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The main goal of this paper is to establish whether there is some relationship between organizational charts (OC) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in banks. The analysis is based on contents disclosed in their CSR/sustainability reports, as well as Mintzberg's taxonomy for OC.

This paper describes, from a theoretical point‐of‐view, both issues (CSR and social responsible actions), as well as OC patterns according to Mintzberg's taxonomy. Then, an empirical review is gained of CSR/sustainability reports published by a representative sample from the banking industry in the EU‐15. Using a triangular methodology, an attempt has been made to verify whether there is some correlation between Mintzberg's OCs patterns and their CSR contents disclosed, mainly referring to internal management issues.

The paper found no solid evidence to accept or reject a possible relationship between both variables (type of OC adopted by each bank and reporting contents revealed). However, this is a promising research line for future analysis, using a bigger sample and more CSR reporting issues.

This paper opens a new research path in CSR/Sustainability and OCs, for a possible link between both variables, a matter that has not been previously explored.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an exploratory assessment of the employment of assurance in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)/Sustainability reports published by the UK's top ten food retailers.

The paper begins with an outline of the characteristics of assurance and the empirical information for the paper is drawn from the assurance material in the CSR/Sustainability reports posted on the internet by five of the selected retailers.

The findings reveal considerable variation in the nature and the scope of the assurance processes undertaken, at best the accent is on limited assurance and some concerns are expressed about the independence of the assessment process. The paper concludes that these concerns can be seen to reduce the reliability and credibility of the assurance process.

The paper provides an accessible review of how the UK's top ten food retailers are employing external assurance statements as part of their CSR reporting and as such it will interest academics, managers within the retail industry and those professionals and consultants who work with the industry.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the effects of social media on a company when stakeholders decide select companies are not living up to their corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals. As the number of CSR and sustainability reports on company Web sites increases, the more stakeholders, not just stockholders, know about a company’s commitment to CSR, and the more they can use social media to comment on those goals. It will describe three strategies for CSR initiatives that move beyond self-reporting of goals and progress: third party assessment, specialized certifications and partnerships to provide trustworthy data to stakeholders.

The experiences of Nestlé, Unilever, PepsiCo/Frito Lay and P & G are described. Key third-party assessors and their processes are described, as well as organizations who certify in specific areas. The importance of third-party assessment for CSR achievement is reinforced by examining the results of two reports on CSR reporting trends and capital markets’ response, one of Fortune 500® companies and the other of S & P 500® companies by the Governance & Accountability Institute, Inc.

All three strategies used to verify the data for CSR accomplishment help companies communicate their goals through social media.

All three strategies used to verify the data for CSR accomplishment are shown to help companies communicate and validate their CSR goals through social media.

Considering the increasing significance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the corporate world and the mixed findings of the financial implication of CSR investment in the financial economics literature, the purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between (im)material CSR investment and firm performance and the moderating role of airline type and economic conditions based on the stakeholder theory and institutional pressure argument.

This study uses a two-way random-effects model by firm and year along with using clustering coefficient estimation by firm to control for the possibility of inflated standard errors because of autocorrelation across years within a given firm.

This study finds that both material and immaterial CSR initiatives do not directly influence firm performance, but airline type and economic conditions do moderate the relationship. In specific, the study found that airlines’ investments in material CSR initiatives show an indifferent effect on firm performance between low-cost and full-service carriers and also between non-recessionary and recessionary periods. On the other hand, investments in immaterial CSR initiatives present different impacts on firm performance between low-cost and full-service carriers and between non-recessionary and recessionary periods. In details, the effect is more negative for low-cost carriers and recessionary periods than full-service carriers and non-recessionary periods.

This is the first empirical investigation of materiality for the airline industry in relation to firm performance using the industry-specific Materiality Map developed by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board. Further, this study incorporates two additional moderators (airline type and economic conditions) to enhance the understanding of the proposed relationships between (im)material CSR and firm performance.

The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively analyze the corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability reporting (SR) practices of Indian companies in terms of disclosure quantity and quality, and to investigate the differences in SR practices by SR dimension, industry, ownership structure, firm size and profitability.

Data are collected from annual reports/business responsibility reports (BRR)/CSR/sustainability reports of 60 top-listed companies in India. A comprehensive sustainability reporting index is developed. Content analysis technique is used. Inter-coder reliability is established.

Altogether, 18 items of the index are not disclosed by the majority of companies in India. SR quality is found significantly lower than the SR quantity. Moreover, SR practices significantly differ by dimension/category, industry-type and firm-size but are not influenced by ownership structure. However, the study fails to establish any conclusive relationship between SR and profitability.

The present study has several implications for corporates, practitioners, policymakers and stakeholders. The findings underscore the need for amendments in the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines and BRR framework of the Securities and Exchange Board of India to avoid patchy disclosures and ensure complete reporting by companies.

This study is among the foremost studies in India evaluating SR practices of top-listed companies in the wake of the mandatory BRR requirement from a quantitative as well as qualitative perspective using a multidimensional index.

This paper aims to examine the consistencies and discrepancies in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting by analyzing the CSR reports of pharmaceutical companies. Despite the major role pharmaceutical companies play in the CSR field, our knowledge of the extent to which their disclosures provide comprehensive, material, credible and accurate information on their actual performances is limited because of a lack of sufficient literature on the CSR reporting practices of pharmaceutical companies.

The authors present a literature review that serves as the basis to develop the two key research questions: Do pharmaceutical companies publish comprehensive CSR reports? Are company reports that cover more material issues more comprehensive? Using the information on material CSR topics provided by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and CSR reporting quality scores by the CSR-Sustainability Monitor®, the authors analyzed the CSR reports of the world’s 15 leading pharmaceutical companies. A total of 11 material topics from SASB were mapped onto the corresponding contextual elements in the CSR-Sustainability Monitor. The Monitor evaluates CSR reports published by the world’s largest companies in terms of the degree of transparency and external verification of reporting.

The analyses revealed that while the pharmaceutical industry outperforms other industries in terms of the overall comprehensiveness of reporting, certain discrepancies exist among these companies in the content of their disclosures. Specifically, pharmaceutical companies beat the averages on multiple key CSR topics. However, while disclosures on mature areas such as environment and labor relations show some level of standardization, those focusing particularly on sensitive areas such as human rights and supply chain are far from being standardized. The authors also find that CSR reports that do not include all of SASB’s material topics are just as comprehensive as those that do. A detailed analysis of US and non-US companies separately further revealed that this result is valid for both groups of companies.

Considering the voluntary nature of CSR reporting, pharmaceutical companies still resort to selective disclosure techniques to highlight their achievements in areas where they feel more confident while leaving out others that can have potential negative consequences on the company. These results underscore the evolving nature of CSR reporting in the pharmaceutical industry and call for more attention and further investigation from managers and researchers alike.

The originality and value of the research show that despite its rapid growth and wide recognition by different segments of society and business as an effective and promising concept, CSR reporting has not yet reached a point where its expected benefits are realized. Focusing on the disclosure side of the story, this paper tries to identify the extent to which the pharmaceutical industry appropriately addresses increasing societal demand for enhanced transparency on its sustainable business policies and practices.

This study explored how board diversity affects environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance in the Italian banking sector. Specifically, this study examined whether the presence of specific corporate governance (CG) characteristics (board diversity) in Italian Cooperative Credit banks is related to ESG dimensions.

The authors examined a sample of 247 Italian Cooperative Credit banks for the period 2017–2021 and developed an econometric model by applying unbalanced panel data with firm fixed effects and controls per year. To verify the research hypotheses, the authors analyzed board diversity in terms of board attributes variables (size, gender diversity, age, activity, independence and corporate social responsibility/sustainability committee (CSR) and measured ESG dimensions using the ESG score provided by Refinitiv.

The findings suggest that board size, independence and the existence of a CSR/sustainability committee positively affect banks' ESG performance, while no significant relationship between board average age and ESG performance was found. The study also explored how the critical mass of women on a board affects ESG performance by testing the positive impact of gender diversity on ESG dimensions only up to a certain threshold of female directors.

This study is highly relevant to managers and investors who consider ESG issues in their decision-making processes. The findings support regulators by offering insights into ways to improve ESG performance through the specific design and application of governance mechanisms.

From a practical perspective, this investigation has implications for both practitioners and regulators, suggesting that chief executive officers (CEOs) and managers should pay more attention to CG aspects to improve ESG performance and that policy-makers should give greater consideration to these aspects of CG in their efforts to enhance ESG performance.

This study offers an in-depth analysis of banks' ESG practices and attempts to bridge the gap in the literature on ESG in the Italian banking industry. This study is the first to investigate the relationship between CG variables and ESG dimensions in this context.

This paper aims to explain how companies in the region of Arab countries respond to the institutional diffusion of a new communication genre like corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports.

Analysis of the features, content and language of CSR reports published by listed companies in the region, to classify the genres of these reports and infer results about ways of companies’ interaction with newly institutionalized genre.

Three distinct genres are identified: “sustainability reports genre,” “professional CSR report genre” and “light CSR report genre.” When companies interact with institutionally diffused genres, they either adopt them and re-enforce their distinctiveness, mix them with elements from other genres so their distinctiveness will be diluted, or produce the old and established genres under the new name so the new genre will lose its distinctiveness.

The proposed classification of CSR report genres and ways of companies’ interaction with new genres are original and open new horizons for research in social and environmental accounting and corporate communication fields.

The purpose of this research is to assess the implementation of sustainable practice by Malaysian property developers, particularly on social and environmental perspectives.

This is a qualitative research where content analysis is used to analyse leading property companies’ websites, annual reports, corporate responsibility and sustainability reports, and carbon disclosure reports.

Findings from this research indicate that the majority of the developers have their corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in place and there are variations in their approaches and reporting process. Of all, philanthropic activities are the mostly widely reported followed by human resource initiatives. Even though the majority of property companies reported their environmental practices, only the top few developers had their projects certified by sustainability rating agencies.

As this project was restricted to the top ten Malaysian developers, the results do not reflect how other companies, particularly the smaller ones, adopt CSR in their business. However, this project revealed valuable findings regarding the magnitude of CSR initiatives, particularly on social and environmental perspective, adopted by the top ten Malaysian property developers; this is useful for the Malaysian government authorities in formulating CSR‐related policies particularly on environmental sustainability. As well, the findings of this project can be a useful reference to other property companies which are keen to contribute to sustainable development, particularly on social and environmental perspectives.

There has been limited literature on CSR in the Malaysian property industry thus far. Previous research papers are mainly about environmental sustainability of property companies, sustainable practice by Malaysian real estate investment trusts, and CSR perception of house buyers and developers. Therefore, to fill the gap in the literature, this research is designed to assess the implementation of sustainable practice by Malaysian property developers, particularly on the social and environmental perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to determine what types of sustainability activities companies are reporting and whether persons external to the companies understand how those reported activities correspond to the companies’ narratives about sustainability. That is to ascertain how people interpret the meaning of the activities included in the sustainability reports.

From a sample of sustainability reports prepared by Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines, the authors identified the distinct activities reported. The authors prepared a survey comprised of these activities and asked a sample of people knowledgeable about business and investing to evaluate each activity on the extent to which they are relevant to sustainability performance. The responses were then factor analyzed to identify the most important dimensions of sustainability these persons employed to relate the activities to sustainability.

The dimensions employed by the subjects differed in some significant ways from those dimensions used to construct the GRI format. Subjects evaluated sustainability efforts as primarily efforts of being a good citizen with sustainability an end in itself rather than as constraint to be respected in achieving profitability goals.

The study is a first attempt so results are preliminary, i.e. suggestive but not definitive. Though preliminary an intriguing implication is that closure on a sustainability reporting structure would be premature. More effort needs to be devoted to provide more clarity on the concept of corporate sustainability and what its implications are for corporate behavior.

Given the results that sustainability be regarded as a corporate end, what is the role of the corporation in society seems still to be disputatious. Sustainability may not be something achievable without changes in corporate law.

The study is an early attempt to assess the potential alternative narratives about corporate sustainability. Its value lies in providing insights into the age-old question of what should be the role of the corporation in a free society.