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This study examines whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives positively impact customers’ selection of retail banks in Hong Kong (HK) and identifies which CSR domains affect customers’ selection of banks.

This study adopted a quantitative approach. Primary data were collected from 416 customers of 22 retail banks in HK. The theoretical framework of this study was developed from a literature review, prior studies by Oberseder et al. (2013 and 2014), and CSR initiatives implemented by leading retail banks in HK. Descriptive statistics and statistical tests were used to analyze the data.

The study found that CSR initiatives positively affect customers’ bank selection. CSR initiatives related to the customer and environment domains are likely to have a greater impact on customers than those related to the society domain and are not likely to significantly impact customers’ bank selection.

This study contributes to the CSR literature by offering enhanced insight into the dynamics of CSR and its effects on customer bank selection. Furthermore, this study tests consumers’ perceptions of CSR initiatives in each CSR domain in the banking sector in Hong Kong – a novel approach that has not been previously explored in existing studies. These findings can help banks review the effectiveness of their CSR initiatives and make informed decisions on which initiatives should pursue improved CSR performance and efficient resource allocation.

Considering the ongoing debate regarding the roles of business in society, this paper aims to examine the managerial understanding of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Nepal.

This study uses explanatory sequential design under mixed methods of research. First, the questionnaire survey method was used to collect data from 168 managers of listed companies in Nepal. Second, semistructured interviews were conducted with 20 senior-level managers of listed companies to verify the results obtained from the survey and to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomena.

The survey results show that managerial understanding of CSR is mainly guided by the notions of corporate philanthropy, stakeholder approach and political CSR, respectively. However, the managerial understanding vis-à-vis political CSR and corporate philanthropy were found to be remarkably positively influenced by the firm’s size, whereas the stakeholder perspective was widely held by the managers regardless of their firm’s size. The interview results largely substantiated questionnaire survey findings and further revealed vivid dimensions within the philanthropic approach, stakeholder approach and political CSR.

Given the recent legal provisions vis-à-vis mandatory CSR spending in Nepal, the policymakers may devise and update common core and firm-size-specific informational, fiscal-economic, legal and partnering instruments based on the findings of this study. Besides, companies may go for appropriate institutional arrangements for CSR as needed.

The reaffirmation of conventionally accepted roles and the approval of relatively nascent political roles of business in a distinct socio–political–legal–economic context of Nepal can be an important contribution to the literature.

While the rise of chain restaurants has attracted increasing research interest, few studies have taken servicescape into consideration to examine its effects on transformative service outcomes. This study aims to assess how social service elements can provide customers with restorative qualities, though social components are considered vital in constituting a dining locale's servicescape (AKA Social Servicescape).

The study fills the void above by undertaking a survey-based quantitative research method. Using online surveys with a sample of 306 diners, the study employed structural equation modeling to explore a proposed moderated mediation model. A post-hoc interview followed to provide qualitative data to complement the findings developed from surveys.

Results first point to a positive relationship between social servicescape and attention restoration. Moreover, the authors unveil that substantive servicescape has a moderating effect on the relationship of interest, suggesting the interplay of social and built servicescape in promoting restorative experiences.

Social and built stimuli can be intertwined to offer restorative qualities for customers. Through such an intertwined network of relationships, one may derive better mental health resources from hospitality settings.

This research presents new nuances to the existing field of inquiry by linking social servicescape and restoration through an intertwined network of attentional recovery.

This study examined the influence of university corporate social responsibility (University CSR) on university corporate brand legitimacy through the lens of university brand trust.

The study utilized a cross-sectional research design with a quantitative approach to gather data from a sample of 398 university students. The collected data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The findings of the study suggest that University CSR has a significant influence on the legitimacy of a university's corporate brand. Moreover, the study identified the mediating role of university brand trust in the proposed relationship.

The study was conducted in the context of higher education in Tanzania. As a result, the generalizability of the findings to other contexts that significantly differ from Tanzania, a developing country, may be limited.

The study recommends that the management of higher education institutions in developing countries should include CSR practices in the strategic plans of universities. Additionally, faculty members should be empowered to play a significant role as initiators and implementers of CSR programs.

This study is one of the few attempts to examine the interplay between university CSR, corporate brand trust and university corporate brand legitimacy. The study contributes to the state of knowledge in the education sector by highlighting the role of university CSR in building social acceptance, which is a crucial pillar in empowering universities to play a role in social and economic development.

When a crisis occurs, do corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities protect organizational reputation by buffering negative effects or do CSR activities intensify negative effects, potentially leading to a worse reputation compared to if the organization had no prior CSR engagement? The authors hypothesize that if a crisis emerges in a domain aligned with an organization’s CSR initiatives (crisis-congruent CSR) backfire effects would arise, adversely affecting the organization’s reputation. Conversely, in cases of incongruence, where the crisis emerges in a domain not aligned with an organization’s previous CSR involvement, a buffering effect would manifest, protecting the organization’s reputation.

The authors conducted an experiment with a 3 (crisis-congruent, crisis-incongruent, and no CSR activities) × 2 (repeated measures) mixed factorial design. In the first scenario, no information was provided concerning a company’s social commitment. Alternatively, participants were exposed to an article illustrating the company’s dedication either to healthcare (crisis-incongruent commitment) or to combating sexism (crisis-congruent commitment). Afterward, participants were presented with a newspaper article addressing allegations of sexism against the company’s CEO.

The findings demonstrate that prior CSR activities have the potential both to serve as a buffer and to cause backfire effects in times of crisis. Domain congruence is the decisive moderator of these effects: Crisis-incongruent CSR activities acted as a buffer, crisis-congruent CSR activities “backfired” and led to more negative perceptions of the company’s reputation.

The study directly contributes to the understanding of CSR effects in crisis communication, while also addressing the often paradoxical and contradictory findings of prior studies.

This chapter addresses one of the most crucial areas for critical thinking: the morality of turbulent markets around the world. All of us are overwhelmed by such turbulent markets. Following Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2004, 2010), we distinguish between nonscalable industries (ordinary professions where income grows linearly, piecemeal or by marginal jumps) and scalable industries (extraordinary risk-prone professions where income grows in a nonlinear fashion, and by exponential jumps and fractures). Nonscalable industries generate tame and predictable markets of goods and services, while scalable industries regularly explode into behemoth virulent markets where rewards are disproportionately large compared to effort, and they are the major causes of turbulent financial markets that rock our world causing ever-widening inequities and inequalities. Part I describes both scalable and nonscalable markets in sufficient detail, including propensity of scalable industries to randomness, and the turbulent markets they create. Part II seeks understanding of moral responsibility of turbulent markets and discusses who should appropriate moral responsibility for turbulent markets and under what conditions. Part III synthesizes various theories of necessary and sufficient conditions for accepting or assigning moral responsibility. We also analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions for attribution of moral responsibility such as rationality, intentionality, autonomy or freedom, causality, accountability, and avoidability of various actors as moral agents or as moral persons. By grouping these conditions, we then derive some useful models for assigning moral responsibility to various entities such as individual executives, corporations, or joint bodies. We discuss the challenges and limitations of such models.

The study aims to understand how corporate social responsibility (CSR) and happiness are used together in various research studies to serve the ultimate goal of corporate sustainability (CS), which in turn contributes to sustainable development.

A systematic literature review (SLR) was made using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) method in the two most-reputable databases of Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, revealing a final list of 54 studies to analyse.

The review concludes that the literature on CSR and happiness provides three main findings: first, concerning the pillars of sustainability, most of the studies concentrate on people, neglecting the planet and profit, second, employees are subject to the highest number of studies as the target of CSR initiative and third, almost all studies employed the hedonic aspect of happiness in CSR literature.

This particular research finding points to the need for developing a comprehensive framework to assess stakeholder happiness from both hedonic and eudaimonic aspects from a CSR perspective which is then represented under the three pillars of sustainability.

To contribute to the ultimate goal of CS, management would design CSR initiatives for all stakeholders to increase both hedonic and eudaimonic happiness of them.

The literature provides reviews of research in CSR and happiness separately; however, there is not any research revealing how these two concepts are used together in studies and how this association could be read to serve the goal of CS.

The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic review of the literature of the studies that have examined several theoretical perspectives on corporate social performance (CSP) and identify possible future research questions based on various theoretical viewpoints.

The study used systematic literature review analysis on a sample of 667 studies published in top A* and A category journals listed in the Australian Business Dean Council list. The present study derived articles between 1975 and 2023 from the SCOPUS database by using relevant keywords to identify research activities in CSP.

The findings suggest that many studies on CSP have been undertaken globally. But there is a lack of studies on various theoretical perspectives, including peer uncertainty evaluation, buyer–supplier sustainability links, the role of primary stakeholders (especially consumers, employees, suppliers and secondary stakeholders), the use of technology, firm-related heterogeneities, and the role of demographic and socio-economic factors. Future research areas are recommended.

The study investigates existing research gaps to identify possible future research questions and frameworks that can be explored to advance the research on CSP.

The research also provides implications for firms in terms of understanding diverse theoretical perspectives to develop strategies to improve a firm’s social performance.

The findings are derived from a systematic review of the literature in top-category studies that examined existing theories and frameworks in the CSP domain. This highlights the importance of other understudied complementary theories, such as complexity theory, spillover theory, critical mass theory, slack theory and so on, and related variables that can improve a firm’s social performance. Evaluation of existing theoretical perspectives is not included in other review studies.

The appraisal of corporate reputation based on third-party corporate social responsibility (CSR) indices appears to have been institutionalized. The endorsement of such an approach by sustainability custodians and influencers undermines the uptake of the morality and legitimacy of CSR. This study takes a social realist perspective, which suggests that social phenomena such as CSR and corporate reputation are shaped by social structures and power relations. This study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between CSR and corporate reputation and understand ways in which the constructs are influenced by cognitive factors.

This study surveyed 411 respondents across five shopping malls and analyzed the data using path analysis of the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. The mall-intercept survey sought to critically assess expectations of CSR vis-à-vis evaluation of corporate reputation. Based on a case study of three Johannesburg Stock Exchange listed companies, CSR expectations were measured along the philanthropic, economic, ethical and legal dimensions, while evaluation of corporate reputation was based on product quality, financial performance and social responsibility. SEM path analysis was used to extrapolate the predictive outcomes of CSR on corporate reputation.

Reputation for product quality and social responsibility is underpinned by the fulfillment of ethical CSR expectations, while philanthropic gestures enhance the evaluation of financial performance. Legal CSR significantly influences the reputation for social responsibility and product quality. Fulfillment of economic CSR expectations influences the reputation for product quality. However, no relationship was established between economic performance and social responsibility. Involvement in economic, philanthropic and particularly, legal CSR, are not indicative of the reputation for financial performance. Conversely, companies’ involvement in economic CSR does not suggest a higher propensity for social responsibility.

The predictive outcomes of CSR expectations on corporate reputation can reveal situated understanding of actual perceptions of corporate behavior.

Ethical business conduct is synonymously associated with social responsibility while espoused corporate philanthropy signals strong financial performance. The awareness of consumers’ cognitive evaluation of corporate reputation can offer a pathway to corporate communication professionals, policy makers and agencies to rethink and reposition CSR efforts.

Insensitivity to taken-for-granted cultural prescriptions and reliance on market-based reputational rankings undermine mutually beneficial stakeholder relationships and the social license to operate.

This study brings to the fore, cognitively dominated indicators of consumers’ perceptions of the reputation for CSR, to foster nuanced and halo-removed approaches to social responsibility. The authors show for the first time how companies’ skewed focus on corporate philanthropic giving paradoxically signals a capitalistic notion of social responsibility and unethical business conduct. This study offers a halo-removed orientation to the appraisal of CSR and corporate reputation.

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.