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The main purpose of this study is analyzing the influence of corporate social responsibility practices and programs on employee human resources performances in Puerto Rico. The study used an exploratory approach and primary data for this research was obtained through a questionnaire collected from 205 employees of companies with CSR active programs. The study uses structural equation model (SEM) technique to test the hypotheses. The study found the highest significantly positive relationship in CSR programs and employee human resources performances than CSR practices and employee human resources performances. The present study discusses important implications regarding uses of CSR for enhancing employee’s organizational commitment and satisfaction. One of the least studied areas at the moment is the internal corporate social responsibility which is directly related to company’s employees. This dimension of the corporate social responsibility refers to the set of responsible activities and practices that the company realizes toward their employees that consider the living conditions of each one of them and the contribution that it can do to improve their well-being.

This study examines different types of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices across the industries in Pakistan along with their effectiveness. The main aim of this study is to research the CSR practices and growing trends of CSR in developing countries like Pakistan. Companies adopting CSR as a vital part of their company have frequently been encouraged across the industry and by the governments of their respective countries. A total of 120 individuals from public and private sector institutions participated in this research. The findings suggest that CSR is very effective across the industry. Furthermore, the practices of CSR will result in better social welfare of society. CSR practices have worked a great deal in increasing a company’s goodwill and raising its brand name. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings have been discussed in this chapter. Lastly, this research concludes with details of top effective practices adopted by different companies within same industry as well as across different industries.

This chapter is derived from the result of research conducted by Firman Menne, Lanita Winata and Mohammad Hossain. The emergence of Islamic Financial Institutions (IFIs) is expected to provide enormous benefits for the Muslim community in Indonesia such as the availability of IFIs based on Sharia law and the implementation of Islamic value in the community. Like Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices in all business organizations, the IFI’s CSR becomes one of the important factors in improving organizational performance. The implementation of CSR in IFIs is unique as it is based on Sharia law. Zakat and Qardh are the unique IFI CSR practices. There are many studies which have investigated the relationship of Zakat and Qardh on organizational performance in Arabic and Muslim countries. In Muslim countries, Islamic laws, including providing Zakat and Qardh, are practices of every business organization. As Indonesia is not a Muslim country, Zakat and Qardh are only required for IFIs as part of CSR practices. This study aims to analyse the influence of CSR practices on the financial performances of IFIs in Indonesia using gender as a control variable.

The samples of this research were taken from the annual reports of nine Islamic banks for the period of 2010–2014. Regression method was used to analyse and test hypotheses.

The results of this research indicate that the relationship between CSR practices and financial performance is significant, the value of R is 0.737, and R square is 0.543.

This means that the implementation of CSR practices (Zakat and Qardh) improves organizational financial performances of IFIs in Indonesia.

This study also has a limitation as it only focuses on Zakat and Qardh; thus in the future, it is necessary to advance the variable of CSR practices on the real social and environmental practices such as environmental improvement, increasing the quality of human resources, involvement in any jobs or reducing unemployment and any other activities.

This chapter aims to understand the communication practices of CSR in technological environments, specifically corporate websites. It is important to know what are the dimensions of CSR most valued in online communication, what content is more widespread, and if there is dialogic communication between organizations and different stakeholders. It was used a quantitative method of analysis, using the expanded web content analysis. It was based on the study results of the 1,000 largest Portuguese companies published by the Economic Journal in 2014. The chapter includes the analysis of the best companies from 24 sectors of activity of Portugal. Portuguese organizations use their websites to communicate about CSR practices. A large majority of companies dedicate to these subjects a higher number of pages. The findings indicate that the issues disseminated are various, but the predominance content is related to environmental dimension. Results suggest a low level of dialogic dimension adoption. It is proposed a theoretical framework of online communication of CSR that integrates a set of indicators from three interlinked dimensions: the technical dimension, the informational dimension and dialogical dimension, considering the different kind of publics and the different practice areas inherent to CSR. This framework is a contribution to the deepening of knowledge and understanding of online communication of CSR practices, on the perspective of public relations theory. It has practical implications to communication, because it proposes guidelines that should be considered in an effective online communication of CSR in organizations of various sectors of activity in Portugal. It is proposed a theoretical framework of an effective online communication of CSR that integrates a set of indicators from three interlinked dimensions that are part of the dialogical capacity of organizations.

The increasing pressure for social responsibility and sustainability that multinational enterprises (MNEs) are facing in their global operations represents one important emerging phenomenon within the international business field. In this book chapter, we present an in-depth case study on how a global fashion MNE develops and implements sustainability practices in their operations in an emerging market context. The case study focusses on the MNE’s work related to energy efficiency and renewable energy in the production market of Bangladesh. The purpose of this chapter is to advance the understanding about particular practices pertinent to a proactive approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR). The chapter contributes to ongoing discussions within the international business field on the role of MNEs in driving and implementing sustainability practices. We add an in-depth understanding of the proactive CSR practices undertaken by an MNE, in an emerging market context.

The purpose of this chapter is to carry out a theoretical review of the state of the art in relation to Latin American Small and Medium Enterprises' (SMEs) communication practices and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) from 2009 to 2016. A range of recently published papers (2009–2016) is retrieved in a literature search of the Web of Science and Google Scholar under keywords such as ‘CSR’, ‘SME’, ‘Communication’, and ‘CSR in Latin America’. This chapter provides information about CSR in SMEs, indicating what can be found on this topic and how the management of CSR communication can help those firms. It also recognizes the lack of any real formation in SMEs to solve their problems in this area. This chapter emphasizes that, in general terms, SMEs are aware of CSR management opportunities but, because of the aforementioned constraints, their current CSR communications practices are absolutely basic and their management is still limited and short-term. Instead of a generalized exhaustive study, this is an approach to develop new studies in the future. It does not contain empirical results but rather practical information for reflections on CSR and communication in Latin American SMEs. A useful source of information for SME managers. CSR communications policies generate no value unless they have been taken into account in the overall design of corporate CSR policy, particularly if there is no clear vision of how new stakeholders may be more valuable strategically than operationally. This chapter fulfils an identified information/resources need and offers indications for future lines of research.

The origins of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have been widely attributed to the work of scholars, and business managers as well, in North America and Western Europe. Inevitably, however, as the economic interaction of individual firms and entire nations has grown over the past several decades — call it globalization — so too has the concept and the practice of CSR spread throughout the world. It is certainly time to explore how CSR is being incorporated into the practice of business management in other regions and other countries. Therefore, in this chapter we will focus on Asia: specifically on Japan, South Korea, India, and China. It is interesting for academicians to understand how CSR is being absorbed and adapted into the business cultures of these four countries. Perhaps of even greater importance, it is vital that business managers know what to expect about the interaction between business and society as well as the government as their commercial activities grow in this burgeoning part of the world.

For each of these four countries, we will provide an overview of the extent to which CSR has become a part of the academic community and also how it is being practiced and incorporated in everyday management affairs. We will see that there are very significant differences among these countries which lead to the natural question: why? To answer this question, we will use an eight-part analytical framework developed specifically for this purpose. We will look at the history, the dominant religious beliefs, the relevant social customs, the geography, the political structures, the level of economic development, civil society institutions, and the “safety net” of each country. As a result of this analysis, we believe, academicians can learn how CSR is absorbed and spread into commercial affairs, and managers can profit from learning more about what to expect when doing business in this increasingly important region.

Over the last several decades, businesses have faced mounting pressures from diverse stakeholders to alter their corporate operations to become more socially and environmentally responsible. In turn, many firms appear to have responded by implementing more sustainable practices — measuring, documenting, and publishing annual CSR or sustainability reports to showcase how they are addressing important issues in this area, including: resource stewardship, waste management, greenhouse gas emission reductions, fair and safe labor practices, amongst other stakeholder concerns. And yet, research in this domain has not yet systematically examined whether businesses have, on the whole, changed their practices in tandem with the important changes in its institutional context over time. Have corporate CSR initiatives, in fact, been growing over the last 25 years or has the increased attention to CSR actually been much ado about nothing? In this chapter, we review the empirical literature on CSR to uncover that common measures of CSR such as the KLD do not support the concept that CSR practices have increased substantively over the last 25 years. We supplement this historical review by modeling the growth curves of CSR implementation in practice and find that the pace of positive change has indeed been glacial. More alarmingly, we also look at corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) and find that, contrary to expectations, businesses have become more, not less, irresponsible during this same time period. Implications of these findings for theory are presented as are suggestions for future research in this domain.

Nowadays, social and environmental reporting is approached in different ways, paths and fields by either large-, small-, or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). However, as demonstrated by previous scholars, SMEs have been critically discussed because they provide lack of proper sustainability disclosure. The fact that the predominant approach of SMEs toward social responsibility is often “sunken” and not “explicit” can drive the lack of disclosure. Furthermore, unstructured communication practices create difficulties in measuring and reporting the sustainability reporting phenomenon in SMEs. The aim of our study is to shed light on the activity of SMEs’ sustainability reporting and disclosure, specifically, by addressing the variables that influence the choice of the guidelines used to prepare sustainability reports.

The research has been carried out by using qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The empirical evidence is based on all the Italian companies, mostly SMEs, that were certified in 2011 as having adopted both environmental (i.e., ISO14001 or EMAS) and social (i.e., SA8000) management systems. A multivariate linear regression model has been developed to address the influence of several variables (i.e., financial performance, size, time after achievement of the certifications, group/conglomerate control, etc.) on the guidelines’ choice for preparing sustainability reports.

Our findings demonstrate that SMEs prefer to use simple guidelines such as those guidelines that are mandatory under management system certifications. However, the sustainability disclosure driven by the adoption of international guidelines may be more complex if the SME is controlled within a group of companies or if a significant amount of time has passed since the certification date. As such, we developed a taxonomy of their different behavioral drivers according to a legitimacy theory approach.

At this stage, our study didn’t focus on the contents’ quality of the disclosure and reporting practices adopted by SMEs, which is obviously a worthwhile and important area for further research. Furthermore, the analysis took into account the impact of a number of easily accessible variables; therefore, it can be extended to investigate the effect on disclosure of other relevant variables (i.e., nature of the board of directors, age, and industrial sector in which the company operates) as well as contexts prevailing in other countries.

The study represents an important contribution for understanding how and why managers might use externally focused disclosure on social and environmental issues to benefit the company’s legitimacy.

Our study provides interesting insights for policy makers who require social or environmental certification when calling for tenders or specific EU contracts, in order to put aside the “brand” or “symbol” and really focus on the disclosed practices.

Previous studies have provided only a few evidence about reporting practices and related influencing features of SMEs’ sustainability actions. As such, the study wishes to make a significant contribution to the existing literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) by providing relevant insights about the factors which influence the guidelines used by SMEs in preparing their sustainability reports.

This chapter addresses a significant topic in Algeria, namely the issue of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), by examining the use of business ethics codes. In recent years, there has been growing interest among companies in implementing practices that can justify their CSR efforts, including the development of corporate business ethics codes. These codes play a crucial role in formalizing the integration of CSR strategies. In Algeria, several companies have adopted business ethics codes; one such example is the companies in the oil and gas sector, the leading oil industry company in Algeria. These companies have implemented a business ethics code to provide justification and guidance for their CSR practices. The main objective of this chapter is to demonstrate the commitment of companies to CSR through the development of their business ethics codes. It presents the results of a comprehensive analysis of the business ethics codes of Algerian companies in the oil and gas sector. The approach involved the development of an analytical framework with various criteria and an objective examination of the business ethics code to yield results that aligned with these criteria. The study concludes that the business ethics codes of these companies serve as sources of internal regulation that primarily address ethical concerns and reflects the existing Algerian regulations at the organizational level.