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This paper aims to enlarge ongoing debate about corporate social responsibility (CSR) proposing reflections about the role of cognitive and information flows in influencing companies’ approaches and market expectations related to CSR.

The paper builds upon the research streams related to the information asymmetry and cognitive distance, for identifying through the interpretative lens provided by systems studies, possible key drivers on which policymakers, researchers and practitioners should act for building a suitable, shared and long-term oriented path for CSR.

The paper defines a scenario map about CSR in the light of information asymmetry and cognitive distance. Such a map supports both researchers and practitioners in better understanding actions and paths required for building a shared approach to CSR.

Recognizing the multidimensionality of CSR and the multiple managerial and organizational contributions provided for underling its advantages for companies, the paper focuses the attention on the elements and conditions able to promote, stimulate and encourage companies’ CSR strategies.

The paper provides a fresh conceptual framework for explaining conditions and elements required for ensuring the success of strategies for CSR. Adopting a systems view, the paper overcomes the limitations related to a reductionist view about advantages and results of CSR to call the attention on the conditions that should be met for ensuring the emergence of a shared approach to CSR.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is significant in the financial market. Despite plenty of existing research on CSR, few studies have quantified the fine-grained aspects of CSR and examined how diverse CSR aspects are associated with firms' trade credit. Based on the released CSR reports, this paper strives to measure the CSR fulfillment of firms and examine the relationships between CSR and trade credit in terms of textual features presented in these reports.

This research proposes a natural language processing-based framework to extract the overall readability and the sentiment of fine-grained aspects from CSR reports, which can signal the performance of firms' CSR in diverse aspects. Furthermore, this paper explores how the textual features are associated with trade credit through partial dependence plots (PDPs), and PDPs can generate both linear and nonlinear relationships.

The study’s results reveal that the overall readability of the reports is positively associated with trade credit, while the performance of the fine-grained CSR aspects mentioned in the CSR reports matters differently. The performance of the environment has a positive impact on trade credit; the performance of creditors, suppliers and information disclosure, shows a U-shaped influence on trade credit; while the performance of the government and customers is negatively associated with trade credit.

This study expands the scope of research on CSR and trade credit by investigating fine-grained aspects covered in CSR reports. It also offers some managerial implications in the allocation of CSR resources and the presentation of CSR reports.

This paper aims to verify whether the integration of sustainability in executive compensation positively affects firms’ non-financial performance and whether corporate governance characteristics enhance the relationship between sustainability compensation and firms’ non-financial performance and to expand the domain of the impact of sustainability on non-financial performance.

This analysis is based on a sample of companies listed on the Milan Italian Stock Exchange from the Financial Times Milan Stock Exchange Index over the 2016–2020 period. Regression analysis was used by using data retrieved from the Refinitiv Eikon database and the sample firms’ remuneration reports.

The findings of this paper show that embedding sustainability in executive compensation positively affects firms’ non-financial performance. The results of this paper also reveal that specific corporate governance features can improve the impact of sustainability on non-financial performance.

This analysis is limited to Italian firms included in the Financial Times Milan Stock Exchange Index; however, the findings are highly significant.

The findings provide regulators with useful insights for considering the integration of sustainability goals into executive remuneration. Another implication is that policymakers should require – at least – listed firms to fulfil specific corporate governance structural requirements. Finally, the findings can provide investors and financial analysts with a greater awareness of the role played by executive remuneration in the long-term value-creation process.

This paper contributes to addressing the relationship among sustainability, remuneration and non-financial disclosure, drawing on the stakeholder–agency theoretical framework and focusing on Italian firms. This issue has received limited attention with controversial results in the literature.

User-generated social media comments can be a useful source of information for understanding online corporate reputation. However, the manual classification of these comments is challenging due to their high volume and unstructured nature. The purpose of this paper is to develop a classification framework and machine learning model to overcome these limitations.

The authors create a multi-dimensional classification framework for the online corporate reputation that includes six main dimensions synthesized from prior literature: quality, reliability, responsibility, successfulness, pleasantness and innovativeness. To evaluate the classification framework’s performance on real data, the authors retrieve 19,991 social media comments about two Finnish banks and use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify automatically the comments based on manually annotated training data.

After parameter optimization, the neural network achieves an accuracy between 52.7 and 65.2 percent on real-world data, which is reasonable given the high number of classes. The findings also indicate that prior work has not captured all the facets of online corporate reputation.

For practical purposes, the authors provide a comprehensive classification framework for online corporate reputation, which companies and organizations operating in various domains can use. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that using a limited amount of training data can yield a satisfactory multiclass classifier when using CNN.

This is the first attempt at automatically classifying online corporate reputation using an online-specific classification framework.

This study aims to analyze consumer motivations to share information about corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities through electronic word of mouth. It examines the roles of self-enhancement, identity signaling and social bonding as antecedents of consumers’ CSR engagement on social media.

A quantitative approach is used with a single-factor between-subjects experimental design in which the presence vs absence of CSR information on a company website is manipulated. The hypotheses are tested through structural equation modeling.

Results show that after viewing the company’s CSR message on its website, consumers who generated more CSR associations were more motivated to engage with the CSR information to satisfy fundamental personality traits (need for self-enhancement) and social relationship motivations (social bonding), which increased their intention to share the information.

This study is restricted to CSR information on websites. Further research should consider what happens if such information is shared on social media, as consumers are more likely to spread CSR messages when they are shared by other public social network sites.

The study highlights the relevance of including CSR information on websites and offers insights into the importance of considering consumers in disseminating CSR information. Consumers share information when they have personal motivation for doing so.

This study put the focus on the role of consumers in the diffusion of corporate information.

The results show the importance of personal motivations such as self-enhancement and social bonding in sharing CSR information on social media.

El estudio analiza las motivaciones que tiene el consumidor para compartir información sobre acciones de responsabilidad social corporativa (RSC) a través de boca oído electrónico (eWOM). En particular, las motivaciones de mejora del auto-concepto, necesidad de mostrar una identidad deseada y la vinculación social.

Se utiliza un diseño experimental entre sujetos donde se manipuló la presencia vs ausencia de información sobre la RSC de la empresa. Las hipótesis se contrastaron mediante un modelo de ecuaciones estructurales.

Los resultados muestran que los consumidores con más asociaciones de RSC comparten más la información de RSC motivados por satisfacer la mejora del auto-concepto y vinculación social.

El estudio destaca la importancia de generar contenido de RSC en el sitio web de la empresa, y la importancia de los consumidores en la difusión de información de dicha información.

El estudio está restringido a la presencia de información de RSC en el sitio web de la empresa. Sería interesante evaluar lo que sucede si dicha información se comparte en redes sociales, en la medida en que los consumidores tienen mayor tendencia a compartir la información procedente de redes sociales.

Los resultados muestran la importancia de las motivaciones personales como la mejora del auto-concepto y la vinculación social a la hora compartir información de RSC en las redes sociales.

本研究分析了消费者通过电子口碑分享企业社会责任（CSR）活动信息的动机。它研究了自我提升、身份信号和社会联系作为消费者在社交媒体上参与企业社会责任的前因的作用。

采用单因素主体间实验设计的定量方法, 对公司网站上企业社会责任信息的存在与否进行操纵。假设通过使用R软件包lavaan的结构方程模型进行检验。

结果显示, 在观看公司网站上的企业社会责任信息后, 产生更多企业社会责任联想的消费者更有动力参与到企业社会责任信息中, 以满足基本的人格特征（自我提升的需要）和社会关系动机（社会纽带）, 这增加了他们分享信息的意向。

该研究强调了将企业社会责任信息纳入网站的相关性, 并对在传播企业社会责任信息时考虑消费者的重要性提出了见解。消费者在有个人动机的情况下会分享信息。

本研究仅限于网站上的企业社会责任信息。进一步的研究应该考虑到社交媒体, 因为当消费者在其他公共社交网站上分享企业社会责任信息时, 他们更有可能进行传播。

研究结果表明, 在社交媒体上分享企业社会责任信息时, 自我提升和社会联系等个人动机的重要性。

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the concepts of sustainability, responsibility and ethics focussing on their links and differences, also to understand how companies move respectively in these field; to understand how companies sometimes move away from the basic and deep meaning of these concepts, landing in a merely utilitarian sphere of personal advantage where ethics, instead of being an irreplaceable and essential stronghold, is found to be a fiction or just an instrument.

The methodology used assumes a theoretical critical approach and, based on the vast literature on the items, is based on a conceptual analysis of the themes of sustainability, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ethics and of the behaviour that companies can adopt in the three contexts. A critical approach to these issues and concepts can effectively help us to understand how companies are responding to external demands and to the challenges of responsibility and sustainability, which are becoming increasingly pressing.

Ethics, sustainability, CSR and social and environmental reporting are distinct constructs with different meanings but linked by important conceptual and operational relationships.

The results of the research are the consequence of the application of a critical approach based on a theoretical analysis of the concepts under study. It would be interesting to support the results achieved with empirical research studies.

This conceptual path helps scholars and companies themselves to understand the difference between the three key concepts analysed. Only by understanding the basic meaning will it be possible to really make one’s own and pursue it in the correct way.

Nowadays, the authors are overwhelmed by these three concepts which are used as synonyms and incorrectly. This leads to confusion and misunderstandings. Knowledge of the characteristics and differences between these concepts and their concrete applications is of great importance.

This study tries to provide a critical discussion of how the three concepts intersect and differentiate, leading to concrete results or results that have nothing to do with their meaning. There are no conceptual papers in the literature that deal with the three concepts and also analyse the implications on the real world.

This article examines how responsibility and strategy can and should be connected in a business organization.

The article offers a review of the field by mapping previous studies according to their strategy and responsibility orientations and, consequently, identifies the classic perspective, as well as the major deficiencies and prevailing research gaps in the literature.

The article contributes to the field of strategic corporate responsibility by reframing the field with a contender perspective that challenges the classic view of strategy and responsibility amalgamation. Together, the classic and the contender perspectives are synthesized to form an integrative perspective that is more holistic than those currently available.

The article ends by calling for a reimagining of the relationship between corporate responsibility and strategy to find promising future research avenues and effective business practices suitable to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.

The research objective of the paper is twofold. First, it scrutinises the current state of the art concerning adopting the most popular social media by European port managing bodies (PMBs). Second, it investigates the use of social media in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication strategies of European PMBs.

The paper carries out online field research on the use of social media by the top-25 European ports. Then, it provides an in-depth case study of the use of Twitter by the Port of Rotterdam for CSR communication. Finally, a content analysis of the tweets published in the 2017–2019 timeframe is performed.

Empirical results demonstrate the extensive use of social media by European PMBs to reach a wider array of stakeholders. Uneven approaches emerge considering port sizes and cultural clusters. The content analysis shows that one-third of tweets published by the Twitter account of the Port of Rotterdam address CSR issues, especially green initiatives, advocating the use of social media to communicate CSR.

The study focuses on the European domain. A broader sample of ports worldwide should be examined to further investigate the drivers affecting PMBs' strategic adoption and use of social media, mainly to communicate CSR.

The paper provides port managers with insights to strengthen CSR communication. Given the increasing pressure of the public opinion on environmental and social issues, the ability of European PMBs to communicate their CSR commitment through social media represents a key driver when searching for consensus of stakeholders and “licence to operate”.

The paper adds to the existing maritime logistics literature by introducing a promising field of research.

This paper aims at explaining variances in the contribution of Islamic crowdfunding platforms (ICFPs) to sustainable development (SD), by adopting an institutional logic perspective (ILP). ICFPs represent a dual institutional overlap between two logics (the Western-mainstream and the Islamic logic) which have an impact on corporate social responsibility (CSR) interpretations, practices, and decisions and whose conflicts are mitigated by choosing different resolution strategies. The authors aim at showing that this choice affects SD differently.

The authors develop a conceptual typology through the following steps: (1) choice of variables and identification of corresponding variable domains, through literature review. Variables chosen are the elemental CSR dimensions related to various social and environmental corporate responsibilities to whom diverse meaning and emphasis are given under the Western-mainstream and Islamic logics. (2) Identification of three distinct ideal types of ICFPs, building on different resolution strategies to mitigate conflicts between logics; (3) development, for each ideal type, of a set of implications related to SD; (4) implementation of a first test aiming at assigning real cases to each ideal type.

The authors identify Western-mimicking (platforms adopting as resolution strategy decoupling or compartmentalizing strategies), Islamic-driven (platforms focusing on one prevailing logic) and Syncretism-inspired (platforms adopting hybridizing practices) ideal-types.

It is the first paper suggesting ILP to explain variances in crowdfunding platforms' role in addressing SD. It focuses on a specific type of CF platforms till now neglected.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why environmentally-sensitive companies still face criticism despite the extensive disclosures in their annual reports. This paper explores the extent of site-specific social, environmental and ethical (SEE) reporting by mining companies operating in Ghana.

The authors conduct an interpretive content analysis of the annual/integrated reports of mining companies for the years 2009–2014 to extract site-specific SEE information relating to the companies’ mining operations in Ghana. The authors also theorise these actions using the existentialist work of Jean-Paul Sartre, in particular his work on “bad faith, nothingness and authenticity”.

The findings suggest that SEE information disclosure at site-specific level remains problematic because of bad faith and inauthenticity by mining companies attempting to placate a range of stakeholders. Bad faith represents a form of self-deception or internal denial which manifests in corporate narratives. Inauthenticity is a self-awareness that culminates in the denunciation of corporate identity and the pursuit of external expectations. The effect is the production of inauthentic corporate accounts that is constrained by the assumption made on stakeholder expectation.

The authors apply a Sartrean lens to explore site-specific SEE. Furthermore, the authors seek to expand the social accounting research domain by drawing on Sartre’s work on “bad faith” and “nothingness”. Sartre’s work to the best of the authors’ knowledge is not explored in social accounting research.