Advances in Business & Management

Using a classification of production related organizations, Chapter One proposes a historical sketch of the growing popularity of project management (PM) within businesses and accounts for this popularity by characterizing PM as a distinct set of elements among components making up a firm. Chapter Two examines the possible two-way link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and earnings management (EM) corporate strategies, and whether there are any corporate governance differences at the international level in this respect. Chapter Three analyzes design management (DM), design concepts and design thinking (DT) for promoting socially responsible solutions. The chapter provides a deeper understanding of DT, ascertains its meaning and characteristics, determines gaps among different DM approaches, design concepts and DT in the context of social responsibility and reveals why and how DT helps us to deal with complex problems regarding social responsibility. Chapter Four focuses on how businesses can improve health and working conditions for their employees. Using results from a 2016 NPR/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health survey of 1601 workers nationwide in the U.S., the chapter represents one of the broadest examinations of how workers see health in their workplace experiences. Chapter Five examines the challenges and opportunities in public-private partnerships (PPP) for housing the low-income urban residents in Nigeria. The chapter relies on a systematic review of research literature and empirical data derived from oral interviews with 27 experts in nine PPP housing projects in Nigeria to achieve its goal. Chapter six deals with an analysis of standards for usury thresholds in Italy. The authors work consists of a close examination on Italian Legislative Decree 70/11 that has modified the aforementioned standards. Chapter Seven discusses the influence of the accounting value of conservatism, proposed by Gray (1988) as part of the cultural relevance theory. The possession of derivative financial instruments (DFI) was used as proxy to define it. This chapter concludes the book by assessing the existence of the explanatory variables of this accounting value, such as regional groups, firm level controls and qualitative characteristics.