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AbstractThis analysis tries to discover an empirical validation to back up the hypothesis that the Italian phenomenon of social reporting has changed with regard to the past and is growing in importance. After considering the evolution of Italian literature on the issue, the paper tries to find connections between this literature and social reporting practices. Empirical findings are based on 62 Italian social reports. The paper tries to answer three questions: (a) what kind of organization publishes social reports; (b) what are the main differences, if any, between different reports belonging to diverse organizations; (c) which are the leading models. Social reports have been sorted according to three main issues: report objectives, emerging models and stakeholder mapping. Collected data suggest that there is a common ground for organizations in socially responsible behaviour, but also that this common ground fits the need of every single organization. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

The aim of this book is to demonstrate how Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) can be used to enhance the study of social agency, organizational behavior and organizational management. It derives from a workshop, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behavior (AISB), held at Bournemouth University Business School in 2014 on 'Modelling Organizational Behavior and Social Agency'. The contents of this book are divided into four themes: Perspectives, Modeling Organizational Behavior, Philosophical and Methodological Perspective, and Modeling Organized Crime and Macro-Organizational Phenomena.ABM is a particular and advanced type of computer simulation where the focus of modeling shifts to the agent rather than to the system. This allows for complex and more realistic representations of reality, facilitating an innovative socio-cognitive perspective on organizational studies. The editors and contributing authors claim that the use of ABM may dramatically expand our understanding of human behavior in organizations. This is made possible because of (a) the computational power made available by technological advancements, (b) the relative ease of the programming, (c) the ability to borrow simulation practices from other disciplines, and (d) the ability to demonstrate how the ABM approach clearly enables a socio-cognitive perspective on organizational complexity.Showcasing contributions from academics and researchers of various backgrounds and discipline, this volumes provides a global, interdisciplinary perspective.

Researchers increasingly take advantage of the comparative case design to build theory, but the degree of case dependence is occasionally discussed and theorized. We suggest that the comparative case study design might be subject to an often underappreciated threat—dependence across cases—under certain conditions. Using research on innovation diffusion as an illustration, we explore the role of social linkages across cases when building theory through comparison and contrast between cases. We develop an agent-based simulation, grounded by comparative case research about innovation diffusion, as novel way to study the implications of case dependence in theory building using multiple-case study research. Our simulation results suggest that the degree of case dependence has a nontrivial bearing on innovation diffusion experienced by case entities, specifically when the researcher draws a few case entities operating in a highly interconnected industry. Under these conditions, overlooking the degree of case dependence might weaken newly built theory against commonly held standards of internal validity and external validity in inductive research. We conceptualize the issue of case dependence as a concern about researchers' bounded rationality. Accordingly, we build on our findings to provide actionable advice aiming to alleviate this concern while being amendable to the variety of approaches to build theory from multiple cases in social sciences.