The current dramatic context of COVID-19 has urged academics and practitioners to tackle the topic of the pandemic not only regarding its medical side but from the perspective of social sciences, accounting and accountability as well. In this sense, our paper moves from the pivotal work of Higgins and Walker (2012) and Merkl-Davies and Brennan (2017) and tries to trace the use and the extent of accounting communication by companies during the peculiar context of the pandemic. Considering the nature of the elements to be evaluated, we applied a manual content analysis, a more suitable technique than software to capture subjective and emotional elements. Among the main preliminary results of the paper, the volume and the importance of emotional content come to the surface, such as self-assessment and emotional tone. The paper confirms the important role of rhetorical analysis in understanding the quality and the meaning of the information provided by companies and contributes to the stream of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) studies on corporate reporting.

Increasing attention is now being paid to the concept of sustainability as a crucial element of our life at all levels. The awareness that attention must be paid not only to the present, but also and above all to the future of the society in which we live has increased attention to social and environmental issues, such as climate change and the digital revolution. This transformation has also impacted the public sector: in particular, the scientific attention in the university sector has led to the birth of the concept of University Social Responsibility (USR), which suggests that universities sustainably re-transform their work. However, this issue has so far only been the subject of a few studies. The purpose of this article is to promote greater awareness on the part of universities of the importance of addressing sustainability issues. The results of the analysis, obtained thanks to the use of a questionnaire and interviews, depict the state of the art in the adoption of social reporting practices by Italian universities and identify the main reasons and barriers to the adoption of these practices.

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In recent years, the literature on football and accounting has focused on some opaque spaces in the ownership of football clubs, as well as in the definition of collaboration and commercial partnership mechanisms that, even in the case of larger clubs, are at times misrepresented in financial reports (Chadwick et al., 2018; Sudgen et al., 2017; Holzen et al., 2019). Our paper describes the case of Italy and its main relevance lies in that spectrum of analysis; in effect, the strictly familial nature of Italian capitalism clearly emerges in the case of football, as well. The clubs are controlled by influential entrepreneurial families (often operating in the entertainment industry) who through football consolidate their image. Put in these terms, the risks of conflicts of interest and opacity in commercial formulas, already highlighted by the best and recent literature, are reflected in a system of economic and meta/non-economic returns in which the object “football” becomes an instrument of social recognition and financial growth via indirect mechanisms.