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This study aims to investigate the influence of external factors identified by the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal (PESTEL) framework on corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance in Vietnamese construction firms.

The snowball sampling method was employed to gather 182 validated responses. Employing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), the research analyzed how these factors correlate with CSR practices under institutional theory.

Results indicated that social, economic, environmental, legal and technological factors positively impacted CSR performance. Among these, social factors had the most significant effect, followed sequentially by economic, environmental, legal and technological influences. Intriguingly, political factors demonstrated no significant association with CSR performance.

The strong impact of social factors confirms that societal norms and cultural values are critical in shaping corporate behavior in Vietnam. Firms can leverage this insight by intensifying their community engagement and social investment. Additionally, the negligible role of political factors in shaping CSR suggests that firms might not need to focus heavily on political engagement in Vietnam. However, firms should remain aware of legal changes as legal factors influence CSR outcomes.

Despite CSR’s growing importance, there remains a notable research gap regarding how external macro-environmental factors influence CSR performance, particularly within the construction industry. The findings emphasize the importance of aligning business strategies with socioeconomic and environmental aspects.

With the rapid rise in the number of start-ups, corporate social responsibility (CSR) can principally contribute to the nation’s socioeconomic development, making it more critical. This study aims to explore the effect of sustainability practices on a firm’s performance with competitive advantage (CA) and innovation (INN) as the mediating variable.

An exhaustive literature review was done to identify the constructs relationship for this study, and a questionnaire was used to gather the data from the start-up owners. In total, 400 samples were received, and partial least squares structural equation modeling was used for testing and validating the proposed hypotheses.

CSR and financial performance (FP) have a significant relationship. According to this study’s findings, innovation and CA substantially mediate the relationship between a firm’s FP and CSR. This study will highlight how CSR practices stimulate organizational creativity, problem-solving and strategic thinking. It will also demonstrate how CSR can foster a culture of innovation that generates long-term value and positively impacts FP.

It will aid in improving the knowledge of start-up owners that CSR is more than just pure altruism or philanthropy; instead, it must be promoted strategically as an investment that boosts productivity and creativity while also bringing overall financial benefits to the company. It will ultimately enhance the start-ups’ ability to improve the economy and society. Furthermore, this study holds the potential to inform policy discussions and recommendations for fostering responsible business practices in the Indian start-up ecosystem. Policymakers can benefit from insights into how regulations and incentives can be designed to encourage start-ups to adopt CSR practices that not only fulfill legal obligations but also contribute to their CA and FP.

This study provides empirical validity to establish linkages between sustainability measures on the FP concerning start-ups that were not considered in the prior studies. Identifying the current conceptual framework and CA and Innovation as the two major factors influencing CSR in Indian enterprises is a novel contribution. This study aims to fill the research gap. By unravelling the intricate dynamics between CSR, FP and CA, the research contributes to the understanding of how start-ups can navigate the complex interplay of social responsibility and business success in the Indian context.

Organizations that prioritize humanistic responsibility create an environment of value for their employees as the most important stakeholders. However, despite the numerous corporate social responsibility (CSR) models and research highlighting stakeholder considerations, the long-standing “social” aspect of CSR has inhibited its humanism responsibility. In response, this study proposes to move beyond the antecedents and outcomes of CSR to explore how perceived CSR can promote its humanistic responsibility both inside and outside of organizations.

The authors followed Sendjaya et al. (2008) ’s methodology for developing and validating the perceived corporate humanistic responsibility (CHR) scale. Study 1 validated the CHR's content. Study 2 established the measure’ reliability, internal consistency, unidimensionality and discriminant validity. The authors describe each of the studies in the forthcoming sections.

This research has produced a comprehensive set of perceived CHR items for business leaders based on earlier CHR/humanism concepts. Through the deconstruction of CHR theory, the granular conceptualization provides employee-centric workplaces, healthy internal communication, holistic compensation, CSR-committed behaviors and holistic training and development, equipped to assess how their CHR fosters humanistic workplaces that encourage socially responsible behaviors. This, in turn, would have an immense impact on employee well-being that, in turn, flourishes societal well-being.

Although the perceived CHR scale's psychometric properties were confirmed using multiple tests ranging from qualitative to quantitative studies, this newly developed scale requires further investigation to explore whether internal or external relevance factors affect organizations' humanistic responsibility.

CSR is about caring for humans and the planet. The authors have unpacked what and how the human side of CSR operates for business leaders to advance their CHR practices and responsible management learning. The perceived CHR dimensions can guide business leaders to promote multidimensional humanistic behaviors inside and outside workplaces that transcend how to strengthen the humanistic responsibility behaviors of corporations to promote CHR by articulating how the “Social” aspect of CSR ought to function for employee well-being first.

This study responds to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) most aligned with the SDG 3 (good health and well-being) and SDG 8 (decent work and economic growth) by promoting humanistic workplaces with implications for United Nation's Principles for Responsible Management that encourages universities to educate students on humanism concepts in business management.

The originality lies in the empirical study of CHR. By incorporating the original concepts of humanism/humanistic management and CHR, the authors empirically articulate how CHR may be practically implemented as an elaborated humanistic synthesis for corporations.

This study aims to examine the roles of corporate social responsibility (CSR), green innovation (GI) and knowledge management (KM) in boosting sustainable practices (SPs). It also investigates the mediating effect of green innovation and the moderating effect of KM in the relationship between CSR and SPs.

Using measurement scales adapted from existing studies, a quantitative methodology with causal and deductive reasoning was used on data from an online survey with 322 respondents in manufacturing firms in the United Arab Emirates.

There was no direct significant positive relationship between CSR and SPs; the mediating role of GI was evident, whereas the moderating role of KM was not present.

Only manufacturing enterprises are considered in this study, with a single geographical case study highlighting CSR efforts.

The findings reveal the positive influence of GI on CSR and SPs. This study contributes to the understanding of the influence of green processes and product innovation on applying social, environmental and sustainability practices to enhance the overall productivity, compliance, performance and well-being of the community.

This study collectively explores the causal relationships between these factors, besides offering new insights into the manufacturing industry in an emerging market.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the workforce environment and corporate social responsibility (CSR) audit report lag while also developing a comprehensive understanding of the moderating effect of media coverage on this relationship.

This paper was based on a sample of 151 French nonfinancial companies listed on the CAC All Shares index and covered an eight-year period, from 2014 to 2021. To test the hypotheses, a feasible generalized least squares regression was applied. Moreover, the authors checked the results using an additional analysis and the generalized method of moment model for endogeneity problems.

Based on a panel data set comprising 960 observations of French firms from the period 2014 to 2021, the results obtained indicate a significant negative relationship between the workforce environment and CSR audit report lag. Additionally, it was found that media exposure moderates the relationship between the workforce environment and CSR audit report lag.

This study contributes to the existing research on workforce environment and CSR audit report lag, potentially providing stakeholders such as employees, employers, regulators and auditors with an environment that shortens the time for issuing CSR audit reports. The findings are also relevant for foreign institutional investors aiming to enhance their investment decisions with more comprehensive information.

The work is innovative as it explores the moderating impact of media exposure on the connection between workforce environment and CSR audit report lag, a topic not extensively studied before. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior empirical studies have examined this relationship within the French context or elsewhere.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is viewed as a differentiating strategy that wins over stakeholders’ confidence. Due to the potential strategic and positive effects on businesses, the study of CSR and its relationship to competitiveness has gained relevance. While studies have examined the impact of CSR activities on firm competitiveness, the findings so far remain contradictory. Further research on the underlying processes/mechanisms that explain how CSR contributes to competitiveness remains scarce. Accordingly, this study aims to look into the link between CSR and competitiveness with a focus on Asian business and management studies.

By using a bibliometric approach, this paper aims to provide a review of the state-of-the-art research on the linkage between CSR and competitiveness in Asian context. The sample for this research included all 538 studies from the period of 2001–2023 in the Scopus database. A bibliometric study included both co-occurrence and co-citation analysis.

The study’s findings made significant contributions by identifying seven distinct clusters of co-occurrences. Using co-citation, three journals-based co-citation clusters and another three authors-based co-citation clusters are identified. The findings show how processes/mechanisms such as – accountability, multi-stakeholder dialogue/engagement, resource generation, emphasizing sustainable development goals and emerging markets, redefining strategy, cultivating value/vision and CSR leadership – are increasing in importance.

Overall, the authors argue that CSR-led competitiveness is indeed one of the key drivers for improved sustainability performance of a firm.

Based on findings, a conceptual framework has been proposed highlighting different processes and mechanisms that influence the CSR-led competitiveness – outcomes relationship.

This study aims to examine whether social initiatives adopted by firms lead to improved financial performance. The authors analyse the impact of different elements of social initiatives on wealth creation for firms in terms of operating and market performance.

The study is based on the social initiative scores of over 4,500 firms collected from Thomson Reuters' ESG database. The study uses two-stage least squares (2SLS) to analyse the relationship between social initiatives and firm performance.

Profitable, mature, capital intensive and firms with high sales growth rate tend to invest more in social initiatives. Firms with high agency costs invest in social initiatives for workforce efficiency, maintaining human rights and product responsibility. The study documents evidence that social investments are value creating mechanism for firms which leads to improved financial performance in terms of operating and stock market performance. Firms with high dividend intensity invest in social initiatives for workforce welfare and human rights initiatives. Investment in employee well-being and community initiatives results in intangible benefits such as improved stock market valuation.

The research model has not considered the impact of intervening variables to understand the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance.

Firms ought to recognize that social investment is beneficial in terms of value creation of firms as stock market perceive such investments favourably. Firms must focus more on community development initiatives and workforce initiatives for the value creation of firms compared to investments directed towards human rights initiatives and product responsibility initiatives.

This study focusses exclusively on the social dimension of the CSR activities. The authors examine the impact of social welfare scores on firm performance by analysing the valuation effects on scores representing workforce, human rights, community and product responsibility. Moreover, the paper also examines the impact of a new dimension of product responsibility on firm performance. They also focus on both aspects of financial performance in terms of operating performance (proxied by ROE) and the joint impact of both operating and market performance (proxied by Tobin’s Q). This paper contributes to the research on the linkage of social performance to financial performance by observing that firms with high agency cost characteristics tend to invest in social initiatives for work force efficiency, maintaining human rights and product responsibility.

This paper aims to explore how lean manufacturing practices (LMPs) predict sustainable performance (SP) in the context of manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in less developed countries, like Yemen. In particular, it investigates the mediating effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) under different levels of competitive intensity (CI).

Hierarchical regression analysis was used to analyze data gathered from a survey of 259 Yemeni manufacturing SMEs.

The findings confirm that LMPs affect CSR, which in turn affects SP. This study also confirms that LMPs have a positive indirect effect on SP through CSR, which diminished in the presence of CI.

This study provides useful insights for policymakers and firms’ managers, who are anticipated to show a higher commitment to CSR in their firms when adopting LMPs to enhance their firms’ SP, especially under a low level of CI.

This paper contributes to expanding knowledge on the effect of LMPs on SP through CSR constrained by the level of CI.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained tremendous importance after several corporate scandals, financial crises and the rise of the hyper-competitive world. Firms must address multiple stakeholders’ interests to increase firm value. This study aims to investigate the effect of CSR on firm value. This study also examines the mediating role of enterprise risk management (ERM) and the moderating influence of corporate governance (CG) in this CSR-firm value relationship.

The sample of the study comprises 119 Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) listed firms and the study covers the period from 2010 to 2021. The corporate social responsibility performance has been quantified across five dimensions. These aspects are product, environment, employee relations, diversity and community. Four proxies i.e. strategy, operation, reporting and compliance, have been used to measure ERM. The governance quality of the sample companies was evaluated using the governance index, which included 29 governance provisions. The authors used the dynamic panel data technique (system-GMM) is used to achieve the objectives of the study. Furthermore, a firm’s engagement in CSR activities can also be measured through a multinational financial approach to check the robustness of the result.

Based on the regression analysis, the authors discovered that CSR was positively connected with firm value, validating the stakeholder view of CSR. Furthermore, following Baron and Kenny’s (1986) mediation technique, the findings confirm that ERM mediates this association. These results are robust by using the bootstrapping tests by Preacher and Hayes (2004). Furthermore, the result shows that corporate governance (CG) is positively connected with firm performance, and this relationship is strengthened in the presence of an effective governance system in the organization.

This study provides useful insights to regulators, investors and policymakers to consider CSR as a value-enhancing factor and encourage the development of enterprise risk management and compliance with CG mechanisms to improve firm value.

The presented analysis strengthens the existing CSR–firm value relationship by analyzing the mediating and moderating roles of ERM and CG, which have not yet been tested, particularly in the context of Pakistan.