Francesco Rizzi

• Professor
• University of Perugia

This study examines how individuals accept and navigate paradoxical tensions within a sustainability context, using a multiple case study of five Italian companies implementing circularity measurement tools. By exploring the interplay between self‐efficacy and acceptance of paradoxical tensions, drawing upon the Goal Setting and Paradox theories, w...

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is becoming a prominent inter‐organizational approach for improved resources utilization and reduced emissions. IS literature and development efforts focus on interventions needed to overcome or eliminate various barriers, but pay inadequate attention to paradoxes that cannot be suppressed over time and require management....

The proliferation of operationalisation approaches to safety climate has failed short of establishing a common set of dimensions and measurement items. Furthermore, extant measures are designed to accommodate all organisations regardless of safety management maturity; thus, a safety climate measurement scale suited to high-maturity organisations is...

Since recruiting high-potential employees is essential to be innovative and sustainable, scholars and practitioners advocate using attributes of general interest for employer branding. Through two empirical studies, this research investigates to what extent employer branding strategies can rely only on sustainability-related attributes to win the w...

This paper aims to investigate how supporters perceive and react to environmental messages that call for reducing the environmental impact of sporting events. Based on prospect theory, we randomly provided 1423 supporters attending football events in Europe with (1) a negative (perceived loss for supporters), (2) a neutral (no perceived gain or los...

The unprecedented systemic disruptions that occurred in the last years are highlighting a structural lack of resilience in most organisations. In this context, there is an increasing scholars’ interest in understanding to what extent capabilities to anticipate, respond and thrive in unprecedented situations represent a strategic lever for business...

Despite the growing literature on paradox theory in corporate sustainability (CS), there is a lack of systematic analyses of both the antecedents and the maintenance of the active strategy for managing paradoxical tensions. This systematic literature review examines the individual, organisational and inter‐organisational antecedents, hereinafter ro...

This paper presents two empirical studies that investigate various combinations of different products and types of Point-of-Purchase displays (PoPs) from self-regulation and operant conditioning theoretical perspectives. The results reveal that PoPs’ effectiveness depends on the congruence between, on the one hand, the type and the content of the P...

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the interlinks between different forms of organisational culture (OC), supply chain (SC) integration, green supply chain management (GSCM) practices. It adopts a green human resource management (GHRM) perspective on knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) dynamics to shed light on the drivers that facilitate th...

The European industry sector is responsible for about one-third of the EU's total energy consumption and process-related Greenhouse Gas emissions, which makes it a central factor in the EU's climate and energy strategies. Energy cooperation, i.e., the mutualised generation, use and/or acquisition of energy by at least two companies, has the potenti...

Purpose The relation between sport and sustainability is a topic that has recently raised a lot of interest among both academics and practitioners. However, in the academic literature, very few studies have investigated which solutions are implemented in football, despite its popularity, to reduce the environmental impact of its events. This study...

The capability to manage the supply chain is a key issue in general management as well as green management. The topic has been widely discussed in the literature, however only few studies focused on how this capability could influence the effectiveness of certified Environmental Management Systems. To bridge this gap, we administered a survey with...

Purpose of the paper: This paper aims to analyze how small-medium enterprises (SMEs) contribute to the development of a sustainable innovations in the energy sector such as geothermal heat pumps (GHPs) by implementing effective sustainable business models. Methodology: The study carried out an exploratory multiple case study with 8 SMEs operating i...

We performed a systematic literature review to explore and understand how the 23‐year long debate about dynamic capabilities has addressed sustainability issues. Based on this, we propose a unifying framework that distinguishes different facets of dynamic capabilities for sustainability (DCsS) based on the different types of performance they are mo...

Sin da quando in Italia si è presa coscienza della pandemia che si stava diffondendo, molto è stato detto e scritto sui rapporti tra ambiente, salute ed economia. Rapporti che hanno trovato spazio anche nei richiami ad un green deal italiano nel Decreto Rilancio. In tal contesto, questo capitolo si pone l'obiettivo di analizzare come la più irruent...

Technology providers have clearly understood that considering consumers' behavioural changes is important in developing new technologies, particularly in the energy sector. This study examines the effectiveness of exposure to information and self-benefit appeals in determining the energy conservation behaviours of consumers. In particular, based on...

Tourism can have major impacts on the environment, ecosystems, and economy but, favoring their openness, also on societies and culture. The positive or negative nature of these impacts, and thus the distinction between sustainable and unsustainable tourism, depends on how it is managed. It is thus not surprising that in the last 30 years sustainabl...

Studies on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) acknowledge the need to consider stakeholder’s expectation when building a corporate image. However, this stakeholder-centric perspective is often neglected in the literature in favour of more firm-centric studies on CSR practices that are widely legitimated in the business community. Our study helps...

A large proportion of the global tourism industry is highly exposed and vulnerable to environmental hazards and has over the last years been highly affected by subsequent disasters and crises. Tourism involves the interactions of organizations, people, and events in a variety of subsystems. The complexity of this interconnected system and the relat...

Preparation for reuse (PfR) is a fundamental waste management practice that is second only to prevention in the waste hierarchy. The paper, building on advertising literature, investigates how to leverage the pro-social nature of this option for giving products that have become waste a second life. To examine how advertising strategies based on emo...

Purpose of the paper: This paper aims to analyze how companies fulfill their responsibility in shaping sustainable supply chain strategies for innovative technologies. To this end, it describes a decade of evolution of Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) end-of-life management practices among leading energy utilities. Methodology: Using GRI’s Sustainabili...

This paper explores which are the drivers and their interactions that can lead organizations to adopt radical sustainable innovation (SI) in unfavorable contexts. We identify external and internal drivers of SI adoption, and we conceptualize sustainable intrapreneurship as an additional driver. We report and discuss the findings from a case study i...

Purpose: Surveys measuring consumers' preferences for sustainable food might suffer from socially desirable responding. Social desirability stems in part from social norms about sustainable lifestyles, when respondents need approval from others and when privacy is not guaranteed during survey completion. While various studies showed this phenomenon...

This study investigates the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate ability (CA) associations on perceived corporate reputation (PCR) and the relationship between the two associations in different cultural environments. By focusing on electricity providers, we carried out a questionnaire survey within BRICS capital cities—that...

The development of geothermal energy can be hindered by both technical and socio-economic issues. Technical issues are associated with the intrinsic characteristics of geothermal energy and the ways in which is exploited, whereas socio-economic ones arise from the interplay between companies and stakeholders, affected to some extent in the developm...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1447677018301049#! An increasing number of companies are using Cause-related Marketing (CrM) to fund-raise in support of disaster risk reduction (DRR) activities. This study presents a comparative analysis of two CrM campaigns promoted by a tourism firm in order to improve disaster prevention and...

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781317244295/chapters/10.4324%2F9781315629520-23 Disasters may generate several negative effects. According to the Munich RE, economic losses from internationally reported disasters have increased steadily since 1990, reaching in 2013 an estimated annual average of US$200 billion. The victims of disasters nee...

This article theorizes and empirically tests the relationship between employee perceptions of human resource practices and their propensity to adopt sustainable behavior (SB) to support organizational change for sustainability. Informed by the literature on corporate greening and organizational behaviour, we developed a structural equation model th...

Il tema del se, come, quando e quanto la tensione verso l’eco-sostenibilità debba essere considerata dalle imprese una determinante delle strategie competitive è attualmente in forte dibattito. L’alternarsi di storie di esemplari successi e fallimenti a livello internazionale alimenta oggi tanto le prospettive più positive quanto quelle più negativ...

Although the public debate tends to privilege investor-owned organizations, alternative forms of organization are mushrooming at the borders of the capitalist economy. In this work, we contribute to the debate on alternative economies by analysing a specific form of worker-owned organizations originating in Italy in the 1970s and recognised by Ital...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how sustainable entrepreneurs (SEs) address the regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive institutional pillars when operating in conservative contexts. It aims to study in depth the use of sustainable innovation (SI) as a means of increasing legitimacy within the institutions, thus triggering a...

Sustainable production and consumption is a hot topic in innovation policies. Most European producers of electrical and electronic equipment have joined collective compliance schemes - generally called Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs) - to guarantee compliance with the mandatory requirements that enforce the Extended Producer Responsibi...

Among world’s economies, the circular economy (CE) has become popular especially in the European Union and China, which opens several opportunities for sustainability leaders to gain a first-mover advantage and, consequently, to pursue organizational sustainability and growth. In spite of public policy support, since CE often requires entrepreneuri...

Space heating and cooling pose fundamental challenges to the achievement of EU decarbonization targets. A comprehensive review of the recent literature acknowledged that district energy systems contribute substantially to the sustainability of energy in the building sector by improving the efficiency and integration of low energy sources. However,...

Providing information to consumers is crucial to foster pro-environmental attitudes and the purchasing of green products. To date few studies explored the interplay between information, pre-existing environmental concern and barriers to the purchase of green products. By analyzing the data from a survey to a large sample of Italian consumers (n = 8...

For energy managers, finding personal meaning in the activities they are engaged in and gaining an identity in connection between energy efficiency and organizational goals is a necessary condition to mobilize passion and commitment, which in turn are fundamental to achieve organizational goals under tight budget constraints. Despite this, little i...

On 11 March 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (GEJET) triggered the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) accident. This event caused immense damage releasing large amounts of radioisotopes to the environment. As consequence, safety concerns have arisen for food safety and marine products. Our research contributes to invest...

Although a new landscape of social finance institutions (SFIs) is evolving rapidly in Europe, the academic literature on the structures of legitimation that characterize the development of social finance has been limited. This paper addresses this gap: (1) by conceptualizing social finance (SF) as a pre-paradigmatic field where leading SF instituti...

Extended Abstract at "DPRI Annual Meeting, 2017", Kyoto University. http://www.dpri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/campus_en/

The chapter explores the current evolution of smart city paradigm characterized by worldwide-raising, spontaneous and bottom-up socio-technological networks that produce non-planned forms of citizen empowerment in urban governance, via crowdsourcing processes. It focuses on the role of citizen-centred data-richness for unlocking the full potential...

Offers an innovative perspective on the use of data to promote people-friendly and livable cities ▶ Analyzes trends in data-rich city governance ▶ Presents revealing and inspiring case studies ▶ Contributes to the current debate over the smart city paradigm ▶ Pursues an interdisciplinary approach to the subject This book analyzes the ongoing transf...

Poster presentation during the Conference ”From the management of crisis to the governance of risk: Time for a paradigm shift?” - Hainan (China) https://www.unisdr.org/we/inform/events/49754

Offers an innovative perspective on the use of data to promote people-friendly and livable cities ▶ Analyzes trends in data-rich city governance ▶ Presents revealing and inspiring case studies ▶ Contributes to the current debate over the smart city paradigm ▶ Pursues an interdisciplinary approach to the subject This book analyzes the ongoing transf...

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) has been the backbone of product life cycle management in Europe since the 2000s. Unfortunately, EPR implementation has multiple impacts on the supply chain and, thus, its consequences are not always easily manageable. Although several studies have explored various examples within the EU, the determinants of t...

Sustainable entrepreneurs are considered to play a crucial role in fostering sustainable development. However, transitions in sociotechnical systems, such as a transition to low-carbon energy solutions, are unlikely to succeed without the coordination with regional political actions, particularly in sectors characterized by path dependency and lock...

The interest in smart cities has been growing steadily in recent years; however, there are few examples of analyses, which take into account, at the same time, multiple socio-demographic variables, economic variables and smart city characteristics. In our study, we took into account different types of socio-demographic and economic variables and sm...

Full text available here: https://ugecviewpoints.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/smart-cities-for-smart-citizens-enabling-urban-transitions-through-crowdsourcing/

https://ugecviewpoints.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/smart-cities-for-smart-citizens-enabling-urban-transitions-through-crowdsourcing/

Sustainable entrepreneurs are assumed to have a crucial role in fostering sustainable development. However, transitions in socio-technical systems, such as a transition to low-carbon energy solutions, are unlikely to succeed without the coordination with political actions at regional level. Based on an empirical analysis of the interplay between fi...

Demand-side policies are an important complement to subsidies in fostering green product/service markets. Green Public Procurement (GPP), in particular, presents valuable characteristics in terms of directionality, volumes and measurability. Despite being widely analysed from a public perspective, GPP development is still under-explored from a corp...

Italy was the first country in the world to exploit geothermal resources for electricity production. In Europe it is still the first country in terms of installed capacity. Currently, the only region in Italy with geothermal power plants is Tuscany. This study focuses on Mt. Amiata, one of the two geothermal areas in Tuscany. In Mt. Amiata a strong...

The evolution of environmental regulation is largely influenced by the reciprocal influence exerted by policies, natural resources and stakeholders’ behaviours in an often disregarded and continuously adapting-by-interacting setting. On the basis of this assumption, we explored the role of oligopolistic industries in shaping the evolution of enviro...

Southern Europe and the Mediterranean region are facing the challenge of managing its water resources under conditions of increasing scarcity and concerns about water quality. Already, the availability of freshwater in sufficient quality and quantity is one of the major factors limiting socio-economic development. Innovative water management strate...

Resource-intensive business plays a fundamental role in causing climate change through the emission of large amounts of GHGs (greenhouse gases), and, in turn, climate-induced physical changes affect companies. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports an increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather and climate events...

In industrial clusters, cooperation among different actors operating in the same sector provides theoretical arguments in favor of the coordination of life cycle thinking initiatives, such as the sharing of green supply chain practices and the implementation of product-oriented environmental management systems, as well as other evolved environmenta...

In industrial clusters, cooperation among different actors operating in the same sector provides theoretical arguments in favor of the coordination of life cycle thinking initiatives, such as the sharing of green supply chain practices and the implementation of product-oriented environmental management systems, as well as other evolved environmenta...

In the objective of reaching the “nearly zero-energy buildings” target set by the European Union, municipalities cover a crucial role in advocating and implementing energy-efficient measures on a local scale. Based on a dataset of 322 municipalities in Northern Italy, we carried out a statistical analysis to investigate which factors influence the...

The present study investigates renewable energy analyzing the last twenty years of worldwide scientific production and the dynamics of interest around relevant policies in this direction. Based on a review on the role of knowledge development in technology transitions, we coupled bibliometric and expert debate approaches to provide decision makers...

End of life tires require sound accounting of environmental performances to design sustainable procedures for material recovery. Their use in rubber modified asphalt provides could lead to the improvement of technical and environmental performances of asphalt roads, but the effectiveness of simplified procedures is to be proved. During LIFE+ projec...

The integration of hydrogen technologies in the automotive industry as an option to cope with environmental issues has typically attracted significant attention among politicians, academics, and the media. After the recent “hydrogen hype” this interest in hydrogen technologies highlights the need to fully understand to what extent this sector is be...

The paradigm of the green economy has contributed to raising the attention paid to developing sustainability-oriented strategies for supply chain (SC) management. The responsibility of producers to extend and reverse SCs is a critical and timely topic that captures increasing concerns over the way firms can adapt their business models to interlinki...

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is an environmental policy approach that could potentially have a positive impact on different determinants of the business environment, including scientific production. Despite that, direct and indirect impacts on those national research environments where EPR is not directly implemented are under-represented...

Energy efficiency in buildings is an important objective of energy policy and strategy in Europe. A survey questionnaire was conducted among the 27 European Union Member States. This study aims to provide an overview of the current national regulatory framework focusing on three aspects: 1) integration of energy efficiency and renewable energy requ...

The European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is designed to be a flexible and efficient mechanism to encourage carbon-intensive industries to reduce CO2 emissions cost-effectively. Similarly, Environmental Management Systems (EMSs) are well-established tools designed to improve the efficiency of the environmental performance of companies. Up to n...

The use of hydrogen produced from renewable energy sources is often reported as an attractive strategy to address the issue of urban environmental sustainability in automotive sector, and a potential alternative to fossil fuel-fed vehicles. The project ‘Filiera Idrogeno’ (Hydrogen Chain) has investigated the potential realisation of hydrogen produc...

Energy efficiency in buildings is an important objective of energy policy and strategy in Europe. A survey questionnaire was conducted among the 27 European Union Member States. This study aims to provide an overview of the current national regulatory framework focusing on three aspects: 1) integration of energy efficiency and renewable energy requ...

Life cycle assessment has been used to compare a rubberized asphalt road prototype with a conventional asphalt road, designed within the EU LIFE+ Environment Policy and Governance Project ROADTIRE "Integration of end-of-life tires in the life cycle of road construction", to be constructed in Lamia, Greece. The analysis covers the construction of th...

Energy and environmental services are affected by a particularly significant dynamism correlated to green-oriented innovations. Although the so-called “green economy” cannot yet be considered as a new techno-economic paradigm, it constitutes a complement that can enrich and stimulate the innovative trajectories in green services beyond the contribu...

Despite its centrality, the energy problem has always occupied a relatively marginal space in social research. Many scholars are actually concentrating their attention on communication about energy issues, risk and environmental struggles tied to building energy plants. In spite of the relevance of these issues, which are also the topics of some of...

Energy efficiency in buildings and the penetration of renewable energies are important targets in order to reduce the European Union's dependency on fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. The study collected information from a questionnaire among 27 European Union Member States and Norway. The aim of study is to provide a comprehensive overview...