Purpose -This study seeks to examine the influence of the gamut of changes that have taken place in the past 15 years in the world of international football that have permanently transformed football from a game into a real business, while also considering some specific events that have affected Italian football in terms of the valuation of players' registration rights in the financial statements of the leading Italian football clubs throughout the period 1996-2009. Design/methodology/approach -The research was conducted taking into account the leading Italian clubs. The clubs considered were those that, in the period examined, qualified at least five times for a place in the Italian Serie A championship which is instrumental to their direct participation, or through the qualifying round, in the Champions League. Findings -The research shows that questionable window dressing policies, consisting of artificially overestimated values of players' registration rights, aggravated the Italian football crisis that exploded during the 2001/2002 season. However, the origins of this crisis must be ascribed to the inability of Italian teams to control players' wages.Research limitations/implications -The study concerns only the leading clubs and examines the value of players' registration rights as an aggregate, as it is not always possible to extrapolate from financial statements the values attributed to individual players. Originality/value -The Italian legal system, unlike others, establishes for corporations, the obligation to recapitalize if losses exceed a certain level. Based on this particular regulation, this research, suggesting a different interpretation of events, identifies the window dressing policies implemented by Italian football clubs during the period in question as behavior designed to evade the obligation to cover losses, and highlights the real purpose of the exceptional measures undertaken by the Italian legislator to save the entire industry.

Purpose This paper provides a conceptual discussion of the bidirectional relationship between knowledge management (KM) and intellectual capital (IC) in a specific subset of knowledge-based organisations, i.e. professional sport organisations. Through the review and conceptual discussion of two relevant research themes, i.e. KM strategies for IC value creation and IC codification, this paper aims to highlight research gaps useful to future research. Design/methodology/approach The authors apply a systematic literature review method to analyse 66 management and accounting studies on KM and IC in sport organisations. Internal and external validity tests support the methodology adopted. Findings The authors provide a conceptual model to explain how KM strategies about IC investments can be optimal, i.e. they create value for all the stakeholders but also suboptimal, i.e. they create value only for a group of stakeholders. Next, they provide evidence of the opportunistic use of the codification associated with IC investments that impair financial reporting information transparency and mislead managers and investors. Practical implications The results are informative for managers, regulators and policymakers to mitigate the inefficiencies regarding KM and IC codification and decisions. Originality/value This study contributes to the understanding of the bidirectional relationship between KM and IC in knowledge-based organisations by focussing on professional sport organisations in which KM and IC have played an important role for a long time. It also includes future avenues for advances in managing, measuring and reporting IC.

The aim of this paper is to understand the similarities and differences in the accounting con-vergence process of the BRIC countries. The study examines the evolution of these countries’accounting systems by developing a three-dimensional framework based on the political,economic and cultural elements. Brazil and Russia merely imitate, whereas China and Indiaedit and translate the international standards (‘informed divergence’). The political aspect,supported by the national culture and ‘community’, represents the main driver, even if thethree dimensions are closely interconnected and overall, we show the current emergenceof limits of the implementation of the dominant market model

Using a scientometric approach, this study frames the evolution of corporate social responsibility (CSR) research over a period of 46 years. It carries out a statistical‐historical analysis mapping the main topics, references, sources, and countries of publication emergent in the CSR research. We apply this combination of bibliometric analyses on a sample of 2,583 CSR studies derived from Scopus (1973–2018). These analyses illustrate the interdisciplinary character of CSR. Second, this study recognises numerous topics in the history of CSR research and demonstrates how these topics emerge, vanish, or become steady over time. Third, the patterns of evolution in terms of topics are reflected in scientific journal specialisation and country coauthorship collaborations. Finally, this research provides the latest evaluation on the state of the art in this field, highlighting the newest and hottest topics. By plotting out the evolution of CSR research, practical implications are identified.

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This paper explores the logics that drive the attitudes of certified accounting practitioners for small firms (CAs) toward new accounting standards. It then unravels the heterogeneity within the accounting profession surrounding the accounting harmonization process. Through analysis of an extensive survey of 1,268 Italian CAs and of ten interviews with presidents of local professional associations regarding an ongoing accounting harmonization project (i.e., the IFRS for SMEs), we first document the coexistence of competitive logics in driving CAs' attitudes toward the new accounting standards. Second, we demonstrate the role of social characteristics in fragmenting the community of accounting professionals, particularly in expressing heterogeneous views on the IFRS for SMEs. This paper contributes to the literature on the relation between the accounting profession and accounting harmonization by illustrating the multifaceted attitudes of CAs toward a project of accounting harmonization. The results are also informative to policy makers in understanding the adoption and implementation process of new accounting standards.