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This chapter analyses how corporate governance codes in Europe approach CSR, devoting specific guidelines or recommendations or specifying the responsibility of implementing and disclosing CSR in the company.

Content analysis have been used in a sample of 27 corporate governance codes of 27 European countries, issued in the European Union (EU) and United Kingdom (UK), issued by governments (seven codes), national stock exchange (eight codes), industrial associations (six codes) and composites (six codes).

Only five out of 27 codes make and explicit reference to the term Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Two of them reflect the importance of a CSR Report (Slovenia and Spain), whereas the Spanish Code was the only code which devoted a section to the implementation of a CSR policy.

Although corporate governance codes could represent an opportunity to shift the focus from an implicit CSR approach to an explicit CSR approach in Europe, the truth is that content related to the issue and its level of specificity does not reflect that change yet.

Previous literature has not focused on the analysis of corporate governance codes from a CSR perspective, so the chapter is relevant for policy makers when it comes to updating corporate governance codes.

Corporate governance has experienced numerous changes in chime with the exigencies of the time during which it has been introduced or the context in which it has been practiced. Its gestation can be divided into three stages of development namely the traditional governance, the current transitional governance, and the upcoming sustainable governance. Traditional governance refers to the period hitherto the industrial revolution when corporations have not yet been formed, in today’s sense, but the governance structures were already in place in the existing entities at the time. Transitional governance refers to a period between the industrial revolution and the information age when corporations started to rise as a new economic entity. Reviewing the dominant corporate governance models are integral to understanding the transitional era. At the end of the transitional governance era, a transmogrification in corporate governance is underway to prepare itself for the coming age of sustainability. Sustainable governance integrates the principles of systems thinking and appreciates the complexity of decision-making environment, contrary to its former iterations that welcomed oversimplification of interactive messes (systems of problems). The objective of this chapter is to review corporate governance developmental transition toward sustainable governance and its role in the age of sustainability.

Public-interest entities – among which are listed companies – are obliged to publish nonfinancial disclosure in some countries and regions. The European Commission established mandatory nonfinancial disclosure by Directive 2014/95/EU. While a large body of literature was developed on sustainability reporting quality (SRQ) in voluntary context, evidence about the effect of mandatory nonfinancial disclosure on SRQ is controversial and previous experiences worldwide did not make clear if obligatoriness improves SRQ. This chapter aims to bridge the gap of empirical evidence about this phenomenon in European countries, focusing on first implementation of new legislation by Italian and German companies. The research has an explorative character and it adopts content analysis methods performed on sustainability reporting practices of companies listed in FTSE-MIB and DAX 30. The analysis aims to understand if obligatoriness affects SRQ, causes some changes in reporting practices such as harmonizing Italian and German ones by performing a cross-country comparison. The findings suggest that obligatoriness improves reporting quality and, above all, it fills the gap between different countries by fostering the adoption of international guidelines and the consequent introduction of some content, such as materiality analysis and quantitative measures of social and environmental performance.

This chapter provides an introduction to the world of family companies and family constitutions from a legal perspective. It first studies the legal types of business organizations that family firms have chosen across time and jurisdictions. It then illustrates how early predecessors of family constitutions evolved in the late Middle Ages and what modern family constitutions look like in different countries today. Further considerations are devoted to the governance framework of family firms. The chapter concludes by exploring the potential legal effects of family constitutions under German company and contract law.

A company's overall success and resilience in the market is increasingly linked to its Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance. Following a brief review of sustainable development and corporate sustainability, the concept and rationale behind ESG is discussed with an emphasis on the criteria and limitations of ESG scores. ESG matters are mostly limited to global hotel chains but critical to an entire industry that seeks to decarbonize its operations until 2050 while also tackling the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There is a potential misalignment of the ESG criteria to achieve the ambitious SDGs based on the narrow, environmentally based view on sustainability in the hotel sector. A set of recommendations is designed to align the SDGs to ESG requirements and expectations supported by industry examples within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and resiliency imperative.