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Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore the proactive role played by investor relations officers (IROs) in enhancing the quality and delivery of corporate social performance (CSP) information to social responsibility investment (SRI) analysts and investors, thereby improving the link between CSP and corporate financial performance (CFP). The increasing pressures on corporations to produce and communicate CSP information will be described, as well as how the timely and meaningful communication of CSP can improve CFP.

Methodology/approach – Subsequent to a review of relevant literature, three case examples from McDonald’s, Nestlé, and Stora Enso illustrate Hockerts and Moir’s grounded theory framework that suggest how IROs can improve communication of CSP.

Findings – This chapter illustrates three levels of communicating CSP information. First, IROs target SRI investors and respond to ESG inquiries and surveys. At the second level, IROs integrate ESG information into business strategy and financial results. At the third level, IROs actively market CSP and create a two-way proactive dialogue between SRI investors and senior management and the board.

Practical implications – This chapter provides practical examples to improve ESG activities and their communication via the IRO to SRI analysts and investors.

Originality/value of chapter – This chapter contributes to the literature on the CSP–CFP link by illustrating how proactive IROs are improving the CSP information channel to SRI securities analysts and investors. Furthermore, it advances the theory and research concerning the impact of the information channel between IROs and securities analysts behind the CSP–CFP link.

Ecological degradation is causing various medical hazards worldwide. Modern globalization is enhancing several polluting factors that cause ecosystem deterioration. This situation leads to the increasing significance of implementing green environmental practices. Previous studies emphasize various green concepts, mainly in finance, encouraging investors to make ethical and responsible decisions to promote clean ecological practices. But still, emerging concepts like socially responsible investment (SRI) require more understanding and acknowledgment, particularly in developing economies.

This study has focused on exploring the impediments to SRI-adopting practices. It is conducted in two phases. Initially, a systematic literature review was conducted to identify the hurdles in promoting SRI. Later, open-ended interviews from the active investors of Pakistan Stock Exchange Limited were executed to explore the barriers to implementing the SRI system. The responses were transcribed and tested through NVivo software.

The information extracted from the recorded statements was further classified into three themes: initial, subordinate and cluster, which provides an understanding of the identified factors. The findings suggest that the significant complications hindering SRI are a lack of regulatory framework, inadequate conceptual knowledge and limited resources.

The findings state that the identified impediments can help in developing a framework for successfully implementing SRI practices in emerging economies. It can strengthen the stakeholders' knowledge and suggest a guideline for investment decisions, providing them with socially, ethically and financially positive returns. Therefore, this study will inspire active and potential investors to adopt SRI practices, making the economic uplift certain.

This study will add value to the existing body of knowledge related to SRI and highlight the importance of SRI by suggesting it as a source to ensure sustainable green efficiency, particularly in the postpandemic era. It emphasizes the urgent need for a policy framework for effective investment decisions in emerging economies.

The weighted evaluation function method with normalized objective functions is used to transform the proposed multi-objective model into a single objective one, which reflects the investors' preference for returns, risks and social responsibility by adjusting the weights. Finally, an example is given to illustrate the solution steps of the model and the effectiveness of the algorithm.

Based on the possibility theory, assuming that the future returns of each asset are trapezoidal fuzzy numbers, a mean-variance-Yager entropy-social responsibility model is constructed including piecewise linear transaction costs and risk-free assets. The model proposed in this paper includes six constraints, the investment proportion sum, the non-negativity proportion, the ceiling and floor, the pre-assignment, the cardinality and the round lot constraints. In addition, considering the special round lot constraint, the proposed model is transformed into an integer programming problem.

The effects of different constraints and transaction costs on the effective frontier of the portfolio are analyzed, which not only assists investors to make decisions close to their expectations by setting appropriate parameters but also provides constructive suggestions through the overall performance of each asset.

There are two improvements in the improved particle swarm optimization algorithm: one is that the complex constraints are specifically satisfied by using a renewable 0–1 random constraint matrix and random scaling factors instead of fixed ones; the other is eliminating the particles with poor fitness and randomly adding some new particles that satisfy all the constraints to achieve the goal of global search as much as possible.

This paper seeks to explicate the strategic contribution of the corporate communication/ public relations function (PR) to enterprise strategy development at macro‐organisational level with the aim of contributing towards its institutionalisation.

The approach takes the form of a literature review and conceptual analysis, reflective PR paradigm and corporate social performance approach.

Enterprise strategy is the suggested mechanism and a relevant strategy process for incorporating societal and stakeholder expectations, values, norms and standards into the organisation's strategy development processes. Enterprise strategy explicates corporate communication/PR's strategic contribution at the macro‐organisational level. Societal expectations, values, standards and norms are expressed through concepts such as CSR, corporate governance, good corporate citizenship, sustainability, and the Triple Bottom Line; manifest through non‐legislative measures such as the Global Sullivan Principles of CSR, the Global Reporting Initiative, the Social Responsibility Investment Index of the JSE, as well as voluntary codes such as the Cadbury Report (UK) and the King Reports I, II and III in South Africa (SA); and are addressed through legislative measures such as the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (USA) and the Employment Equity/Broad‐based Black Economic Empowerment/Financial Intelligence Centre Acts (SA).

This article addresses the dearth of literature on enterprise strategy and corporate communication/PR's strategic role at top management level by conceptualising enterprise strategy and explicating corporate communication's strategic contribution within its framework – indicating corporate communication's focus to be on the social (People) and environmental (Planet) pillars of the Triple Bottom Line approach, rather than its financial aspects (Profit).

In order to further understand the research status and prospect, the purpose of this paper is to adopt a novel method in the research field of institutional investor to depict the knowledge structure and the evolution path over the past three decades.

Based on the 4,194 records retrieved from Web of Science, Citespace combined with VOSviewer are employed to perform visualized analysis.

The results reveal that the number of published articles of research on institutional investor has an exponential growth. Although the United States is the most significant contributor with more publications compared with other countries, Malaysia and Nigeria show higher centrality in the research network worldwide. Furthermore, “shareholder activism”, “corporate governance”, “global convergence”, “corporate reporting regulation” and “individual investor” are the largest five knowledge clusters. “Media coverage”, “corporate social responsibility” and “stock price crash risk” are the latest three knowledge clusters. Moreover, “governance worldwide”, “institutional character”, “dynamic information environment”, “investment patterns” and “sustainable development” are the potential extended research fields in the future.

This research helps the scholars and participants to capture the knowledge structure of research on institutional investors and to develop a reference to future opportunities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent dynamic capabilities (DCs) developed in the field of green supply chain management can foster social supply chain performance. In addition, the role of both human and stakeholder capital in enhancing this relationship is investigated.

Relying on the theoretical framework of the resource-based view, complemented with the DCs perspective, the authors hypothesize about the benefits of a firm’s environmental management capability for its social supply chain performance, as well as the moderating role of both human and stakeholder capital. Our contentions are tested through a multi-year database of socially responsible investments covering 1,177 multinational corporations.

The findings show that companies can sustain positive and superior social performance in their supply chain by leveraging DCs developed in the environmental field. This impact is further shown to be elevated in the presence of both human and stakeholder capital.

This study represents a snapshot of the transformation process from environmentally to socially responsible supply chains. While the secondary data employed offers unique advantages, secondary data also have limitations.

Developing environmental capabilities not only enhances companies’ profitability, but can also lead to better supply chains through improved labor conditions and well-being.

The authors’ shift from a company-centric to a sustainability-centric conceptualization of DCs can open up new opportunities to engage research, potentially leading to high-impact results in the field of sustainable supply chain management. In addition, the authors leverage a secondary data source not frequently utilized in prior work.

A commitment to social responsibility is indispensable to the sustainable development of a firm, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a key corporate evaluation indicator. CSR's economic consequences have long been a hot topic in academic research. The authors analyze the relationship between CSR and corporate capital structure and also investigate channels through which such links are transmitted.

Using CSR score (CSRS) data published by China's Hexun (hexun.com) from 2010 to 2018, the authors control some influencing variables of the nature and characteristics of enterprises and discover that CSR can effectively improve firm leverage using ordinary least square regression. In addition, the research results remain robust for other CSR proxies, different dimensions of CSR, alternative measures of leverage and endogenous testing.

The authors discover that CSR can significantly reduce firm leverage. In addition, the research results confirm that investor attention and liquidity are the main channels by which CSR effectively reduces leverage, and other influence channels are worthy of further exploration. After examining the substitution variables and endogenous characteristics of CSR, the results remain robust.

Regarding decision-making and governance within companies, the authors conclude that CSR reports not only announce the status of CSR activities to corporate stakeholders but also reveal information on corporate financial decisions. Considering the widespread agency problems in companies, management may take advantage of investor understanding of CSR reports and conceal real information or disclose false information. They distort investors' understanding of the financial policies of financial reports to achieve their self-interests. Hence, companies must reinforce their governance and construct comprehensive monitoring mechanisms for CSR disclosure to protect their investors, establish a strong corporate reputation and facilitate long-term development.

The essence of responsibility in leadership can help to integrate course of action of policy makers and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This will augment meaningfulness of the humanity in human in the present era of isolationism, when everyone is becoming the part of the race. However, the precise criterion of different contexts of behaviour for Corporate Social Performance (CSP) that the pioneers or leaders understood and demonstrate the accountability is uncertain. This ambiguity and multiple dimensions of responsible leadership (RL) present in the current literature are concurring. Gaps identified indicates that there should be a methodical research on the impact of such leadership on the societal and firm level of outcomes. By following interpretivism approach in research, this paper relies on the content analysis of speeches, welcome stories, biographies and recorded interviews of selected business leaders and entrepreneurs in India. This research study identifies four different dimensions of orientation that leaders practice while fulfilling their responsibility and envisioning CSR. The limitation of this study is that it tries to map the leader's orientation under a cultural spectrum, but its findings still provide major insights for the future perspective of research based on the RL matrix model. The outcome of this study will be useful for the leaders to recognise the dimensions of responsible leadership for creating value addition in their style and practices. The model identified envisages practical implications of the corporate social responsibility theory.

This paper aims to develop a framework for incorporating implementation indicators of corporate governance for municipalities in South Africa. In South Africa, there is a corporate governance framework (King III report) that is regarded as a seminal work applicable to both the public and private sectors. Despite its existence, municipalities still struggle to provide services to the citizens due to poor implementation. The poor corporate governance implementation in municipalities led to several issues such as loss of credibility for local government, little interests from investors to invest in municipalities, service delivery protests from communities, maladministration and unexpected change of leadership in municipalities without succession planning in South Africa.

The study conducted literature review to demonstrate the need for a framework to implement corporate governance in South Africa.

It is evident from the study that the municipal sector could improve its performance and practices of corporate governance, if the underpinning framework is adopted and implemented as a sector framework. The integration of governance elements during the development of the municipal sector integrated development plan (IDP) will facilitate a coherent base for good governance implementation practices.

This research would go a long way in bringing out the anomalies that paralyse municipalities, the root causes of inefficiency and possible ways to rectify them.

This study offers a framework that can help the local government sector to improve on service delivery. Implementation of the framework can also assist municipalities in obtaining clean audits from the supreme audit institutions in their respective countries.

The study has a huge social impact as it would help municipal officials take notice of the issues raised and act accordingly thus improving the life of citizenry.

This study adds value to the existing theoretical and conceptual issues that form the ongoing discourse on the implementation of corporate governance in local government, especially in South Africa, as the country is characteristic by corruption and maladministration.