Economic sciences - 3

Short description of the research team:

Emidia Vagnoni’s research group has been working in the area of performance management and strategic control system design both with regard to public sector organizations and to enterprises. More in depth, previous research results enhance further investigation in the following RESEARCH AREAS:


A) PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT AND STRATEGIC CONTROL SYSTEM
The continuous increase of competitiveness represents a big challenge for enterprises. Sources of competitive advantage could change and enterprises require performance measurement system to monitor the key performance areas towards strategy. The efficacy of the performance management is crucial to business success. Thus, strategic control model and performance measurement systems (Simons, 2000; Lebas, 1995; Otley, 1999, 2003) need to be investigated:
(a) Since some performance dimensions are difficult to measure, the risk is that these are less emphasized and open the way to a short term approach; thus, how to represent the entire performance of the enterprise? What is the impact of the intangible determinants of performance towards internationalization strategy success?
(b) Many issues have an effect towards the ability of the firm to achieve strategic goals: among them, the firms’ strategic agility, the ability of SME to manage the generational change, the leadership role need to be addressed by academic studies.
(c) The contextual factors have an effect on the characteristics of performance determinants and on the performance measurement system implemented. In the public sector organizations, performance measurement and strategic control systems have difficulties to deliver the expected results; the implementation is sometime a weak process, and many internal and external factors intervene.

B) SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTING BETWEEN RESPONSIBILITY AND EXTERNAL LEGITIMACY
Stakeholders’ views are relevant to set the business characteristics, to define communication process, to identify strategies. As a consequence, the organizations are often engaged in meeting stakeholders’ expectations (Owen et al., 2001) and manage the dialogue with a wide range and large number of stakeholders (Swift, Owen, Humphrey, 2001). These issues are addressed both to public and private organizations. Private and public organizations are required to design their businesses considering stakeholders’ expectations, and the context cultural values. Thus, many issues challenge the academic studies:
What is the stakeholders’ contribution to the definition of the organizations’ strategic issues?
Which is the set of measures that organizations belonging to the same sector use to disclosure their attitude toward social and environmental sustainability?
What’s the effect of social and environmental policies on the organizations’ financial dimension?
To what extent social environmental data impact the strategic orientation of the organizations?

Manager/head of the team: Emidia VAGNONI, PhD, BmA
Full Professor of Management Accounting at Ferrara University (Italy)

Team members: B. Bonvento, C. Cavicchi, E. Bracci, M. Tallaki

 

Research infrastructures: Work station, online access to the University of Ferrara library and data bases, access to the statistical analysis software available at the department of economics & management

 

Contact: E. Vagnoni - Email: vgnmde@unife.it   Ph: +39 320 4365028