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The importance of organizational-stakeholder relationships has been an interesting subject in the organizational literature.

In this chapter, the evolution of the concept of stakeholder and how crucial is the company’s interaction and cooperation with them to achieve common goals has been studied. Initially stakeholder was considered a synonym of shareholder but throughout the years the category has expanded including managers, employees, suppliers, and other key actors, until the current meaning: stakeholder is “any group or individuals who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objectives” (Freeman, 1994). Hence for running successful businesses, the companies need to acknowledge the existing stakeholders and provide them expected benefits, proportionally to their relevance, which is based on their power, legitimacy, and urgency. The chapter concludes by showing us the main principles that identify the management duties to all stakeholders and the necessity of increasing their involvement in decision-making processes.

The core idea behind lean is maximizing customer value and companies’ competitiveness through the streamlining and optimization of its main processes. Lean means creating more value with fewer resources. Thanks to its positive impact on companies’ overall performance, the lean concept is widely adopted across various industries and many organizations. Before being an operational tool, it is a management culture to be disseminated at all levels and applied with patience and conviction. Lean is about continuously improving work processes, purposes, and people. Instead of trying to hold total control of work processes and keep the spotlight, lean management encourages shared responsibility and shared leadership. Lean management was not created in a moment and still is evolving gradually, thanks to the desire of people for continuous improvement.

This essay aims at retracing the intellectual and biographical events of the economist Gino Arias (1879–1940), examining more in detail the two seasons at the opposite ends of his life: the early one that saw him considerably committed to the Zionist cause and the one that, thirty years later, would force him to confront the racial laws of the Fascist regime.

Despite the seeming tragic continuity of these two phases, Arias’s case is a real historiographical paradox since, over the long span between the opposite ends of his biography, not only did he distance himself from the Zionist movement, but he also gradually laid the foundations for his upcoming and immediate dedication to Fascism; indeed, within the Fascist regime he would stand out as an authoritative and influential theorist of corporatism, the institutional solution Mussolini tried to exploit to organize the national economic life.

After carefully examining Arias’s early contributions to the Zionist cause (that include the establishment of the Florentine Zionist Group and that led him toward strongly nationalistic stances), this essay sums up Arias’s intellectual biography during the next years and then, thanks to unprecedented documents from the Italian Ministry of Interior, closely looks into his fate after his conversion to Catholicism in 1932 and up against the racial laws of 1938, as well as into his attempts to escape persecution. A few final observations will then try to highlight the dramatic exemplarity of his case.

My duty in remembering the life and works of Tullio Bagiotti and in discussing his thought is justified for several reasons. I succeeded Bagiotti both in the chair of Political Economy at the University of Milan and in the editorship of the Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Economiche e Commerciali (International Review of Economics and Business); and both Bagiotti and I were assistants to Professor Giovanni Demaria at the Bocconi University of Milan. Even though Bagiotti was teaching at the University of Padua when I was assistant in Milan and there were also, in the following years, few opportunities to meet him, mainly because of the commuter habits of Italian academic life, Bagiotti's great amiability allowed me to benefit from his friendship and impressive culture.

In some settings, sharecropping is associated with large extended families, high fertility, and early age of marriage. These demographic practices are often considered to be labor strategies for working extensive share‐tenancies. Where agricultural production is primarily labor intensive, landlords can increase their income, within certain limits, by maximizing the number of adult workers. If landlords hold considerable power over their tenants, they may have a large influence on demographic practices. Although this relationship between sharecropping and some of these demographic practices is found throughout much of history in northern Italy, the evidence is less clear for fifteenth‐century Tuscany. Herlihy and Klapisch‐ Zuber's study of the Catasto of 1427, a set of tax declarations, found no relation between household structure and land tenure. Some of their work suggested that fertility was higher among sharecroppers, but this relationship was not specified in detail. They did not consider the relationship between land tenure and age of marriage. This paper reconsiders the relationship between land tenure, household structure, fertility, and age of marriage. To try to correct for problems with Herlihy and Klapisch‐Zuber's land tenure variable, their data were aggregated to the administrative unit of analysis. The aggregated data show that sharecropping in rural Tuscany in 1427 was associated with household extension, high fertility, and early age of marriage, although the magnitude of this relationship was not large. Possible reasons for this weak relationship are discussed.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

The “economic miracle” in postwar Italy was accompanied by a rapid increase in the industrial accident and illness rates. Italian workers demanded occupational safety and health enforcement mechanisms that would be more accessible to grass‐roots workers' groups and unions. In the early 1970s local “Occupational Medicine Services” were voluntarily established in many regions. The entire health care system was decentralised in 1978, giving regions exclusive authority to implement occupational safety and health standards within Local Health Units (USLs). The concrete results of these reforms are investigated and the validity of the assumptions of the calls for decentralisation. The difficulties encountered by leftist‐administered regions in attempting to translate their political commitments into significant health and safety improvements are documented. The track‐record of the USLs is examined. An ironic consequence of decentralisation has been that the concentration of all health care activities in the USL has swallowed up occupational safety and health. As a result it is less politically visible and less responsive to worker input.

The purpose of this paper is to measure food loss and waste by material flow analysis (MFA) tool. Applying this methodology, the authors estimate wastage-related losses and discuss opportunities for more circular and sustainable practices in the Italian potato industry.

MFA is applied to two specific typologies as follows: ready-to-eat (chips) and dried potato products produced in Italy. The analysis refers to the year 2017 as the complete dataset useful for this study includes measurements until this year. A bottom-up and top-down mixed approach is applied, and functional unit refers to 1 t of potatoes consumed as final product.

MFA is applied to quantify and qualify material balance associated with 1 t of potatoes consumed as final product. In Italy, in 2017, more than 22,000 t of fresh tubers were lost, including 3,500–4,800 t of starch, equivalent to 52,800–72,600 GJs. Moreover, fewer than 23,000 t of skins and scraps were produced within industrial plants, not available for food but suitable for animal feed (dry skins are an excellent carbohydrates source in cattle and poultry feed), starch industry and bioenergy production (biogas and/or bioethanol).

This research is one of the few studies proposing MFA methodology as a tool to measure food waste. This analysis shows its utility in terms of food waste quality/quantity evaluation, supporting both company management and policymakers.

This chapter provides a list and a brief description of files and documents where the name of Piero Sraffa is mentioned and are currently kept at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato and at the Archivio Storico Diplomatico. For each file or document we provide indication of the reference number where it is conserved and a transcription of one or two of the relevant documents out of more than 500 which have been located. The purpose of the chapter is to illustrate the results of archival research of the last decade, including more recent findings, and furnish a groundwork for further research, which may throw further light on documents already known to us, and lead to the discovery of new documents or information, so as to provide a better basis for the reconstruction of the biography of Piero Sraffa and of people whose lives entwined with his – Antonio Gramsci certainly ranking high among them.