Search results

The purpose of this paper is to address firms’ decisions on corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a function of the economic environment. The paper focuses on corporate giving, a CSR dimension that is especially important in an economic downturn such as the one experienced by many European economies since 2007-2008.

A theoretical framework comprising product differentiation and market competition is proposed. The paper investigates whether adverse economic conditions refrain corporate giving or, alternatively, stimulate it as a differentiation and demand enhancing instrument. Econometric empirical testing on the business cycle properties of giving at an aggregate level is also conducted.

According to theoretical results, firms seem to refrain giving under adverse economic conditions in the short run. Empirically, the paper concludes for a pro cyclical contemporaneous relation of corporate giving with real gross domestic product, supporting the theoretical finding. In a dynamic perspective, however, giving causes revenues and firms tend to donate more than a few years after the downturn.

The paper examines the behaviour of an under researched component of corporate social responsibility, which is especially important in economic downturns - giving. It considers continuous degrees of market competition and differentiation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how demographic characteristics contribute to consumers' decision on bank delivery channels' usage, namely the direct and indirect demographic influence on channel usage frequency via cognitive and affective mediators.

The consumer usage frequency pattern concerning the main bank delivery channels and its determinants are modelled and analysed with a questionnaire sent to 24,000 bank customers. This stage was preceded by a series of in‐depth interviews to bank managers and bank customers.

Empirical evidence suggests that demographic variables' influence over consumers' usage frequency decision has both a direct and indirect component. These influences are identified by delivery channel.

The main limitation derives from the nature of empirical results and their generalization to other samples and contexts. Nevertheless, precautions recommended in the literature to overcome this limitation were followed.

Bank managers will benefit from knowing, by channel, which demographic characteristics have the desired direct and indirect impact on usage frequency. This information will improve bank managers' efforts to encourage customers to favour a specific delivery channel.

In the literature, only the direct influence of demographics is compared to the innovation attributes in order to explain the innovation adoption decision. By clarifying the impact of demographic variables, the paper provides a more robust perception on their role as determinants of the bank delivery channels' usage.

This chapter historicizes the social construction of racism in Brazilian society and its relation to the development of the library and information science (LIS) field. It is a theoretical-reflective research built on the scientific literature of the field of LIS and related areas that aims at reflecting on social justice in Brazilian libraries and creating strategies to confront institutional racism. The authors develop five main points to understand Brazilian racism: the myth of racial democracy, structural and institutionalized racism, the whitening ideology, whiteness, and the epistemicide of black knowledge. The authors then discuss racism and the promotion of white supremacy in library teaching and professional action in libraries. Black US American and Black Brazilian Librarianship movements show that the activism and political action of black librarians advance the development of informational counter-narratives. Finally, the authors recommend three strategies for social, racial, and informational justice in the LIS field: including ethnic-racial studies in basic university courses curricula; building diverse, inclusive collections that account for ethnic-racial themes and authors; and considering “Pretuguese” keywords while indexing, in order to counter exclusion and promote epistemic repair. The authors conclude by advocating for these strategies to steer LIS professional and educational spheres toward contributing to forward an anti-racist society.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly aware of their role in developing and implementing a sustainable paradigm, with the potential to accelerate progress toward sustainable development (SD). Therefore, this study aims to investigate the environmental, social and governance (ESG) and sustainable development goals (SDGs) practices of the University of Southern Santa Catarina (UNISUL) and, based on this analysis, indicate how HEIs in general can contribute to the promotion of these concepts.

The study was based on the authors' experiences and participant observations made during the establishment of sustainability practices at UNISUL. Additional data collected from documentary research and literature review were analyzed qualitatively.

The results show that sustainability is present in UNISUL’s educational and management processes as actions related to all SDGs and, thus, to all ESG dimensions. On the other hand, it was noted that many actions identified in the literature are not present, with governance being the dimension with fewer practices, thus indicating possibilities for improvement. In this way, new practices were suggested.

New actions linked to SDGs and ESG at UNISUL were identified that can be adopted by other HEIs.

1. En guise d’introduction.‐ 2. Droit du tra vail, droit social et (des)ordre international.‐ 3. Droit du tra vail, droit social, légalité et droits sociaux.‐ 4. Droit du travail, droit social, légalité et correction des inégalités.‐ 5. Quelques mots á propos du rôle du Droit dutravail.‐ 6. Réflexions (supplémentaires) sur le droit du tra vail: les domaines possibles de spéculation théorique et de re cher che appliquée.‐ 7. En matière des orientations générales du droit du travail á l’époque contemporaine. ‐ 8. Le défi de la mondialisation.‐ 9. èour un modèle économique et so cial européen.‐ 10. A propos de Constitution européenne et ..... alentours.‐ 11. Le traitement juridique de la ques tion économique et sociale en Eu rope.‐ 12. Le mythe de la li bre concurrence.‐ 13. Quelques conclusions, pas conclusives.‐

This study aimed to investigate the role of the country's institutional quality on the environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance of its companies.

Over a four-year period (2016–2019), the study examined the ESG performance of 412 organizations situated in 19 countries. ESG performance was the dependent variable, and the independent variables were rule of law, economic freedom, education index and international trade freedom. These factors described the institutional quality of countries in the authors’ study.

The findings reveal that institutional quality has a major impact on ESG performance. Companies engage in more ESG practices when they operate in countries with greater economic freedom and international trade freedom. The authors corroborated the core assumption of institutional theory (IT), which argues that organizational behavior is determined by the country's institutional setting.

The findings, like all research, should be interpreted with caution. The authors’ research focused solely on large energy corporations. As a result, the conclusions cannot be applied to small companies or other industries. ESG performance can also be measured using different datasets.

If managers want their companies to perform better in terms of ESG, the authors recommend that they form a CSR committee and sign the Global Compact. This study may be valuable to international policymakers because they can underline that greater economic freedom, better education and greater international trade freedom all promote higher ESG performance.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, nearly all of research explores the relationship between ESG and financial performance. As a result, this study built on past research by investigating how national aspects affect corporate ESG performance.

Reducing our carbon footprint (CF) or decarbonizing is a sustainable development goal. Although there has been an increase in research on this topic, little is known about the status of CF research within universities. The purpose of this paper is to identify the initiatives implemented in universities aimed at reducing CF in their efforts toward creating a Green Campus.

Using a bibliometric method, the status of this field of research was examined for the purpose of identifying the main publications and the most central researchers in terms of productivity and citations. Also, by using an exploratory factor analysis (EFA), the regions of the world with the most active research, as well as the direction of research, were identified.

The survey identified the region that published the most on the subject in the past 10 years, as well as the most relevant authors in the publications. Through this factor analysis, it was possible to identify, among the 105 publications analyzed, four distinct factors (clusters) with different thematic strands that appear to define a difference between the related studies on this topic. These factors were identified as campus management: supply and consumption operations; greenhouse gases emissions assessment: CF calculation; university air travel; sustainable food systems. The changes in people’s attitudes and in the use of university spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to the CF was also noted as a point that can be investigated in future research. As well as the reflection of the reduction in academic air travel and the “forced” occurrence of online events during the same period.

The paper aims to innovate by applying the multidimensional scaling method and EFA to scientific articles on the topic of decarbonizing campuses and identifying the clusters that constitute this field of study. The research seeks to contribute to current metric knowledge on the topic and to the creation of a specific research agenda.