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Achieving social sustainability has become a critical challenge in global supply chain networks, particularly during complex crises such as terrorism. The purpose of this study is to explore how institutional forces influence the social sustainability approaches of logistics service providers (LSPs) in high terrorism-affected regions (HTAR). This then leads to investigating how the key factors interact with Institutional Theory.

An exploratory multiple-case study research method was used to investigate six cases of different-sized logistics LSPs, each in an HTAR. The data was collected using semistructured interviews and triangulated using on-site observations and document analysis. Thematic analysis was used in iterative cycles for cross-case comparisons and pattern matching.

The findings interact with Institutional Theory and the three final-order themes. First, management processes are driven by coopetition and innovation. Second, organizational resources, structure and culture lead to an ineffective organizational design. Finally, a lack of institutionalization creates institutional uncertainty. These factors are rooted in many other first-order factors such as information sharing, communication, relationship management, capacity development, new process developments, workforce characteristics, technology, microlevel culture and control aspects.

This study answers the call for social sustainability research and enriches the literature on social sustainability, Institutional Theory and LSPs in HTARs by providing illustrations showing that institutional forces act as driving forces for social sustainability initiatives by shaping the current management processes. Conversely, the same forces impede social sustainability initiatives by shaping the current organizational designs and increasing institutional uncertainty.

The dissemination of misleading and false information through media can jeopardize a company’s reputation, thus posing a threat to its stock and performance. Institutional investors are known to influence capital markets. Therefore, this paper investigates whether institutional investors engage in shaping the media sentiment stock nexus, stabilize company stocks and enhance performance.

We first investigate the effect of media sentiment on market reactions by using panel regression models. To examine the role of institutional investors, we design a quasi-experiment by exploiting the Financial Crisis of 2008 and go further by examining the heterogeneity across levels of institutional ownership. Due to risk-averse, investors may respond asymmetrically to pessimistic and positive sentiment. Accordingly, we split the sample into two sub-types, good news and bad news, based on keywords representing positive or negative content.

We find supportive evidence that institutional investors have impacts on how the markets react to media news, and the impacts are heterogeneous in the face of bad and good news. We conjecture that institutional investors act as a stabilizer of stock prices through media sentiment management.

This paper confirms the distinctive effects of institutional investors on capital markets, and uncovers the behind-the-scenes intervention and possible causal link running from institutional investors to media sentiment management. It contributes to the broad field of institutional investors' behavior, media news involvement in capital markets and market efficiency.

This study aims to elucidate institutional analysis as an effective approach to investigating and designing the multilevel policymaking system of online social networks (OSN) for achieving a participatory model.

The institutional mapping approach has been used to analyze Iran’s OSN multilevel policymaking system. A combination of two matrices, including institutions-institutions and institutions-functions, was used to perform the institutional mapping. Two main steps were taken to draw the mentioned matrices. First, a review of related studies in Iran’s OSN policymaking system was conducted and the policy functions mentioned in these studies were identified and categorized using the meta-synthesis. Second, based on analyzing two policy documents of Iran’s OSN, institutions and their interactions were identified and policy functions were allocated to institutions.

Based on the results, the most important policy functions in the current OSN policymaking system in Iran are support, regulatory, monitoring and evaluation, business environment development, culture building and promotion, organizing licenses and permissions, policymaking and legislation. Also, the results show that there are shortcomings in this system, some of the most important of which are lack of transparency in regulatory, little work in culture building and promotion, neglect of the training of specialized human resources and research and development, slow development of the business environment and neglecting the role of nongovernmental organizations in policymaking.

By examining and analyzing how different institutions operate within a multilevel policymaking system, the policymaking process and its overall effectiveness can be enhanced. This analysis helps identify any inconsistencies, overlaps or conflicts in the roles and policies of these institutions, leading to a better understanding of how a multilevel policymaking system is organized.

Based on stakeholder, agency and institutional theory, this study aims to examine the role of institutional ownership in the relationship between environmental, social and governance practices and CEO compensation.

Utilizing a fixed-effect panel regression analysis, this research utilized a panel data approach, analyzing data spanning from 2014 to 2021, focusing on US companies listed on the S&P500 stock market index. The dataset encompassed 219 companies, leading to a total of 1,533 observations.

The analysis identified that environmental scores significantly impact CEO equity-linked compensation, unlike social and governance scores. Additionally, it was found that institutional ownership acts as a moderating factor in the relationship between the environmental score and CEO equity-linked compensation, as well as the association between the social score and CEO equity-linked compensation. Interestingly, the direction of these moderating effects varied between the two relationships, suggesting a nuanced role of institutional ownership.

This research makes a unique contribution to the field of corporate governance by exploring the relatively understudied area of institutional ownership's influence on the ESG practices–CEO compensation nexus.

The paper aims at addressing the following research questions: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency? And which pillars of institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

By specifying a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method where GHG emissions are considered as the bad output and the GDP is referred as the desirable one, the work computes the environmental efficiency into the appraisal of a production function for the European countries over three decades.

According to the countries' performance, the findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries. In this environmental context, the role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries.

This article attempts to analyze the role of different dimensions of institutional quality in different European countries' performance – in terms of mitigating GHGs (undesirable output) – while trying to raise their economic performance through their GDP (desirable output).

1. The paper aims at addressing the following research question: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

2. We adopt a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method, considering 40 European economies over a 30-year time interval.

3. The findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries.

4. The role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries, while the performance decreases for the low middle-income countries.

The paper aims at addressing the following research question: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

We adopt a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method, considering 40 European economies over a 30-year time interval.

The findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries.

The role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries, while the performance decreases for the low middle-income countries.

In developing countries, how risk management technologies influence management accounting and control (MAC) practices is under-researched. By drawing on insights from institutional studies, this study aims to examine the multiple institutional pressures surrounding an entity and influencing its risk-based management control (RBC) system – that is, how RBC appears in an emerging market attributed to institutional multiplicity.

The authors used qualitative case study research methods to collect empirical evidence from a privately owned Egyptian insurance company.

The authors observed that in the transformation to risk-based controls, especially in socio-political settings such as Egypt, changes in MAC systems were consistent with the shifts in the institutional context. Along with changes in the institutional environment, the case company sought to configure its MAC system to be more risk-based to achieve its strategic goals effectively and maintain its sustainability.

This research provides a fuller view of risk-based management controls based on the social, professional and political perspectives central to the examined institutional environment. Moreover, unlike early studies that reported resistance to RBC, this case reveals the institutional dynamics contributing to the successful implementation of RBC in an emerging market.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

The purpose of this study is to examine the moderating effect of the reflective practice of business students on how it helps to develop their employability skills through various university strategies.

The study employed a simple random sample to select undergraduate level 400 students from the Universities under study (the University of Ghana, University of Professional Studies Ghana, Lancaster University Ghana and Webster University Ghana). Only final-year students with an informed judgement on the reflective practice and various institutional practices to acquire graduate employability skills were participated. The independent variables of the study are institutional strategies (curriculum design, extra curriculum, work-integrated learning, career development centre, university collaboration with the industry, student engagement, internship job placement), the moderator is the reflective practice and the dependent variable of the study is graduate employability.

The study found that the moderation role of reflective practice had a significant effect on institutional strategies (extracurriculum, career development centre, university collaboration with the industry, student engagement and internship job placement) and graduate employability.

The study was limited to only undergraduate business students from four universities ignoring other disciplines and postgraduate students.

The practical implication is that reflective practice must be an integral tool for various universities if they want students to use their strategies to sharpen their employability skills.

The social implications of the study emphasise the reflective practice of graduate students in universities. This implies that firms and other institutions must consider reflective practice for the maximum output of their employees.

The concept of employability is a bit complex as it concerns many stakeholders of the educational process; the students, academic staff, employers, policymakers and higher education; the private sector; and the government. Although examining students' employability development skills is of great importance, students' reflective practice tends to be overlooked in most studies. Therefore, the focus of this study examines how the reflective practice of graduate students promotes employability through the various university strategies, which had not been considered.

Public sector institutional entrepreneurship efforts may contribute to addressing social challenges by creating an enabling regulatory environment that promotes social enterprise formation and fosters complementarity between the public sector and social enterprises. The outcomes of such public sector institutional entrepreneurship are explored in this study. To assess the outcomes of such public sector initiatives in South Korea, the perspectives of executives (n = 40) of government-certified social enterprises are assessed.

Several research methodologies were combined, including purposive sampling with an 11-point Likert scale, hierarchical clustering and principal component analysis. The literature on government–nonprofit relations as well as public sector institutional entrepreneurship was leveraged.

This research results indicate that the enabling regulatory environment with entrenched funding and incubation mechanisms produces mixed-to-positive outcomes if framed with reference to public sector–social enterprise complementarity. The authors identified three perspective-based ideal types that have differential views of isomorphic regulatory pressures, the efficacy of incubation and scaling programs, participation in policymaking and other aspects of public sector patronage.

This study contributes to relating the literature on public sector institutional entrepreneurship and government–third sector relations by empirically assessing how social enterprises attracted by government demand-side signaling to become certified as social enterprises encounter and perceive an ostensibly enabling regulatory ecosystem, with its derivative policies and mechanisms, crafted by the public sector.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.