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Traditionally, competitiveness is mainly described in terms of costs. In effect, costs are a strategic issue for businesses to survive and stand out. The deployment of profit costs is becoming strategically important to be sustainable and competitive in the global markets. In today’s scenario of global ‘hypercompetition’, one of the most important changes in industrial organisation is the transition from multinational corporations (MNCs) to global networks. In a global market-space, the corporate responsibility is thus as a sense of the corporation’s consciousness towards hypothetical consequences of its planned actions (in domestic/international markets) in view on organisation’s long-term vitality.

The attitude of large companies towards the issue of sustainability has evolved considerably over time. In a first phase sustainability was seen as a necessary evil. Today, in global markets, the financial world seeks and rewards sustainable companies. In global competition, the companies’ results cannot be evaluated just in terms of value generated for the shareholders profit: the shared value generated has become the key factor for success. Globalization is not a policy managed by human forces, but it’s a condition of life for humans on this planet. In line with this assumption the aim of this series of articles, dedicated to sustainable management, is to analyse the recent global findings related to the sustainability issues, in topics like communication, human capital, intangible factors, small and large enterprises, retail and fashion, as well as in well-being orientation.

The economies of many developed countries are increasingly marked by businesses focused on a hard-liberal spiral. In global markets, companies are nowadays exposed to socio-environmental forces on a vast scale. This calls for a modern code of corporate social responsibility that clearly demonstrates the company’s global corporate responsibility in the overall framework of sustainable growth. On the demand side, moreover, consumption styles will progressively change increasing the degree of satisfaction and fulfilment of people in any place of the world. The result is represented by a ‘Transformative Development’, which will compel a “win-win” situation with an overall better life quality, labour conditions and a healthy economy, which can ensure lasting wellbeing and respect for life in an entirely sustainable environment.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a complex, disruptive event with many impacts beyond those related to health, national economies and global competition. While many worldwide companies were challenged to survive, the pandemic also presented many development opportunities for the long-term. The digital transformation, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, require new skills (OECD, 2020) informed by greater attention to the applied ethics of responsibility. Moreover, the development of the pandemic has generated an acceleration in a process of change in consumer behavior. Many businesses around the world have become aware of having to reconsider their market relationships starting from marketing channels, the use of marketing channels, from multichannelling, to omnichanneling, to metachannelling.

Global corporations operate today in conditions of highly competitive tension in a context subject to political, social and technological instability. In recent years, the Greek economic crisis of 2009 showed the new basic drivers of global capitalism (Health; Energy; Food; Communication). In global network organisation, the importance of ‘corporate network value’ emerges, and intangible corporate assets (identity, culture, information system) acquire huge importance. The advent of new technologies and the growth of AI offer significant opportunities for creating value not only at business scale but also at societal level. For the future growth of global corporations, the challenge is to conciliate the profitability imperative with a business model compatible with the objective of a sustainable development and in a logic of stakeholders’ engagement.

For a long time, boardroom decision-making focused almost exclusively on economic expectations of major shareholders. During the last thirty years, this approach to corporate governance progressively changed and now responsible companies strive to meet all relevant stakeholders’ expectations, and this requires acknowledging the close links among economic, social and environmental performance for the creation of shared value and lasting prosperity. More and more, in the ‘oversize economy’, robust corporate governance is based on the awareness that long-term value creation for shareholders cannot exist without a multi-stakeholder management approach. On the contrary, multistakeholder satisfaction generates positive effects on the relationships with employees, customers, suppliers and financiers.

Since 2010, globalisation has imposed a new view of the competitive environment in which competitors are not always direct rivals. On the contrary, as a result of alliances and agreements, certain firms can become mega-organisations that have the potential to change the long-term competitive structure of sectors (oversize economy). In the emerging oversize economy, mega corporations (The Coca-Cola Company, McDonald’s, Apple, for instance) manage competition adopting firm policies focused on shareownership, co-ownership and stock splits. The Coca-Cola Company accountability for sustainability creates a range of outcomes including diverse beverage products; economic benefits such as jobs, taxes paid and community investment; ecosystem impacts and initiatives; and customer and shareowner value.

A global firm's success is conditioned by its ability to manage the system of intangible corporate assets (corporate culture, corporate identity, and information system) and intangible product assets (product design, brand equity and pre/after-sales services). Corporate imitation and innovation processes are a primary condition to compete in global markets and entail identifying and proposing design management products with 'new' features that change over time and space. Product design defines the functions that qualify a product or service to identify and organise the distinctive specifications of the firm’s offer, and develop goods and services based on the analysis of competition and demand needs (customer satisfaction). Competitive design management can be oriented towards different forms of flexible production (The Fourth Industrial Revolution), specifically related to products based on planned obsolescence, total quality, or a rigid competitive philosophy of zero defects.

The globalisation phenomenon entangles issues of different kinds affecting attitudes and actions of individuals, corporations, smaller enterprises, communities and governments of both developed and emerging markets. In particular, lower boundaries and higher freedom of sourcing have enabled companies to opt, in many cases, for a wild and often unregulated growth by exploiting resources all over the world. This has become one of the most relevant causes of the proliferation of energy and environmental crises, for instance, and an increased consciousness toward fair treatment of resources and people spread by key local and international stakeholders.

For a long time, tourism has been to many scholars of management a less than optimal choice in their academic and research strategies. Some of them would have probably even denied to tourism the status of “industry”. Even economists, including scholars of development, looked at tourism with skepticism. Low-tech, seasonal, knowledge-unintensive tourism was the worst of the possible post-industrial outcomes and no serious economic policy could be based on it. This scenario has changed very rapidly in recent years. Both internationally and in Italy, the number of scholars, institutes, journals, publications and teaching programs dealing with tourism has increased, involving several disciplines. Globalisation has also established new horizons in terms of tourism variety and development, encouraging the emergence of new tourist profiles. The traditional mass tourism model. has greatly changed, generating tourism supply and demand systems characterized by flexible production, organization and consumption models (dominated by the internet, the sharing economy, low-cost travel, B&Bs, etc.).

A g l o b a l firm 's s u ccess is c ond it i o n e d b y it s a bilit y to m a na ge th e sys t e m of c orp o r a t e i nt a n gi bl e a sse t s (c orp or ate c ultur e, co rp o r a t e id e ntit y a nd in for mation sys t e m ), a nd product int a n g ible a ss et s ( pr o duct d esig n , b r and equity and pr e / aft e r-sal es se r v ic es). C orporate imitation and inno va tion pr oc e ss es have come to represent a primary c o ndition to s tand up to global c ompetition o n the market s, w hich take s th e sh a p e of identifyin g by the design management products with 'n e w' feature s to pro pose t o c u s tomer s th a t chan ge in tim e an d s pa ce . For global corporations, achieving a differential advantage in terms of product design therefore means designing an offer based on the best interpretation of specific distinctive characteristics, and to this end, information must be collected in continuum from the market, about customers and competitors.

World cities are boosted by Nation-States to encourage and control the innovation processes, developing specific attractiveness factors for companies focused on knowledge production. The role of world cities as a knowledge hub is linked to the one of knowledge production-city, since in global cities there are high-knowledge producers, consumers and workers. It is possible to identify three models of global urban development, each one differing from the other for the degree of knowledge production and intangible consumption attracted and promoted within the city: the model of no-knowledge production; the model of low-knowledge production and the model of high-knowledge production.

The globalisation of the market generates unprecedented over-supply well in excess of the market potential. This oversupply thus becomes a structural factor of development. In open markets, global competition has set new rules (manufacturing delocalisation, global distribution players, competitive imitation, instable and non-loyal consumption) which have significantly scaled down the model of economic development based on the isolated small and medium sized enterprise without global networking relations. Instead they emphasise the importance of a robust national development policy based on the ‘identity of the industrial system’, in other words on precise ‘intangible macro-system factors’.

Firms compete today in a situation of intense rivalry, in global markets that are subject to political, social and technological instability. As a result, no company can rely only on its own resources, knowledge and skills as it did in the past. Global managerial economics demands ramified, widespread and strongly interrelated organisations (networks). These complex structures favour managerial capabilities and outsourcing relations with co-makers and external partners (competitive alliances). The corporate culture therefore evolves into cross-cultural management, designed to overcome the physical limits of competition (marketspace management) and the local environment. In global markets, a network corporate culture makes it possible to create organisations with uniform structures, stimulated and checked by a system of communications networks (Internet; Intranet; Extranet), and it presupposes different levels of performance evaluation, which envisage an estimate of the strategic harmonisation (chairman leadership) and of operating armonisation (management leadership).

The critical role played by intangible assets in corporate competitive development in global markets, has modified the nature of communication costs, and above all the costs of marketing communication. Globalisation has produced deep changes in the function and role of the system of corporate information flows, which is expressed in the adoption of an integrated communication strategy. The gradual integration of global markets tends to eliminate static contexts and to replace them with dynamic and unstable environments, which generate huge changes even in the field of corporate communication, specifically with regard to the goals pursuable, the forms and instruments usable and obviously the audiences that can be reached. Basically, integrated corporate communication: pursues the development of a culture of integrated communication; sustains the adoption by the organisation of behaviour and the practice of integrated communication; preserves the strong autonomy of the different operating units; and finally, it refers the concrete realisation of corporate network programmes to individual operating units.

The globalisation of the market and the growth of companies into increasingly complex and ramified networks underline the importance of communication and of the information flows that sustain relations between a company’s executive organ, its management, shareholders and other stakeholders. In a complex framework of relationships, corporate governance communication and information are of prime importance to manage consensus in organisations operating on global markets. We can identify three main approaches in the debate on corporate governance communication. The first typically focuses on the shareholder supremacy of corporate policies. This approach in today’s global markets it often finds concrete implementation in companies operating in conditions of competitive scarcity (typical examples of this are corporations operating in oil extraction, energy and similar markets). The second approach refers to the balance between shareholder supremacy and stakeholder interest. In today’s global markets, this policy emerges in conditions of controlled competition, where corporate governance reveals a management power that is absolutely not subordinated to the shareholders. And finally, the third corporate governance policy concerns the conduct of organisations operating with a stakeholder supremacy. This approach is quite recent, developing in the early 1980s due to the globalisation of the markets of large corporations, which introduced networking logics into their corporate policies, tackling new problems of economic and environmental sustainability, with the result that new needs related to more heterogeneous and complex classes of stakeholders have emerged.

Global managerial economics tends to emerge in conditions of strong, continuous competitive tension, in contexts that are open and subject to political, social and technological instability. Globalisation and new competition boundaries oblige companies to adopt a new ‘market-oriented competitive management philosophy’ (market-driven management), in which customer value management predominates. Global managerial economics thus interfaces with numerous competition spaces, all with different levels of competitive intensity, and market-driven corporate management thus refers to specific competitive conditions, which may typically be summed up as: conditions of scarcity of supply (D>S), with business economics focused on price competition; conditions of controlled competition (D~S), where management economics embodies widespread internationalisation and non-price competition policies; conditions of over-supply (D

Sport has always been a means of development, systematically reducing ethnic, social, and cultural differences among peoples, offering a vision of community and of shared ethical values that preceded economic and market globalisation by many centuries. European sports business models are very different from US models. In general, European sport still operates with partial and limited business models, with horizons nowhere near the opportunities and restrictions offered by globalisation, and with management skills that concentrate mainly on the match. Effective evolution of sport depends mainly on the organisations that manage it, and specifically on the core competences needed to operate in a modern, multibusiness sector such as sport in global markets.

Traditional European governance models, created essentially to safeguard the prerogatives of nation-states, are unable to counter global networks because they are limited, on the one hand, to forming supranational institutions (to offset the influence of global networks) and, on the other, to decentralizing administrative power at the local level (to re-affirm their legitimacy in the system). Moreover, numerous exogenous factors (not effectively controllable at the local level and exceeding European boundaries because an expression of a wider globalisation process) compel individual nation-states to adopt a global, more integrated vision and a common Public Governance system.

Globalisation imposes transition in the spatial competition relationships, specifically the abandonment of a competition domain coinciding with specific physical or administrative contexts (a product category, a country, a region, a geographical area, etc.). Competition in global markets shapes a multi-dimensional space so that a given geographical context can imply the simultaneous presence of very different competitors. Competition practices are further revolutionized, as they must take into account: saturated markets, and time-based competition. Global markets with over-supply determine a new approach to competition, with a complete overturning of the hierarchy between customer satisfaction and manufacturing: goods are manufactured only when the level and amount of satisfaction required by customers is known.

Over-supplied global markets (i.e. with open competition and with production exceeding the absorption capacity of the demand) show clearly the primacy of product intangible assets (i.e. pre/post sales services, logistics, merchandising, design, packaging, etc.) which in turn help to enhance the corporate intangible assets (corporate culture, information system and brand equity). In over-supply, market-driven orientation configures a policy of long-term corporate development, where the competitive constraints of cost compare themselves with the primary goal of meeting demand. The over-supply outlines new logics of competition, with a profound rethinking of the theories of management and marketing. In today's international dominance of over-supply, the strategies of ‘hyper-competition’ are based on the assumption that a business is highly profitable only for firms that shape innovation and create ‘demand bubbles’.

A brand represents the awareness and the image that a product has managed with a segment of customers. In business terms, a brand can be defined as a specific relationship created within a given market for the promotion of a particular product. The specific existing relationship between a brand and a given market indicates the functional and symbolic values that demand attributes to the product through the brand. Brand equity expresses brand value in operating conditions. Brand equity shapes the value, at a certain time, of brand identity (awareness and image) that has been established with a specific demand.

Globalisation has been driven by multinationals' capital and technology and produced a structural change in business networks. In this sense, one of the most important changes in industrial organisation is the transition from multinational corporations (MNCs) to global networks particularly focused on management of innovation and creative imitation. The global competitive landscapes of innovation and imitation have significantly changed the relative position of many Nation-States. The US corporations have changed their worldwide competitive position. Meanwhile the globalisation has expanded the market-space of corporations headquartered in countries with a high propensity to innovation (e.g. the Japanese companies), and has also promoted the growth of new countries, especially in the Far East (e.g. South Korea, India, Taiwan), where domestic firms have favorable conditions (especially in terms of social responsibility and low labor costs) to develop advanced skills for imitation and creative imitation.