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From a continuous improvement perspective, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the levels of maturity attained by organisations in reporting their supply chain (as well as non-supply chain) sustainability initiatives. It also investigates the extent to which supply chain sustainability (SCS) disclosure varies between different business sectors, as well as the degree of interconnection between various sustainability criteria. Subsequently, it proposes an improvement framework for reporting and implementing sustainability initiatives across the supply chain.

To carry out this investigation, corporate sustainability reports of selected companies in ten different industries are downloaded and assessed. The paper uses content analysis and principal component analysis to study the disclosure maturity levels of the different industrial sectors.

The paper's results show that the disclosure maturity level is higher in business-to-consumer industries than in business-to-business industries on both the social and environmental dimensions. The paper also shows that the highly polluting energy sector is the least advanced in disclosing SCS initiatives. Generally speaking, there is no clear pattern in the way organisations disclose sustainability information. The conclusion is that sustainability disclosure is not yet homogeneously structured across different business sectors and organisations are yet to attain the “adult” maturity age.

Very few researchers can claim to have investigated the maturity levels of SCS disclosure from a continuous improvement perspective. This is probably due to the absence of a universally accepted framework that clearly defines the scope of sustainability. The paper tries to fill this gap by proposing a framework that would not only help researchers to study SCS and stakeholders to read sustainability reports, but would also enable practitioners to improve the quality and reliability of the data disclosed, especially as they apply to the supply chain.

The purpose of this article is to explore and classify the pattern of themes and challenges in developing socially sustainable supply chains.

The methodology is based on a systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature to explore what major themes and challenges have been discussed and the significant gaps where opportunities for further research can be found.

In total, four categories of themes were identified, namely, human-centric, focal organization-centric, supply chain-centric and governance-centric. Challenges were classified into seven categories, namely, inadequate and asymmetric knowledge, difficulties of operationalization, shifting the values, subjectivity in evaluation, governance complexity, difficulties of small- and medium-sized enterprises and sustainability fade.

The focus of the article is on the social pillar of sustainable development in the context of supply chains. A more holistic systematic investigation of synergy of all the three pillars/bottom lines of sustainable development (economic, environmental and social) can be an opportunity for further research.

Taking a more holistic view of the pattern of currently discussed themes and challenges may be beneficial in increasing the absorptive capacity of industrial and business practitioners, by accumulating and assimilating external knowledge, when they design and operationalize innovative strategies in developing sustainable supply chains.

This article may increase awareness about the social responsibilities of supply chains actors and stakeholders in different scales. It may also guide managers, decision makers and practitioners to better understand the difficulties, obstacles or dilemmas that can hinder the sustainable development of supply chains. The results section presents a framework driven from the emerged themes, and the discussion section provides propositions for tackling the challenges and opportunities for further research.

This paper aims to discuss a survey, carried out by the authors, of 256 employees employed in public and private manufacturing organizations in north India, to determine if emotional maturity factors have positive association with self-disclosure in the Indian context. Specifically, capitalization and social exchange theories support as major theoretical framework to examine the proposed relationship.

The sample data used were collected through a cross-sectional survey-based research design and a convenience sampling method. Totally, 290 questionnaires were distributed during office hours, administered with a paper and pencil survey. However, in the final analysis, only 256 responses were considered for analysis using multiple hierarchical regression analysis.

Results reveal that all dimensions of emotional maturity positively associated with self-disclosure. This study fully supports the applicability of capitalization and social exchange theories while explaining the proposed relationships in Indian context.

The present study used a cross-sectional survey-based research design; future studies may use longitudinal research design.

The study shows how to develop collective work culture and supportive work climate through emotional maturity and self-disclosure. Thus, employees become accustomed to multicultural team and cultural diversity issues at the workplace. The study also recommended that the organized employees social gathering will create positive feeling, and that such feelings of belonging to a group among employees will give reasons for self-disclosure and finally, in turn, to employee effectiveness.

More predominantly, the proposed association has not been examined before and the findings serve as a potential policy guideline for the self-disclosure literature through the perspective of capitalization and social exchange theories in understudied non-US cultures such as India.

The purpose of this paper is to fill this void in the existing literature and investigate how firms’ disclosure policies influence bank loan contracting in emerging markets after controlling for the influence of borrowers’ private information obtained by banks. Furthermore, the paper examines how firms’ disclosure and non-disclosure governance interact to affect financial contracts.

The key variables Disclosure and Firm Governance are based on a survey by Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia (CLSA) in 2000. The paper hand-merges CLSA disclosure and governance data with the Dealscan database and Worldscope database by firm names. The paper conducts a multivariate analysis to investigate how firms’ disclosure policies influence bank loan contracting and how firms’ disclosure and non-disclosure governance interact to affect financial contracts.

The authors found that firms with superior disclosure policies obtain bank loans with more favorable loan contracting terms, such as larger amounts, longer maturity, and lower spread. In addition, the effects of disclosure on bank loan contracting are more pronounced for borrowers with superior firm-level non-disclosure governance or firms located in a country with better country-level governance.

The paper provides a more comprehensive view of the effects of corporate disclosure has on financial contracts in emerging economies.

This paper explored the relationship between the embeddedness of a firm’s managerial values and corporate financial performance in Swiss small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by developing a conceptual maturity model of managerial values (MM-MV). The MM-MV articulates the extent to which managerial values are embedded within organizations, allowing the analysis of the interrelationship between the degree of values-embeddedness and financial performance in SMEs. The findings suggested that as managerial values become more embedded, financial performance increases; therefore, SMEs exhibiting highly embedded managerial values such as customer-minded, team spirit, innovation-driven reliability, persistency, competency, and engagement tend to financially outperform SMEs that have not fully embedded managerial values throughout the firm.

This study aims to investigate the association between corporate carbon risk and debt maturity and the moderating role of voluntary disclosure, within the context of South Africa, an emerging player in the climate policy debate.

Based on the insights drawn from agency as well as information asymmetry theories, the authors develop models that link debt maturity with corporate carbon risk and voluntary disclosure and examine data obtained from companies listed on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange (JSE), for the period 2011-2015.

The findings document that, other things being equal, debt maturity is significantly higher, both statistically and economically, for companies with lower carbon intensity (risk). In addition, high-quality carbon disclosure accentuates the positive association between debt maturity and the inverse of carbon intensity. The results are robust to alternative measures of corporate carbon risk and issues of endogeneity. The findings are consistent with the view that lenders in South Africa use debt maturity as a non-price mechanism to address borrower risk and grant lower carbon risk companies that voluntarily provide higher quality carbon disclosures an even higher access to longer maturity debts; JSE-listed companies could use voluntary carbon disclosure to ease their access to debt with longer maturity.

The findings of this study have important implications to borrowers, pressure groups, policymakers and other stakeholders.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to document evidence suggesting that lenders in South Africa use debt maturity as a non-price mechanism to address borrower risk.

This study aims to explore if corporations that publicly disclose more information about their managerial values are also more organizationally authentic in enacting these values.

A maturity model of managerial values is used that ordinally ranks a corporation’s level of managerial values enactment using corporate annual reports. The samples of corporations’ corporate reports are qualitatively content analyzed, and the outcomes are statistically tested.

The findings indicate that as an organization voluntarily discloses more information about its corporate values, it tends to be more likely to enact their espoused values, and their corporation’s level of organizational authenticity increases.

This study suggests an approach to benchmark a corporation’s level of organizational authenticity using public information, and by doing so, contributes to both policy and practice by offering a framework to compare organizational authenticity between public corporations by their sector, size or the age of the corporation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent of intellectual capital (IC) disclosure on the UK biotechnology initial public offering (IPO) prospectuses. The study is based on companies going public on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and the London Alternative Investment Market (AIM) over the period 2005‐2007.

The extent of IC disclosure is collected and measured by using the IC disclosure index and the framework proposed by Bukh et al. The differences in the level of IC disclosure are analysed by modelling some firm‐specific determinants such as size, maturity, age and independence of the board.

It is shown that primary listing companies on the LSE disclose more IC information than those on the London AIM. Maturity and independence of the board are associated with IC disclosure, while size and age are not related, showing the importance of corporate communication as a signal of credibility to possible investors at IPO stage.

The main contribution of the paper is to analyse IC disclosure in the UK biotechnology IPO prospectuses. Previous literature does not focus on this reporting genre as an important corporate communication tool, as most research investigates IC disclosure only in annual reports and country regulation settings.

This paper aims to examine the impact of firm-specific characteristics on managers’ identity disclosure in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region.

Research data were collected from 2010 annual reports and financial statements of 403 listed firms in the GCC countries. The data were analyzed by multiple regression models.

Evidence suggesting that managers’ identity is significantly disclosed by firms that separate the office of chairman from that of chief executive officer was documented. It was also found that mature firms significantly disclose their managers’ identity. Our finding suggests that firms’ declaration that they comply with a set of corporate governance code leads them to disclose managers’ identity. However, we find that firms that are related to the state significantly disclose their managers’ identity, contrary to expectation.

One limitation is the lack of a uniform classification of industries by the stock exchanges in the GCC region. The implication of this is that researchers are lacking a uniform standard to apply in their research. Another limitation is the use of only 2010 annual reports and accounts; thus, there is a problem of inter-temporal generalizability. As markets in the GCC countries are evolving, it will be interesting to capture the state of managers’ identity disclosure after 2010.

The paper has the potential to influence firms in the GCC region to begin disclosing managers’ personal details and other contact information. In addition, there is the prospect that market regulators in the GCC region and other emerging markets who may read this research may now require firms to disclose their managers’ identity.

This is an Original research paper.

To be more effective, artificial intelligence (AI) requires a broad overall view of the design and transformation of enterprise architecture and capabilities. Maturity models (MMs) are the recognized tools to identify strengths and weaknesses of certain domains of an organization. They consist of multiple, archetypal levels of maturity of a certain domain and can be used for organizational assessment and development. In the case of AI, quite a few numbers of MMs have been proposed. Generally, the links between AI technology, AI usage and organizational performance stay unclear. To address these gaps, this paper aims to introduce the complete details of the AI maturity model (AIMM) for AI-driven platform companies. The associated AI-Driven Platform Enterprise Maturity framework proposed here can help to achieve most of the AI-driven platform companies' objectives.

Qualitative research is performed in two stages. In the first stage, a review of the existing literature is performed to identify the types, barriers, drivers, challenges and opportunities of MMs in AI, Advanced Analytics and Big Data domains. In the second stage, a research framework is proposed to align company value chain with AI technologies and levels of the platform enterprise maturity.

The paper proposes a new five level AI-Driven Platform Enterprise Maturity framework by constructing a formal organizational value chain taxonomy model that explains a vast group of MM phenomena related with the AI-Driven Platform Enterprises. In addition, this study proposes a clear and precise description and structuring of the information in the multidimensional Platform, AI, Advanced Analytics and Big Data domains. The AI-Driven Platform Enterprise Maturity framework assists in identification, creation, assessment and disclosure research of AI-driven platform business organizations.

This research is focused on the basic dimensions of AI value chain. The full reference model of AI consists of much more concepts. In the last few years, AI has achieved a notable drive that, if connected appropriately, may deliver the best of expectations over many application sectors across the field. For this to occur shortly in machine learning, especially in deep neural networks, the entire community stands in front of the barrier of explainability. Paradigms underlying this problem fall within the so-called eXplainable AI (XAI) field, which is widely acknowledged as a crucial feature for the practical deployment of AI models in industry. Our prospects lead toward the concept of a methodology for the large-scale implementation of AI methods in platform organizations with fairness, model explainability and accountability at its core.

AI-driven platform enterprise maturity framework can be used for better communicate to clients the value of AI capabilities through the lens of changing human-machine interactions and in the context of legal, ethical and societal norms.

The authors discuss AI in the enterprise platform stack including talent platform, human capital management and recruiting.

The AI value chain and AI-Driven Platform Enterprise Maturity framework are original and represent an effective tools for assessing AI-driven platform enterprises.