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The purpose of this paper is to introduce a long‐time report evaluation project of the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW) and the business network “future – verantwortung unternehmen”.

On a regular basis, the IÖW/future‐Ranking evaluates the content and communicative quality of sustainability and CR reports of Germany's 150 largest companies. The project provides a platform where stakeholder expectations concerning corporate responsibility and transparency are synthesised into a comprehensive catalogue of reporting requirements. These criteria have to be met by the companies to reliably show sustainability commitment.

The evaluation of the reports not only makes the sustainability reporting practice of companies comparable and transparent to the public. The set of criteria itself also serves as a reporting framework for companies and thus enhances directional certainty about corporate contributions to sustainable development. It is itself subject to a periodic evaluation and adaptation by means of dialogue and feedback processes with representatives from industry, politics and NGOs.

The paper discusses the process of ranking and the possibilities for future developments in this.

The process described has had little academic exposure and so the paper provides an original insight into a practical subject which has academic interest.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an extension of the Corporate Governance Reporting Initiative (CGI) 2004, which reports on Malaysia's first corporate governance ratings. Characteristics of firms with high and low scores in the corporate governance ratings are analysed by comparing companies based on their corporate governance ranking as reported in the CGI.

Firms are classified into those at the top 50 percent and the bottom 50 percent of the corporate governance ratings list to examine whether there are any differences in the characteristics of firms in both classified samples. The characteristics of firms that are being examined are firms' profitability, leverage, growth, market valuation, size, age, ownership structure and countries of operation based on the Logit analysis.

The result shows that firm size has a strong influence with corporate governance ratings, but not so for other variables tested.

This study analyses only eight corporate characteristics. There are other measures that can represent firms' size such as market capitalization.

It is hoped that the traits found from the analysis will be able to provide additional information concerning corporate governance to interested parties. The characteristics revealed may probably be found to be essential elements in the development of effective and efficient corporate governance structure. The study could also help corporations in their short‐ and long‐term strategies.

This study bridges the gap of previous studies by using a complete set of governance standards on the analysis and directly identifies firms with certain scores of corporate governance and addresses issues related to these exceptional companies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the financial aspects of high vs low-ranked firms in the Corporate Responsibility Index in Egypt, and to construct a Z-score model to discriminate between high- and low-ranked firms in the Corporate Responsibility Index.

This study empirically examines a comprehensive list of financial ratios for 24 firms listed in EGX30 for four fiscal years, 2007-2010. The authors calculate 90 financial ratios to provide better insights and evaluation of the firms’ financial performance. The ordinary least square regression method and discriminant analysis are utilized to explain differences between the low- and high-ranked firms regarding their corporate social governance index.

The results show that corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are positively related to the firms’ financial performance in terms of sales turnover and customer loyalty. This suggests that in the long run, the market mechanism should be able to provide additional resources to those companies that are better at maximizing a widely defined bottom line of their social governance. The results also show that highly ranked firms are characterized financially by: strong bargaining power with suppliers; financing growth in fixed assets using debt mainly.

The study contributes to the literature in terms of providing practical insights on the financial strategies that help support effective CG and CSR in Egypt. In addition, this study offers a unique quantitative attempt to measure and examine the benefits of incorporation of socioeconomics into business practices.

Rankings have become a popular topic in the social sciences over the past two decades. Adding to these debates, the present volume assembles studies that explore a variety of empirical settings, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging that there are multiple “Worlds of Rankings.” To this end, the first part of the chapter addresses the implications of two modes of criticism that characterize much of the scholarly work on rankings and summarizes extant conceptual debates. Taking stock of what we know, the second part distinguishes three areas of empirical research. The first area concerns the activities of those who produce rankings, such as the collection of data or different business strategies. Studies in the second area focus on inter-organizational, field-level, or discursive phenomena, particularly how rankings are received, interpreted, and institutionalized. The third area covers the manifold effects that research has unveiled, ranging from the diffusion of practices and changes in organizational identities to emotional distress. Taken together, the contributions to this volume expand our knowledge in all three areas, inviting new debates and suggesting pathways forward.

Several studies on corporate reputation have proposed a customer‐based approach for assessing corporate reputation. Other studies proposed examining corporate reputation from the perspective of other primary stakeholder groups such as employees, investors or suppliers. Hence this paper aims to examine corporate reputation by considering both the customer's and the non‐customer's views.

This study was applied to the US wireless telecommunications industry. A random sample of 1,088 respondents composed of 518 customers and 570 representing the non‐customers, was generated for this study. The sample was randomly distributed by age, gender, income, education and geographic location.

The findings of this study revealed that the formation of perceptions about corporate reputation differ between customers and non‐customers. The dimension of emotional appeal is specific to the customer group and the dimension of vision and leadership is specific to the non‐customer group. Finally, social and environmental responsibility was not a significant element in forming the perceptions about corporate reputation for both customers and non‐customers.

The study does not incorporate the effect of variables such as change in price or service quality nor take the impact of mergers and acquisitions into consideration.

This study helped to identify the primary and secondary elements for managing a company's reputation.

This study contributes to the literature on corporate reputation by determining how customers and non‐customers form their perceptions. The model provides a comprehensive assessment on how perceptions about corporate reputation are formed and what are the subsequent outcomes of those perceptions.

This paper aims to investigate whether the assumption of bias-free journalism is violated. If there is systematic news coverage bias inherent in business journalism, certain kinds of companies will have a systematically higher or lower visibility in business news. Such differential corporate visibility may undermine the validity of research that is based solely on business news as a data source.

A set of hypotheses is developed and statistically tested, concerning the corporate characteristics associated with business media coverage. Coverage of the 100 largest Finnish companies is examined within the three foremost Finnish business publications. Methodologically, uncorrelated principal components in regression analyses are used.

The main finding is that that financially low-performing companies and growing companies receive less coverage than well-performing or shrinking companies, indicating a possible bias in journalistic sourcing, attention or selection. Consequently, such companies may be relatively under-represented in data sets derived solely from business news sources.

Significantly greater in-depth understanding of the phenomenon could be obtained through studying the biases at play in day-to-day journalistic practices within editorial offices and news desks, which is beyond the present study. The study cautions against single sourcing strategies reliant on business news alone, and it strongly recommends that future studies complement business news data with other, non-news sources.

Organizational metrics such as financial performance appear to influence corporate visibility in business news, which may therefore skew individuals’ and investors’ attitudes to corporations. The existence of coverage bias is methodologically consequential because management research often sources data from business news, especially in event-based studies.

This study provides evidence that media visibility is influenced by company performance and change in company size, which could contribute to bias in business news coverage. This should be taken into account in future studies that use business news data.

This paper analyzes some of the issues regarding the belief that a company’s values are encapsulated in its corporate philosophy and that conveying these values is what corporate communication is all about. It draws upon the results of a 1997 survey, by the author, of 76 representative Japanese global enterprises on the current state of their overseas business.

This paper aims to explore whether fair value Levels 1 and 2 measurements are more value relevant than Level 3 fair value measurements in a less-active market. Specifically, this research addresses two objectives. Firstly, it examines the value relevance of fair value measures for each disclosure level of fair value. Secondly, it assesses the impact of corporate governance on the value relevance of less observable fair value disclosures (Levels 2 and 3).

Drawing insights from agency theorising, this research adopts a quantitative approach (regression analysis) that investigates data from a less active financial market (South Africa).

Contrary to agency theory suppositions, the results show that investors in a less active market value management inputs more than market (more transparent) information. The authors also observe that investors pay limited interest to corporate governance structures when pricing fair value measurement, implying that they rely on factors beyond corporate governance mechanisms.

The authors’ findings offer useful evidence to standard setters and preparers of financial information. While the International Accounting Standard Board suggests that investors value transparent financial information, the data shows that investors in less-active markets value management’s inputs more than those of the market.

The authors ask the question if firms would continue the efforts to improve their social responsibility and how that continued efforts would impact their financial performance over time. This study’s approach helps better understand the effects of changing social responsibility on firms’ stock performance over time.

The authors investigate the relationship between firms’ evolving social responsibility and their stock performance changes.

This study’s findings suggest that more socially responsible firms tend to perform better. In addition, improvements in companies’ social responsibility measures are associated with better stock performances.

Existing literature uses firms’ social capital scores at a single point in time and does not account for the changes in firms’ social effort over time. By using Media Corporate Responsibility Magazine’s 100 best corporate citizens ranking for a 10-year period from 2009 to 2018, we construct a unique data set that includes the firm’s social responsibility levels for 10 years.

The game plan firms must navigate in the quest of competitive advantage which is changing quickly. More and more firms acknowledge that future prosperity depends on achieving the joint goals of economic, environmental and social sustainability. This understanding has resulted in both firms and actors on the financial markets enhancing their focus on environmental, social and governance dimensions in their respective decision-making processes. In this chapter, the focus is on one key component of the changing game plan, the European Union’s (EU) Sustainable Finance Platform that envisions investors as a key driver of firms’ sustainability transformation. Based on survey data from Swedish listed firms, we discuss implications and outcomes of the Platform. Our results show that investors play an important role in setting the rules of the gameplan for firms. However, not to the extent that it meets the ambitions of the policymakers. This suggests either that the Platform will fail to meet its aims or that firms should expect further significant changes to the gameplan in the future.