Search results

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting has been widely accepted as a vital tool for communicating with stakeholders on a range of social, environmental, and governance issues, but how companies define, interpret, apply, integrate, and communicate their CSR efforts and impacts in corporate reporting is anything but a straightforward task. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the concept of materiality in CSR reporting and demonstrate practical examples of good CSR and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reporting practices. We chose the aviation industry because of its economic relevance, constant growth, and future expected changes in the aftermath of COVID-19. In addition, airlines affect many of the SDGs directly and indirectly with contending results. This chapter is timely because of the growing willingness by companies to integrate CSR and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) thinking into the corporate strategy and business operations using materiality assessment and enhancing their competitive advantage and ability to maintain long-term value and because ESG and ethical investing have become part of the mainstream investing. Thus, this chapter contributes to an understanding of the wide range of existing and new reporting frameworks and regulations and reinforces the importance of discussing how this diversity of approaches can affect the work toward worldwide comparability of CSR and sustainability reporting.

This paper aims to investigate the association between negative tone in annual report narratives and future performance in the UK context. Under the principle-based approach in the UK, managers tend to bias the tone of narrative reports upward, as the reporting regime is more flexible than the rule-based approach in the USA. Consequently, any negative disclosure not mandated by regulators conveys credible information about a firm’s prospects.

This paper uses a sample of UK FTSE all-share non-financial companies from 2010 to 2019. The authors use the textual-analysis approach based on Loughran and McDonald (2011)’s wordlist (LM) to measure the negative tone in UK annual reports.

The results show a significant negative association between negative tone and future performance. Moreover, our further analyses suggest that only the negativity in the executive section of the annual disclosures correlates significantly with future performance. In summary, this study suggests that negativity does matter under the principle-based approach and can be used as an indicator of future performance.

In contrast to the literature arguing that only positivity has the power to affect a firm’s outcomes under the principle-based approach, the authors provide new empirical evidence suggesting that negativity also matters within the UK context and can be used as an indicator for future performance. Also, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to identify which section of the annual report is more informative about a firm’s future performance.

This study aims to explore the experiences of living through the COVID-19 pandemic for people who faced homelessness and dealt with mental health and/or substance use challenges.

This qualitative study was comprised of 26 1:1 interviews (16 men and 10 women), conducted between February and May 2021 with people who experienced homelessness in North East England during the COVID-19 pandemic. An inductive reflexive thematic analysis was undertaken, with input from individuals with lived experience who were involved throughout the study.

Four themes were developed. The first theme, lack of support and exacerbation of mental health and substance use difficulties, highlighted how the lack of in-person support and increased isolation and loneliness led to relapses or new challenges for many people’s mental health and substance use. The second theme, uncertainty and fear during the pandemic, explored how the “surreal” experience of the pandemic led to many people feeling uncertain about the future and when things would return to normal. The third theme, isolation and impacts on social networks, discussed how isolation and changes to relationships also played a role in mental health and substance use. Finally, opportunity for reflection and self-improvement for mental health and substance use, explored how some people used the isolated time to re-evaluate their recovery journey and focus on self-improvement.

The experiences shared within this study have important implications for planning the future delivery and commissioning of health and social care services for people facing homelessness, such as sharing information accessibly through clear, consistent and simple language.

As one of the few papers to involve people with lived experience as part of the research, the findings reflect the unique narratives of this population with a focus on improving services.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neuro-developmental condition that has frequently been pathologised in career research and broader society to date. The study seeks to reframe such assumptions through a qualitative positive-focused exploration of career stories of ADHD adults, elicited through a strength-focused technique with wide applicability for coaching and other career-based development activities.

Situated in a strength-focused coaching psychology paradigm, the authors undertook semi-structured interviews with 17 participants, using an adapted feedforward interview technique (FFI) rooted in positive psychology (PP), to investigate individuals' strengths and successful career experiences.

Narrative thematic analysis of the transcripts identified two core themes: “the paradoxical nature of strengths” and “career success as an evolving narrative”. The participants described how they have achieved career success both “in spite of” and “because of” ADHD. The use of the FFI demonstrated a helpful and easily taught method for eliciting personal narratives of success and strengths, an essential foundation to any coaching process.

This research provides a nuanced overview, and an associated conceptual model, of how adults with ADHD perceive their career-based strengths and experiences of success. Further, the research shows the value of using a positive psychological coaching approach when working with neurominority individuals, using a successful adaptation of the FFI. The authors hope that the documentation of this technique and the resulting insights will offer important guidance for managers as coaches and internal and external career coaches, as well as providing positive and relatable narrative resources for ADHD adults.

This chapter provides a comprehensive investigation of the literature on sustainability reporting in Islamic banks using a content analysis of 200 English language articles published between 2000 and 2023. The data were collected from the Web of Science (WOS) database and analyzed using Bibliometrix in R software. This chapter addresses the trends of the most influential authors, institutions, countries, and research hotspots. This chapter fills one of the gaps in sustainability reporting literature, setting up a statistical description of the principal features of sustainable Islamic banking research and carrying out an analysis of its knowledge structure via bibliometric analysis. This chapter found that the number of articles on sustainability reporting in Islamic banks has increased over time; however, it is concentrated on a few core sources and authors, mostly related to Islamic finance, accounting, and ethics, as well as sustainability and social responsibility. The analysis of the co-authorship network shows a limited degree of collaboration between researchers from different clusters. The most productive and collaborative countries are Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan, reflecting their well-developed and regulated Islamic banking industries that follow sustainability guidelines and frameworks. Moreover, the co-word analysis identifies 11 clusters and 43 keywords that represent the main topics and themes in the field, such as corporate governance, performance, disclosure, and risk. This chapter suggests some directions for future research and action on sustainability reporting in Islamic banks. This chapter contributes to the literature on sustainability in Islamic banking and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

In Thailand, the number of higher education institutions (HEIs) offering international programmes has surged dramatically. Internationalisation is seen as key to competing in the higher education market, modernising educational programming, and generating new streams of revenue. Yet, such rapid change is disorientating for the internationalisation of higher education (IHE) in the Thai context. That said, there is little disagreement on what it is not; it is not Thai. This chapter investigates apparent efforts to ‘de-place’ Thailand from IHE and considers how these attempts may connect to (post-)colonial tensions between sovereignty and civilisation. Through a synthesis of scholarship in the areas of higher education, cultural geography and Thai studies, the authors construct a framework for exploring how IHE is both imagined and experienced in Thailand. In particular, they re-examine datasets from studies they conducted with stakeholders over recent years, including executive leadership, international faculty members, and university students. Through a series of narrative portraits, a dialogue of voices is constructed that reflect distinct orientations to ‘Thainess’ in the IHE. The authors argue that a wider and more inclusive orientation to internationalisation is not only respectful of local identity but is enhanced by it. Ultimately, the hope of this study is to offer a vision of what an ‘emplaced’ idea of IHE in Thailand might look like, one grounded in an orientation unique to a particular place with its own cultural and social coordinates.

The global economy has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has placed greater responsibility on companies to fulfill their obligations to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) amid the crisis. This chapter investigates the role of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) attributes in improving a firm's CSR in the emerging economy of Jordan and how the COVID-19 pandemic modifies this relationship. Using a Jordanian sample of 655 firm-year observations during the 2014–2021 period, the research results show that older CEOs, well-educated CEOs, CEOs' remuneration, and CEOs' ownership positively correlate with CSR reporting. However, long-tenured CEOs are associated with lower CSR initiatives. The subsample analysis findings also validate the significance of CEO attributes in improving CSR practice during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the prepandemic period. These findings are beneficial for the regulatory setters to understand better whether CEO attributes are linked to engagement in CSR-related information. This research is among the limited number of studies that have explored how CEO attributes impact CSR reporting for the stakeholder's welfare. Moreover, it uniquely concentrated on contrasting the findings before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper aims to introduce the Theory of Ethical Leadership as a possible means of actualizing the mission and vision statements of the American Physical Therapy Association as well as individual professional objectives. Specific examples of how this can be applied directly to the profession of physical therapy will be presented.

Leadership influences can profoundly affect a profession, an organization and an individual. This has led to exploring which leadership style would be most effective in moving their organization forward. Through a review of the literature, this viewpoint paper compares leadership theories present in the health-care literature, as well as why they may fall short of actualizing the mission and vision statements of the American Physical Therapy Association as well as individual professional objectives.

Most research has separated ethics from leadership, but all agree that to be successful, the leader needs to exhibit a strong moral compass and demonstrate positive ethical behavior. At the intersection of ethics and leadership is the emerging theory of ethical leadership. Ethical leadership is based on the premise that employees look outside of themselves for ethical guidance and that leaders have an opportunity to provide this moral awareness by making an ethical message sufficiently salient to be recognized in the organizational context as well as allowing the leader to stand out against an ethically neutral ground.

This paper is an original work and has not been published previously, either in whole or in part. Additionally, this paper is not under consideration for publication by any other journal.

This chapter explores the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) from an Islamic Shari'ah-compliant perspective. It provides a comprehensive literature review on CSR with an explicit focus on the Islamic perspective of CSR, Islamic models of CSR, CSR practices in conventional and Islamic banks, and the consequences of CSR to Islamic banks. This chapter's main contribution lies in considering the current CSR literature from a Shari'ah perspective. Likewise, it identifies gaps in the current literature and suggests potential areas for future research. This chapter attempts to improve the understanding of how Islamic banks integrate social responsibility into their operations. The insights from this chapter are helpful to practitioners and academic scholars in Islamic finance, accounting, and CSR. This chapter emphasizes the importance of incorporating Islamic values and principles into CSR practices and encourages further research and investigation in this area.