scholarly journals EXPRESS: Investments in nascent project-based enterprises: The interplay between role-congruent reputations and institutional endorsement

2021 ◽  
pp. 017084062199452
Author(s):  
Angelo Tomaselli ◽  
Joris Jan Ebbers ◽  
Giuseppe Torluccio
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Theory ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Upper Echelons ◽  
Private Investments ◽  
Project Idea ◽  
Italian Film

We study nascent project-based enterprises (PBEs) through the lens of upper echelons and institutional theory. We analyse the interplay between the different role-congruent reputations of their project entrepreneurs and the institutional endorsement of their project idea, theorizing how these affect PBEs’ ability to attract private investments. In the context of the Italian film industry, we find that the commercial reputation of the project entrepreneur in the producer role is crucial for attracting investors, while the artistic reputation of the project entrepreneur in the creative director role is crucial for attaining institutional endorsement of the project idea. Finally, we find that the effect of the commercial reputation of the project entrepreneur in the producer role on attracting investments is mediated by the institutional endorsement. We contribute to the literature on PBEs by demonstrating how specific combinations of project entrepreneurs’ roles and (role-congruent) reputations can directly and indirectly attract investments.

From Conan the Barbarian to Gunan il guerriero: Re-contextualizing spaghetti sword and sorcery

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfio Leotta
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Violent Conflict ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Sword And Sorcery ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
The Aesthetic

The release of Conan the Barbarian (1982) played a crucial role in the emergence of the sword and sorcery film, a subgenre of fantasy cinema featuring muscular heroes in violent conflict with wizards and other supernatural creatures. Italian genre filmmakers attempted to capitalize on the international popularity of sword and sorcery by quickly producing a number of low-budget films, which emulated the stylistic and narrative features of Conan. Over a period of six years, between 1982 and 1987, the Italian film industry produced almost two dozen sword and sorcery films, which achieved mixed results at the box office. Although recently an increasing number of international film scholars have focused on the critical examination of Italian genre cinema, to date, little attention has been devoted to the study of Italian sword and sorcery. By examining the aesthetic features of four Italian sword and sorcery films (Gunan il guerriero [1982], Ator l’invincibile [1982], Hercules [1983] and The Barbarians [1987]), as well as their modes of production and distribution, this article proposes the first comprehensive critical examination of this filone.

Eleonora Duse: An Actress-Manager for the Italian Film Industry in the 1910s

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-95
Author(s):  
Maria Pia Pagani
Keyword(s):  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
White Hair ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Original Case ◽  
Italian Film

From a historiographical point of view, the Italian diva Eleonora Duse (1858–1924) as an actress-manager offers an original case study in relation to her only film performance in Cenere ( Ashes, 1916). This is a film adapted from the eponymous novel by Grazia Deledda (Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926). In the 1910s, when Duse decided to work in the Italian film industry, she was a celebrity and her name was a guarantee of success for the Ambrosio Company in Turin. The film producers wanted to use her celebrity in order to ensure success at the box office. As an actress-manager with a long and acclaimed international career in the theatre, Duse knew this mechanism very well, but her position was contrary to their expectations. In fact, she aimed to present herself as an anti-diva, with her wrinkle-furrowed face and white hair, proposing a fascinating artistic creation based on the ‘mother roles’ that she had created for the theatre. This paper explores new elements concerning the position of Duse as an actress-manager for the Italian film industry in the 1910s. It is focused on her strategy of reiterating her stage success in playing a mother. On film, she did not want to be an instrument used for commercial purposes, and she did not want to create a common popular diva film. With Cenere, Duse's capability as an actress-manager can be seen in her creation of this non-conventional, poetic role for the silent film industry in wartime Italy.

Bava Goes Fashion

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-14
Author(s):  
Roberto Curti ◽  
Roberto Curti
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Foreign Markets ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
The World ◽  
Italian Film

This chapter recounts Mario Bava's seventh official solo feature film as a director, a present-day thriller set in the world of high fashion titled The Atelier of Death (L'atelier della morte). It also mentions Bava's two other Gothic horror movies released in Italy in the summer of 1963 that were destined primarily for foreign markets, especially in America. It discusses I tre volti della paura starring Boris Karloff and Mark Damon, and La frusta e il corpo with Christopher Lee and Daliah Lavi. The chapter describes Bava's debut film La maschera del demonio in 1960, which distributed overseas by American International Pictures under the title Black Sunday. It points out how the Italian film industry had increasingly been involved in bilateral and multinational co-productions since the first agreement signed with France in 1949.

scholarly journals Imitation in foreign location choice: The role of upper echelons' diversity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Umar Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Theory ◽  
Functional Diversity ◽  
Host Country ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Location Choice ◽  
International Experience ◽  
Upper Echelons ◽  
Upper Echelon ◽  
Upper Echelon Theory

<p>This research investigates how the Top Management Team (TMT) characteristics impact the imitation of home country firms’ Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) location choice. A review of the FDI location choice research was performed, and various viewpoints for the selecting locations were identified. Amongst these viewpoints, the institutional perspective suggests that lack of cognition coupled with uncertainty about host markets compels firms to follow the FDI decisions of other home country firms. The review identified that the current literature in the cognitive domain had overlooked the role of TMTs. Upper echelon theory suggests that TMTs are not only a unique source of cognitive resources but also help to overcome challenges associated with internationalisation. This research applies institutional theory and the upper echelon theory to advance the argument of how and why TMT characteristics may impact the imitation of location choice decisions. Various TMT attributes like TMT international experience, TMT international experience diversity, TMT tenure diversity, TMT education diversity and TMT functional diversity were hypothesised to moderate the imitation in FDI location choice.  This research applied quantitative methods to assess the proposed hypotheses. First, a sample of 202 US-based firms (which invested in 11 Asia-Pacific countries from 2009 to 2014) was collected from FDI Markets database. This sample generated a panel dataset of 12,771 observations. Nearly 11,000 unique top manager profiles were created to compute the TMT data for the firms in the given period. Through logistic regression, this study assessed whether TMT attributes moderate the extent of imitation in FDI location choice.  The findings from this research contribute to institutional theory by highlighting the role of upper echelons. In particular, the findings show that while TMT tenure diversity weakens the effect of imitation, TMT functional diversity further exacerbates the effect of imitation in location choice. It was also found that when firms do not have a prior presence in the host country, then TMT international experience also strengthens the effect of prior FDI by other home country firms. The research also supports that the effect of various TMT attributes could be subject to environmental conditions. In particular, it shows that deep-level characteristics cause a more profound impact when host country uncertainty is high, while surface-level characteristics are impactful when host country uncertainty is low.</p>

The Italian Film Industry (1945–1985)

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Michael Guarneri
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Ground Zero ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
Post War ◽  
Film Market ◽  
First Time

The chapter provides an overview of the history of the post-war Italian film industry from crisis to crisis, that is to say from the ground zero of 1945 (when the whole Italian film business had to be politically and economically reorganised, together with the rest of the war-torn country) to the ground zero of 1985 (the year in which, for the first time in almost three decades, Italian film production fell below the rate of 100 films made per year, as the culmination of a crisis that started in the mid-1970s). The chapter opens with an in-depth production history of I vampiri / Lust of the Vampire (Riccardo Freda, 1957), followed by an account of the 1958-1964 boom in the production of pepla, the historical-mythological adventures of the sword-and-sandal kind. Both cases (an isolated commercial failure the former; a short-lived box-office goldmine, or filone, the latter) are emblematic of the functioning of the Italian film industry between the early 1950s and the mid-1980s – a state-subsidised system mostly based on a constellation of medium, small and minuscule business ventures piggy-backing on popular genres/trends in the local and/or global film market.

Bavaesque: The Making of Mario Bava as Italian Horror Auteur

2016 ◽  
pp. 79-92
Author(s):  
Peter Hutchings
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Going Public ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Major Figure ◽  
Italian Film

In 2007 the writer/critic Tim Lucas published Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark. This massive tome, glossily produced, extensively illustrated, and over 1,100 pages long, has since been described, with some justification, as ‘one of the most impressive books ever to have been written about any director’ (Williams, 2011: 162). The end result of over thirty years’ research, Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark has served to underline, reinforce and possibly clinch once and for all Mario Bava’s status as a major figure not merely in Italian horror cinema but in world horror as well. However, such status has been bestowed entirely retrospectively, for during his directorial career – which ran from 1960 through to the mid-1970s – Bava, while a respected figure in the Italian film industry, received little critical attention and was not generally known to the film-going public, either in his native Italy or elsewhere.

The adoption of green practices by Chinese firms

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 550-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yina Li ◽  
Fei Ye ◽  
Jing Dai ◽  
Xiande Zhao ◽  
Chwen Sheu
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Theory ◽  
Structural Equation ◽  
Leadership Role ◽  
Top Management ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
Upper Echelons ◽  
Chinese Firms ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Green Practices ◽  
Internal Pressures

Purpose Despite touting the value of green practices, many firms struggle to respond appropriately to the diverse environmental issues. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the external and internal pressures interplay to influence top management championship, which, in turn, fosters the company’s green culture and the adoption of green practices. It thus helps to explain Chinese firms’ diversity with respect to the adoption of green practices. Design/methodology/approach A conceptual model is developed that summarizes the interplay of external and internal pressures, top management championship, green culture and the adoption of green practices. Data from 148 Chinese manufacturing firms were collected and a structural equation model was used for statistical analysis. Findings Government policy that provides incentives to adopt green practices and overseas customers’ green demand has significant positive influences on top management championship, while resources pressure has a significant negative effect. Government command and control policy, domestic customers’ green demand and organizational inertia do not impact top management championship. Furthermore, top management championship is positively correlated to both green culture and green practices, and green culture contributes to implementing green practices. Practical implications The findings help us understand which external and internal factors inspire or force top management to adopt green practices, and how they do so. Moreover, managers must also be aware of the bridging role of green culture. The findings will be valuable to policy makers in forming and enforcing “stick” or “carrot” environmental policies. Originality/value Leveraging a multi-theoretic approach, the authors’ research builds on insights from the institutional theory, natural resource-based view (NRBV) and upper echelons perspective, so as to increase the authors’ understanding on how firms adopt green practices to respond to environmental sustainability pressures. The institutional theory and the NRBV are leveraged in this study to recognize that firms perceive not only external institutional pressure for environmental management but also the internal pressure from resource constraints and capability to change. Upper echelons perspective is integrated into this study to explain the leadership role that top management serves in the management of the organization’s response to dynamic changes in the institutional environment and cultivate green culture within organization.

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