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Effective business and investment climate can lead to a higher rate of investment, profits and improved productivity, through the creation of an institutional environment, where the state provides high-quality public goods. This study aims to explore the impact of the business–investment climate on firm performance in a sample of six countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and Turkey. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to explore the impact of business–investment climate on the resource misallocation in Egypt and Turkey.

The study used fixed effects models to investigate the relationship between the business and investment climate, expressed by the obstacles in state–business relations- and the firm performance, which is measured by the firm's value-added, the labour productivity and the total factor productivity To reduce the endogeneity coming from possible reverse causality and the perceptions about the business climate, an instrumental variables (IV) approach applying the two-stage least squares (2SLS) method was followed. The empirical analysis relies on data derived from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys.

Based on estimates, the obstacles in business climate may reduce the firm performance measures by 15–40%. These findings indicate the importance of quality in the business climate and how the improvement in its efficiency can have a very considerable positive impact on firms' performance and thus on the overall economic growth of a country.

This is the first study exploring the impact of business–investment climate on various measures of the firm performance and the resource misallocation in a large sample of countries in the MENA region.

Sustainable development has become a strategic priority for companies. The purpose of this study is to explain what paths a company can take to reconfigure its business model and corporate reporting tools in line with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The research used a qualitative approach and drew on stakeholder and legitimacy theories to collect primary and secondary data through in-depth interviews, semi-structured questionnaires and observation of corporate documents.

Sustainability and climate change issues’ relevance in the business model and reporting requires improvement so that stakeholders can participate and become aware of the actions put in place to limit the climate challenge.

The results of the case study cannot be subjected to statistical generalisation, as they focus on the Italian context and do not capture the regulatory divergence of different countries.

The results can help managers experiment with, orient, test and implement business model transformations to increase the level of sustainability within an organisation. In addition, disclosure of climate change risks and opportunities for the company and the resulting impacts, including financial impacts, is now recognised as a key urgency to support the achievement of the SDGs and the stakeholder decision-making process.

This study contributes to the literature by focusing on necessary developments for governance and strategy and on climate change disclosure to support investors’ and other stakeholders’ decision-making processes for corporate social responsibility.

This study aims to examine the various climate change practices adopted by firms and develop a set of corporate indexes that measure the level of climate change corporate commitment, climate change risk management integration and climate change strategies adoption. Moreover, this study examines the relationship between the aforementioned indexes. The authors claim that there is a positive relationship between the adoption of climate change strategies, corporate commitment and risk management integration. The aforementioned indexes have been used to assess the largest companies in the oil and gas sectors.

To assess this study’s sample companies, a content analysis of their carbon disclosure project (CDP) reports for the years 2012-2015 was conducted. Finally, weights were assigned to the content analysis data based on the results of a survey regarding the difficulty of implementing each climate change practice included in the respective index. The survey sample included climate change experts who are either currently employed in companies that are included in the Financial Times Global 500 (FT 500) list, or work as external partners with these companies.

The present study results highlight the need for developing elaborate corporate indexes, as the various climate change practices have different degrees of difficulty regarding their implementation. Additionally, a general trend in adopting climate change strategies is observed, especially in the field of carbon reduction strategies, which mainly involve the implementation of low carbon technologies. Finally, a positive and significant relationship was found between carbon reduction targets, risk management integration and climate change strategies.

Although international research has extensively examined the importance of managers’ perceptions on environmental issues as an enabling factor in developing environmental strategies, according to the results of our survey, corporations must go beyond top management commitment towards climate change to be able to successfully implement climate change strategies. Incorporation of climate change risk management procedures into a company’s core business activities as well as the establishment of precise carbon reduction targets can provide the basis on which successful climate change strategies are implemented.

Most studies address the issue of climate change management in terms of environmental or sustainability management. Furthermore, research on climate change and its relationship with business management is mainly theoretical, and climate change corporate performance is measured with aggregate indexes. This study focuses on climate change which is examined from a five-dimensional perspective: top management commitment, carbon reduction targets, risk management integration, carbon reduction and carbon compensation strategies. This allows us to conduct an in-depth analysis of the various climate change practices of firms.

This study aims to explore South Korean firms’ reactions to climate change issues and the Korean emissions trading scheme (ETS) from the perspective of proactive climate-entrepreneurship. Differences in attitude toward the Korean ETS, implementation of carbon management practices and performance regarding operations, market and emission reductions are also investigated.

A research model was developed to investigate the differences in corporate perception of climate change. Using a cluster analysis and analysis of variance with 94 South Korean companies subject to the Korean ETS, the study identified carbon strategies and examined differences in characteristics among the strategies. This study undertook a robustness test by comparing the results from a large sample (n = 261) with those of the original sample (n = 94).

The study identifies four different carbon strategies based on climate-entrepreneurial proactivity: the “explorer,” “hesitator,” “attempter” and “laggard.” The “explorer” cluster is likely to have a proactive stance toward the Korean ETS regulation, while the “laggard” cluster shows resistance to this new climate policy. Entrepreneurial proactivity in carbon strategies is related to the actual adoption, implementation and effectiveness of carbon management practices.

This research is one of the few studies to explore differences in corporate response to climate change from the perspective of entrepreneurship. The study provides a theoretical foundation for extending the literature on the strategic management of climate change issues.

The climate crisis presents a global threat. Research shows the necessity of joint communication efforts across different arenas—media, politics, business, academia and protest—to address this threat. However, communication about social change in response to the climate crisis comes with challenges. These challenges manifest, among others, in public accusations of inconsistency in terms of hypocrisy and incapability against self-declared change agents in different arenas. This increasingly turns public climate communication into a “blame game”.

Strategic communication scholarship has started to engage in this debate, thereby acknowledging climate communication as an arena-spanning, necessarily contested issue. Still, a systematic overview of specific inconsistency accusations in different public arenas is lacking. This conceptual article provides an overview based on a macro-focused public arena approach and decoupling scholarship.

Drawing on a systematic literature review of climate-related strategic communication scholarship and key debates from climate communication research in neighboring domains, the authors develop a framework mapping how inconsistency accusations of hypocrisy and incapacity, that is, policy–practice and means–ends decoupling, manifest in different climate communication arenas.

This framework creates awareness for the shared challenge of decoupling accusations across different climate communication arenas, underscoring the necessity of an arena-spanning strategic communication agenda. This agenda requires a communicative shift from downplaying to embracing decoupling accusations, from mutual blaming to approval of accountable ways of working through accusations and from confrontation to cooperation of agents across arenas.

Drawing on the theory of contingency, the aim of this work is to understand how supply chain-related contingencies, arising from climate change, are related to changes in the organisational structure of firms. Further, the authors explore how this relationship influences the perception of sustainability managers on the adoption of low-carbon operations management practices and their related benefits.

To achieve this goal, this research uses NVivo software to gather evidence from interviews conducted with ten high-level managers in sustainability and related areas from seven leading companies located in Brazil.

The authors present four primary results: a proposal of an original framework to understand the relationship between contingency theory, changes in organisational structure to embrace low-carbon management, adoption of low-carbon operations practices and benefits from this process; the discovery that an adequate low-carbon management structure is vital to improve the organisations’ perceptions of potential benefits from a low-carbon strategy; low-carbon management initiatives tend to emerge from an organisation’s existing environmental management systems; and controlling and monitoring climate contingencies at the supply chain level should be permanent and systematic.

Based on the knowledge of the authors, to date, this work is the first piece of research that deals with the complexity of putting together contingency theory, climate-change contingencies at the supply chain level, organisational structure for low-carbon management and low-carbon operations management practices and benefits. This research also highlights evidence from an emerging economy and registers future research propositions.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the relationship between innovative climate, strategic orientation, work motivation, business performance and job performance.

Within the scope of the research, a survey was conducted with 400 engineers working in organizations operating within companies producing spare parts for automobile companies. IBM SPSS 25, IBM SPSS AMOS and LISREL programs were gradually used, and the data obtained were evaluated and analyzed.

The importance of strategic orientation and work motivation for organizations can be seen in the analysis results in terms of their positive effects.

In the production sector, where innovation and competition activities take place, not only strategic decisions but also motivation for employees must be realized within the organizational culture in order for the organizations to be successful. Strategic orientation is effective in achieving innovation and creation to the extent that employees are motivated.

In terms of successful performance, it is very important to manage companies with the right strategic understanding and to involve the employees. In order to realize the innovation climate and to be successful in performance criteria, motivation is considered a key factor, in particular for the automobile sector. Automobile companies are now turning to electric vehicle production using new generation technologies. However, they also attach importance to the use of smart technologies in cars. For this reason, the effects of strategic orientation and work motivation on performance and innovation are investigated in companies producing automobile spare parts.

The purpose of this guest editorial is to introduce the special issue entitled “Renewable energy in international business.”

This paper presents a research agenda for the topic of the special issue and provides an overview of the articles included.

This guest editorial contains a discussion of the themes related to the topic, with a particular focus on the global production and adoption of renewable energies and dark sides of international renewable energy.

This guest editorial considers how the articles included in the special issue contribute to research on renewable energy in international business and provides an avenue for future studies for a broader impact.

The discussion raises two important research streams that have remained overlooked in international business research, namely, global production and adoption of renewable energies and dark sides of international renewable energy. This guest editorial also highlights the potential of international business research to become more relevant by incorporating conceptual, methodological and empirical insights that inform the multidisciplinary community of renewable energy researchers.

This paper aims to investigate the current state of knowledge in key reporting aspects in relation to sustainability reporting in general and to reflect on their relevance to Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) in particular. In doing so, the major gaps in that knowledge are identified, and the paper proceeds to suggest further research avenues.

The authors conduct a review of papers published in leading journals concerning sustainability reporting to analyse the progress in the literature regarding three important reporting topics: materiality, comparability and assurance.

The review conducted in this study shows that there is still work to be done to ensure high-quality and consistent sustainability reporting. Key takeaways from the review of the extant literature are as follows: there is ongoing debate about the nature of sustainability reporting materiality, and single versus double materiality. Clearer guidance and better contextualisation are seen as essential for comparability, and, as GRI suggests, there is an important link to materiality that needs to be considered. Finally, assurance has not been mandatory under the GRI, but the current development at EU level might lead to the GRI principles being incorporated in the primary assurance standards.

In this paper, the authors review and synthesise the previous literature on GRI reporting dealing with three key reporting aspects.

The authors extract some takeaways from the literature on materiality, comparability and assurance that will all be key challenges for GRI in the future.

This paper provides an updated review of the literature on GRI reporting dealing with three key reporting aspects.

A low-carbon economy is the pressing need of the hour. Despite several efforts taken by the government and large corporations, there is still research to be conducted exploring the role of top management commitment in translating external pressures into responses that help to build low-carbon emissions in supply chains.

The authors have grounded their framework in institutional theory, agency theory and contingency theory. On the basis of existing literature, four hypotheses were drawn. To test these hypotheses, a questionnaire was developed and pre-tested. Finally, statistical analyses were performed to test the research hypotheses using 176 samples gathered using a pre-tested questionnaire following Dillman’s (2007) total design test method.

The results suggest that coercive pressures and mimetic pressures under the mediating effect of top management commitment have a significant influence on organizational response to low-carbon emissions. The authors further note that supply base complexity has moderating effects on the link between top management commitment and organizational response towards low-carbon emissions.

This study offers valuable insights to those managers and environmental consultants who view supply base complexity as a limitation. However, the results indicate that supply base complexity may help to enhance the effectiveness of the top management commitment on organizational response towards low-carbon emissions.