Search results

This study aims to comprehend luxury brands' corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies. In addition to facing a demand for new CSR strategies (consumer-centric CSR), changes in CSR discourse among luxury brands are observed. This study examines how CSR-related and luxury-related agendas relate in the news media, especially concerning the difference between traditional and new luxury brands.

A total of 117,171 fashion-related news articles were collected from January 2016 to December 2020. The word2vec method was used to determine the relationship between CSR and luxury agendas.

The results indicate that company-centric CSR is more prominent with traditional luxury brands, while consumer-centric CSR is more relevant for new luxury brands. In addition, specific CSR attributes and luxury-related attributes are associated with media discourse, which means that CSR and luxury are compatible.

Studies on CSR in the luxury industry are not extensive in the literature. This study addresses this gap through a unique framework that combines agenda-setting theory and existing CSR literature and applies them to the luxury industry. Specifically, this study captures the development of each construct (company-centric CSR to consumer-centric CSR and traditional luxury to new luxury) and identifies the specific relationships between them. This result provides a novel view of the luxury industry indicating that it has evolved to encompass CSR-related values. The empirical results also offer practical implications for luxury marketing.

This study aims to investigate the role of negative media coverage of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues in deterring tax avoidance. Inspired by media agenda-setting theory and legitimacy theory, this study hypothesises that an increase in ESG negative media coverage should cause a reputational drawback, leading companies to reduce tax avoidance to regain their legitimacy. Hence, this study examines a novel channel that links ESG and taxation.

This study uses panel regression analysis to examine the relationship between negative media coverage of ESG issues and tax avoidance among the largest European entities. This study considers different measures of tax avoidance and negative media coverage.

The results show that negative media coverage of ESG issues is negatively associated with tax avoidance, suggesting that media can act as an external monitor for corporate taxation.

The findings have implications for policymakers and regulators, which should consider tax transparency when dealing with ESG disclosure requirements. Tax disclosure should be integrated into ESG reporting.

The study has social implications related to the media, which act as watchdogs for firms’ irresponsible practices. According to this study’s findings, increased media pressure has the power to induce a better alignment between declared ESG policies and tax strategies.

This study contributes to the literature on the mechanisms that discourage tax avoidance and the literature on the relationship between ESG and taxation by shedding light on the role of media coverage.

This study investigates whether carbon media legitimacy is influenced by carbon performance and/or carbon disclosure using a direct measure of carbon media legitimacy in UK context.

To test this study's hypotheses, the authors employ Tobit regression analysis of 95 UK companies listed in FTSE350. The authors use balanced panel data (475 observations in total) to reduces the noise introduced by unit heterogeneity.

The authors find that while corporate carbon performance is not reflected in carbon media legitimacy, carbon media legitimacy is positively and significantly affected by voluntary carbon disclosure (irrespective of its quality). Thus, voluntary carbon disclosure is shown to be an effective tool in legitimising corporate activities.

The results show a certain degree of naivety on the part of the media in assessing corporate carbon behaviour, since it values carbon disclosure (irrespective of its quality) more than carbon performance. Such media behaviour may hinder future improvement in carbon performance of firms.

This study's results indicate that the existing UK carbon disclosure policy does not address the heart of climate change and global warming. Thus, tougher regulations should be considered by policy-makers in relation to voluntary carbon disclosure in the UK.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine whether carbon media legitimacy is associated with both carbon performance and carbon disclosure using a direct measure of carbon media legitimacy, and to use the UK context when addressing this association. It also examines the effectiveness of quality of carbon disclosure as legitimation tool.

Today's business world has been tarnished with numerous corporate irresponsible behaviors. It is thus of great importance for firms to carry out crisis management on the condition of corporate social irresponsibility (CSI). Taking a contingent social media crisis management perspective, the authors aim to investigate the relation between CSI and firm value while also examining the moderating effects of being known in social media and generalized favorability in social media on this relation.

The empirical analysis conducted in the authors' research is based on a sample of 203 CSI events that occurred within publicly listed firms in China between 2011 and 2015. During the process of the authors' data collection, the authors initially verified the occurrence of CSI events in publicly listed firms by reviewing reports from reputable sources such as the 21st Century Business Herald and China Securities Journal. Subsequently, the authors collected the information pertaining to media coverage of these CSI events from the China Core Newspapers Full-text Database (CCND). Additionally, the authors obtained the remaining data from reliable sources such as Guba, the China Stock Market and Accounting Research Database (CSMAR) and the Chinese News Analytics Database (CNAD). To test the authors' hypotheses, the event study and multiple-regression analysis methods are adopted.

The authors find CSI generates a negative impact on firm value. Moreover, while being known in social media strengthens the negative relation between CSI and firm value, generalized favorability in social media weakens such relation.

There are two streams of limitations that present promising avenues for future studies. Theoretically, the authors explore the mechanisms of CSI affecting firm value from a contingent social media crisis management perspective. Consequently, the authors' study does not encompass other potential mechanisms that may exist in the CSI–firm value linkage. In terms of empirical analysis, three issues arise that provide opportunities for further investigation. First, the authors have not accounted for all potential factors that could influence the link between CSI and firm value. Second, the authors' data are subject to limitation since it comes from manual collection. At last, because the authors confirm the sample based on the actual CSI events of publicly listed firms in China, the authors' sample size is small.

The authors' findings contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the relation between CSI and firm value, as well as effective strategies for responding to CSI through the utilization of social media. Consequently, the authors' results have the potential to stimulate further research on the implications of CSI and the management of corporate crises through social media platforms.

This study aims to investigate the impact of board skill diversity (BSD) on corporate environmental responsibility (CER). In addition, this study explores the moderating effects of formal regulatory pressure and informal media pressure.

This study uses Chinese high polluting companies as the sample and uses regression analysis. Robustness checks, including instrumental variable regression, Heckman two-stage model and propensity score matching method, are performed to test the robustness of the results.

The findings suggest that BSD significantly improves CER performance. Both formal regulatory pressure and informal media pressure strengthen the positive impact of BSD on CER. Further channel analyses reveal that BSD improves CER performance by promoting corporate proenvironmental behaviors rather than by restricting environmental violations; skill diversity of executive directors has a more significant effect on CER than that of independent directors. Finally, the moderating effect of regulatory pressure is only significant after the implementation of the Environmental Protection Law, and the moderating effect of media pressure mainly concentrates on negative media coverage.

The involvement of directors with more diverse skills is essential to improve corporate proenvironmental behaviors. Companies should select qualified directors with different skills to further improve their performance on environmental protection and sustainable development.

Regulators and standard-setters should develop efficient guidelines on corporate board governance to enhance the positive role of companies in environmental and sustainable development.

This study broadens the research on the determinants of CER by examining the influence of BSD on CER and the moderating roles of various stakeholder pressures, thereby providing a deeper understanding of corporate environmental performance and sustainable development.

This paper aims to explore current trends in how companies disclose climate-related risks and opportunities in their financial statements. As part of the authors’ analysis, they examine: whether forward-looking assumptions and judgements are typically considered in reporting climate-related risks/opportunities; whether there are differences in the reporting practices of firms in carbon-intensive industries versus non-carbon-intensive industries; and whether negative media reports have an influence on the levels of disclosure a firm makes.

The authors chose content analysis as their methodology and examined the financial statements published by firms listed on the UK’s FTSE 100 between 2016 and 2020. This analysis is framed by Suchman’s three dimensions of legitimacy, being pragmatic, cognitive and moral.

Climate-related disclosures in the notes and financial accounts of these firms did increase over the period. Yet, overall, the level the disclosures was inadequate and the quality was inconsistent. From this, the authors conclude that pragmatic legitimacy is not a particularly strong driving factor in compelling organisations to disclose climate-related information. The firms in carbon-intensive industries do provide greater levels of disclosure, including both qualitative and quantitative (monetary) content, which is consistent with cognitive legitimacy. However, from a moral legitimacy perspective, this study finds that firms did not adapt responsively to negative media coverage as a way of reflecting their accountability to broader public norms and values. Overall, this analysis suggests that regulatory enforcement and a systematic reporting framework with adequate guidance is going to be critical to developing transparent climate-related reporting in future.

This paper contributes to existing studies on climate-related disclosures, which have mainly examined the ‘front-half’ of annual reports. Conversely, this study aims to shed light on these practices in the “back-half” of these reports, exploring the underlying reasons for reporting climate-related risks and opportunities in financial accounts. The authors’ insights into the current disclosure practices make a theoretical contribution to the literature. Practitioners can also draw on these insights to improve how they report on climate-related risks and opportunities in their financial statements.

The study aims to identify and discuss influential aspects of corporate environmental disclosure (CED) literature, including key streams, themes, authors, keywords, journals, affiliations and countries. This review also constructs agendas for future CED research.

Using a bibliometric review approach, the authors reviewed 560 articles on CED from 215 journals published between 1982 and 2020.

The authors' insights are three-fold. First, the authors identified three core streams of CED research: “legitimization of environmental hazards via environmental disclosures,” “the role of environmental accounting in achieving corporate environmental sustainability” and “integrating environmental social and governance (ESG) reporting into the global reporting initiatives (GRI) guidelines”. Second, the authors also deployed a thematic map that classifies CED research into four themes: niche themes (e.g. institutional theory and environmental management system), motor themes (e.g. stakeholder engagement), emerging/declining themes (e.g. legitimacy theory) and basic/transversal themes (e.g. voluntary CED, environmental reporting and corporate social responsibility). Third, the authors highlighted important CED authors, keywords, journals, articles, affiliations and countries.

This study assists researchers, journal editors and consultants in the corporate sector to comprehensively understand various dimensions of CED research and practices and suggests potential emerging research areas. Although this paper appears to have been thoroughly conducted, using authors' keywords to identify themes was a key limitation. Thus, the authors call upon using a more comprehensive data mining technique that uses keywords in abstracts, titles and the whole body of papers and then identifies inclusive trends in CED literature.

The authors contribute to the extant accounting literature by investigating the organizational-level CED, both mandatory and voluntary, using a systematic and bibliometric literature review model to summarize the key research streams, themes, authors, journals, affiliations and countries. By doing so, the authors construct a future research agenda for CED literature.

Previous research has explored the link between sustainability disclosure and reputation but produced contradictory results. This study aims to clarify the sustainability disclosure–reputation relationship through a quantitative analysis of the correlations between these variables reported in empirical research papers. The second objective was to determine how various moderators affect the sustainability disclosure–reputation link.

The meta-analysis was based on a systematic review of the literature covering empirical research on the corporate sustainability disclosure and reputation relationship. A total of 92 articles were meta-analyzed to compile their findings on four extrinsic moderators: company size, ownership, stock listing status and activity sector.

The findings confirm that a significant positive correlation exists between corporate sustainability disclosure and reputation. The moderator analysis also revealed that companies’ different characteristics can explain researchers’ divergent results.

The results have considerable practical relevance for organizational management. First, they can motivate managers to improve and disclose their company’s social and environmental impacts to strengthen their reputation, which in turn will help accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Second, the findings can ensure organizations develop disclosure and reputation management strategies adapted for each firm’s size, ownership, stock listing status and activity sector.

The results have considerable practical relevance for organizational management. First, they can motivate managers to improve and disclose their company’s social and environmental impacts to strengthen their reputation, which in turn will help accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Second, the findings can ensure organizations develop disclosure and reputation management strategies adapted for each firm’s size, ownership, stock listing status and activity sector.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this meta-analysis is the first to clarify the link between disclosure and reputation, which makes a unique contribution to the field of social and environmental accounting. A larger sample of primary research was collected, and key extrinsic moderators were examined to explain prior studies’ contradictory findings.

This study aims to examine whether corporate governance mechanisms – board size, board independence and CEO duality – influence the actions of oil companies operating in Nigeria to clean up oil spills from their facilities.

Both binary logistic regression (linear) and random-effects logistic regression models were used to test three hypotheses using a unique data set of 1,262 oil spill events involving 24 oil companies from 2017 to 2019.

The study found that board size and board independence are positively related to oil spill cleanup.

Private oil companies in Nigeria should encourage larger and more independent boards in their corporate governance (CG) structures, as these boards may be more effective in serving the interests of stakeholders by bringing diverse knowledge and experience to the boards. Similarly, regulators should extend the enforcement of CG codes to private firms.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the influence of CG attributes on oil spill cleanup.

This study aims to examine the role of royal family members’ board of directors, as a specific aspect of corporate governance, on the firm’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosures. Many firms in the world enjoy special political connections, benefit from tax exemptions and favorable treatments that are largely responsible for their economic endurance and strong performance.

The authors collect data from Thomson Reuters database on Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-listed firms for 2010–2018. Royal family board directors’ data is manually collected using a systematic approach to ensure accuracy. Fixed effects’ panel regression model is used to estimate relationships. The authors interact variables to test the moderating effect of board independence and sustainability committee on the influence of royal family board directors.

This study finds that royal family directors on GCC boards negotiate fewer ESG reporting in firms. While board independence, board gender diversity, sustainability committee and governance committee increase the level of ESG-disclosures in the traditional way of reducing agency costs to stakeholders, this study finds that royal family board members convey beneficial consequences on firms without perceiving the need to disclose their ESG activities. Additionally, these firms do not show a spillover effect from the royal family members on the board’s independence or the existence of a sustainability committee; rather these members use a different channel for protecting and building the business value. These results are robust with respect to controls for company size, leverage, return on assets and growth. Instrumental variables are then introduced in the analysis to perform a sensitivity test.

The study results indicate the need to improve GCC market transparency over supplementary limitations that exist on their corporate governance condition. This may be consequential to regulators, lenders and investors. The results suggest the need to raise awareness of the importance of governance and balancing firms’ financial and social performance in the presence of royal family board directors. Policymakers and governance agencies are responsible for promoting the importance of forming sustainability committees and having a set of performance indicators that measure the effectiveness of their actions.