The increasing demand for non-financial information about the sustainability of economic activities has led the EU legislator to introduce the Directive 95/2014 to foster the transparency and the comparability of Corporate Social Reporting (CSR). This paper reports the findings of a study into the views of preparers and auditors regarding specific features of the new regulation. In particular, the issues examined cover: i) the reasons that justify the regulation of CSR; ii) the scope of the CSR statement; iii) the reporting format of CS information, and iv) the assurance required. It is found that managers favour many of the developments introduced by the Directive. In particular, the Board responsibility for CSR is regarded as a fundamental step for the diffusion of social and environmental policies throughout the whole entity, both at the horizontal and the vertical level. Further, the flexibility in the content, in the reporting format and in the choice of the reporting standards is regarded as an efficient approach to discipline CSR.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between governance structures and turnaround processes in Italian capitalistic model. In fact, aside from the analysis of single cases, no specific empirical studies seem to have been carried out on the relationship between the single aspects of governance and turnarounds/crises in Italian companies, in which the reference model is that of the family company, even if they are listed companies. This study does not extend the results obtained by studies carried out in different contexts tout court to Italian companies, but it considers the peculiarities of Italian model of capitalism, characterized by a concentrated ownership structure, in which the main conflict of interest becomes that between controlling shareholders and minority shareholders. On this basis, the research project examines how simultaneous developments in governance structures might contribute to the processes of turnaround themselves in a sample of Italian listed companies. In particular, enquiry is aimed at analysing the dynamics underlying the ownership structure, the TMT composition and the Boards of Directors composition (i.e. including independent Directors, size, turnover), structure (CEO duality, existence and composition of the audit committee) and functioning. The research has been structured as follows: 1) Literature review; 2) Formulation of specific hypotheses; 3) Definition of a framework of the phenomenon “turnaround” and selection of a sample of turnaround firms; 5) Selection of corporate governance variables; 5) Analyses and results.