseases and injuries. In 2019, there were 11 countries where non-communicable disease and injury YLDs constituted more than half of all disease burden. Decreases in age-standardised DALY rates have accelerated over the past decade in countries at the lower end of the SDI range, while improvements have started to stagnate or even reverse in countries with higher SDI. Interpretation: As disability becomes an increasingly large component of disease burden and a larger component of health expenditure, greater research and developm nt investment is needed to identify new, more effective intervention strategies. With a rapidly ageing global population, the demands on health services to deal with disabling outcomes, which increase with age, will require policy makers to anticipate these changes. The mix of universal and more geographically specific influences on health reinforces the need for regular reporting on population health in detail and by underlying cause to help decision makers to identify success stories of disease control to emulate, as well as opportunities to improve. Funding: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 licens