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The purpose of the present study is to examine the effect of organic food certification labels of different third-party verification institutions on consumers' choice of organic food in terms of willingness-to-pay (WTP) using cue utilization theory.

The study conducted an experiment in which organic rice and organic certification labels were presented to 360 valid participants.

With different organic rice labels issued by various third-party verification institutions, including (1) foundations, (2) associations, (3) university certification centers and (4) private businesses, results indicate that consumers had different preferences and WTP for certain labels. The institutions preferred organic food labels issued by non-profit organizations. In addition, consumers showed different WTP as a result of different purchase motivations (e.g. health vs environmental protection).

These results imply that consumers might not have confidence in the organic labels issued by associations and private institutions. Therefore, different types of certification institutions can have significantly different impacts on consumers' WTP. The study further proposes that the extrinsic attributes of food products (i.e. the cues used in making a purchase decision) must be incongruent with the image of third-party certification institutions in order to develop more efficient communication of product information and to encourage consumers to give positive comments regarding organic food.

The growth in social and environmental reports is followed by a growth in reports including an assurance statement done by an outsider to the company. The aim of this paper is to study the implementation by companies of a third party assurance provision to their sustainability reports.

The author examined the practices of French companies as far as verification of sustainability information is concerned and opted for an exploratory study. The study analyses the assurance statement of French CAC 40 listed companies publishing a sustainability report verified by a third party. It also analyses semi‐structured interviews conducted with sustainability managers and assurance providers.

The paper provides an insight of how assurance reports are stated and it seems that they lack precision and explanation. The interest for companies to engage in the assurance of their sustainability information is to manage their sustainable development policy and to progress in reporting their sustainability information. Moreover, the aim of sustainability verification is to assure users of the accountability and reliability of the disclosed information. The sustainability assurance engagement is mainly a quest for legitimacy.

The sample of semi‐structured interviews could be enlarged and other important actors such as shareholders or non‐financial rating agencies interviewed. Further research could be conducted at an international level, thus allowing embracing institutional contexts for each country.

This paper contributes to the emerging literature about sustainability assurance practices and could be of interest to managers and auditors to improve the assurance practices of social and environmental reporting.

The purpose of this paper is to critically assess the newly created regulatory and policing regime for age-restricting access to pornography in the UK.

It examines the pivotal legislation, policy and strategy documents, consultation submissions and interventions from a range of stakeholders such as children’s charities, content providers and privacy advocates.

Even before its implementation, the regulatory regime betrays serious flaws and shortcomings in its framing and configuration. These difficulties include its inability to significantly curtail minors’ access to online pornography and risks of privacy violations and associated harms to legitimate users’ interests.

Remedial measures are available so as to address some of the problems identified. However, it is argued that ultimately the attempt to prohibit minors from accessing such content is set to fail, and that alternative approaches – such as better equipping children through education to cope with explicit materials online – need to be given greater prominence.

This paper provides the first criminological policy analysis of this latest attempt to regulate and police online behaviour, and offers an important critical response to such efforts.

The purpose of this study is to understand the current trends and development of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in emerging and developing economies and analyze 106 Chinese central enterprises (CEs) that disclose CSR reports from 2004 to 2015.

This study analyzes all the CSR reports available to the public from CEs between 2004 and 2015 in China. This paper carefully examines the reporting patterns and standards in those CSR reports. CEs in China are focused on because state-owned companies account for a large proportion of the Chinese stock market because of their social and economic institutional characteristics.

The results in this paper confirm a growth trend in the numbers of CSR reports, as predicted. The results also suggest that the number of CSR reports from the CEs containing some assurance has dramatically increased. However, the findings indicate that the current content of the CSR reports may not fully meet the needs of users of information from different industries, regions and interests, as more than 20 CEs have formulated their own CSR framework. The lack of unified, sustainable reporting and assurance may reduce the comparability and effectiveness of CSR reporting.

This study provides evidence of the trends and development of CSR reporting in China.

The findings extend the understanding of CSR reporting by analyzing Chinese CE data. The results also provide decision-useful information for the government and other policymakers when considering CSR reporting and assurance standards.

Until now, a lot of research has been done and applied to provide security and original data from one user to another, such as third-party auditing and several schemes for securing the data, such as the generation of the key with the help of encryption algorithms like Rivest–Shamir–Adleman and others. Here are some of the related works that have been done previously. Remote damage control resuscitation (RDCR) scheme by Yan et al. (2017) is proposed based on the minimum bandwidth. By enabling the third party to perform the verification of public integrity. Although it supports the repair management for the corrupt data and tries to recover the original data, in practicality it fails to do so, and thus it takes more computation and communication cost than our proposed system. In a paper by Chen et al. (2015), using broadcast encryption, an idea for cloud storage data sharing has been developed. This technique aims to accomplish both broadcast data and dynamic sharing, allowing users to join and leave a group without affecting the electronic press kit (EPK). In this case, the theoretical notion was true and new, but the system’s practicality and efficiency were not acceptable, and the system’s security was also jeopardised because it proposed adding a member without altering any keys. In this research, an identity-based encryption strategy for data sharing was investigated, as well as key management and metadata techniques to improve model security (Jiang and Guo, 2017). The forward and reverse ciphertext security is supplied here. However, it is more difficult to put into practice, and one of its limitations is that it can only be used for very large amounts of cloud storage. Here, it extends support for dynamic data modification by batch auditing. The important feature of the secure and efficient privacy preserving provable data possession in cloud storage scheme was to support every important feature which includes data dynamics, privacy preservation, batch auditing and blockers verification for an untrusted and an outsourced storage model (Pathare and Chouragadec, 2017). A homomorphic signature mechanism was devised to prevent the usage of the public key certificate, which was based on the new id. This signature system was shown to be resistant to the id attack on the random oracle model and the assault of forged message (Nayak and Tripathy, 2018; Lin et al., 2017). When storing data in a public cloud, one issue is that the data owner must give an enormous number of keys to the users in order for them to access the files. At this place, the knowledge assisted software engineering (KASE) plan was publicly unveiled for the first time. While sharing a huge number of documents, the data owner simply has to supply the specific key to the user, and the user only needs to provide the single trapdoor. Although the concept is innovative, the KASE technique does not apply to the increasingly common manufactured cloud. Cui et al. (2016) claim that as the amount of data grows, distribution management system (DMS) will be unable to handle it. As a result, various proven data possession (PDP) schemes have been developed, and practically all data lacks security. So, here in these certificates, PDP was introduced, which was based on bilinear pairing. Because of its feature of being robust as well as efficient, this is mostly applicable in DMS. The main purpose of this research is to design and implement a secure cloud infrastructure for sharing group data. This research provides an efficient and secure protocol for multiple user data in the cloud, allowing many users to easily share data.

The methodology and contribution of this paper is given as follows. The major goal of this study is to design and implement a secure cloud infrastructure for sharing group data. This study provides an efficient and secure protocol for multiple user data in cloud, allowing several users to share data without difficulty. The primary purpose of this research is to design and implement a secure cloud infrastructure for sharing group data. This research develops an efficient and secure protocol for multiple user data in the cloud, allowing numerous users to exchange data without difficulty. Selection scheme design (SSD) comprises two algorithms; first algorithm is designed for limited users and algorithm 2 is redesigned for the multiple users. Further, the authors design SSD-security protocol which comprises a three-phase model, namely, Phase 1, Phase 2 and Phase 3. Phase 1 generates the parameters and distributes the private key, the second phase generates the general key for all the users that are available and third phase is designed to prevent the dishonest user to entertain in data sharing.

Data sharing in cloud computing provides unlimited computational resources and storage to enterprise and individuals; moreover, cloud computing leads to several privacy and security concerns such as fault tolerance, reliability, confidentiality and data integrity. Furthermore, the key consensus mechanism is fundamental cryptographic primitive for secure communication; moreover, motivated by this phenomenon, the authors developed SSDmechanismwhich embraces the multiple users in the data-sharing model.

Files shared in the cloud should be encrypted for security purpose; later these files are decrypted for the users to access the file. Furthermore, the key consensus process is a crucial cryptographic primitive for secure communication; additionally, the authors devised the SSD mechanism, which incorporates numerous users in the data-sharing model, as a result of this phenomena. For evaluation of the SSD method, the authors have considered the ideal environment of the system, that is, the authors have used java as a programming language and eclipse as the integrated drive electronics tool for the proposed model evaluation. Hardware configuration of the model is such that it is packed with 4 GB RAM and i7 processor, the authors have used the PBC library for the pairing operations (PBC Library, 2022). Furthermore, in the following section of this paper, the number of users is varied to compare with the existing methodology RDIC (Li et al., 2020). For the purposes of the SSD-security protocol, a prime number is chosen as the number of users in this work.

This paper aims to analyze the relevance of private meta-governance for multi-stakeholder partnerships. The authors assume that meta-governance, defined as higher level rules that shall guide partnerships’ governance activities, could build on and institutionalize lessons learned about partnerships’ success conditions and, in doing so, may render partnerships’ work more effective in the future.

The research paper investigates a case of non-state meta-governance in the standard-setting arena. It explores how actors assess the interaction of the meta-governance efforts of the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling (ISEAL) Alliance (mainly in the form of their three Codes of Good Practice) and the Alliance for Water Stewardship’s efforts when setting and implementing their International Water Stewardship Standard. For this, a combination of research methods is applied: a literature review for deriving propositions on success conditions; document analysis, participatory observation and semi-structured interviews for gathering empirical evidence on the interaction between meta-governance and the partnership’s work.

Respondents praise the benefits of ISEAL’s enabling meta-governance measures to strengthen their standard, structures and processes, as well as from ensuring activities, as these also improve their internal governance system while simultaneously providing credibility. In this context, they confirm the relevance of three success factors mentioned in the literature on voluntary standards: an inclusive process, a locally adapted design of the standard and institutionalized compliance management.

Instead of reinventing the wheel with every new multi-stakeholder partnership, meta-governance frameworks should be used to enable partnership staff and members, policymakers and stakeholders to learn from experience.

The authors’ analysis generates unique insights into perceptions of partnerships’ staff and stakeholders regarding lessons learned and private meta-governance. The present study on these actors’ perspectives provides a starting-point for further research on how meta-governance could help institutionalize success factors to scale-up and improve the impact of standard-setting partnerships.

As investors' expectations shift toward corporate sustainability, many corporations have jumped on the bandwagon of being “green” by issuing green bonds. However, as a recent green financing tool, little attention has been paid on the value that green bonds actually deliver. This causes the problem of greenwashing, in which firms pretend to be environmentally responsible when in reality they are not. This study therefore aims to explore green bonds' impact on issuers' corporate environmental and financial performance.

The sample is collected from among the green bond and conventional bond issues between 2015 and 2019 issued by corporations from various countries. Using the propensity score matching (PSM) and then difference-in-difference (DiD) approaches, two sub-groups (green bond and conventional bond issuers) were generated for comparison. Changes in environmental and financial performance over time between the sub-groups are then examined.

The overall results show that green bonds are effective in improving environmental performance, but only when they are certified by third parties. Additionally, green bonds do not have an impact on financial performance. The findings imply that green bonds' dependency on external certification may be a consequence of an underdeveloped green bond market, where weak governance still dominates the green bond market. Because of this, corporations tend to take advantage of green finance's growing popularity, causing the greenwashing problem.

Green bonds are an extremely new area of research. Few research studies focus on the effectiveness of green bonds in impacting corporate financial and environmental performance. Therefore, this study strives to fill this research gap. It sheds light on the effectiveness of green bonds in supporting the development of green projects and provides a reference point for decision-making in strengthening transparency and accountability in environmental disclosure and helps regulating authorities develop tighter regulatory controls.

This paper aims to study the shortcomings of the business process of credit card department of a multinational bank and to improve the existing business process efficiency and effectiveness through redesigning the process that eliminates bottlenecks and improves service quality.

The research investigates real‐life business process using case study methodology. It collects primary data through interviews of individuals, focus groups and secondary data from the investigation of company documents. It then uses SWOT analysis, Fishbone Diagram, Process Flow Diagram and a number of other tools to analyse and to redesign the existing process.

The research identifies that the business process of the credit card department of a multinational bank is unnecessarily lengthy and requires eight to nine days to complete from application processing to final account creation and to issue the card. It then designs a to‐be business process for the same business function. The proposed process reduces half of the time of the existing process.

The proposed business process reduces the cycle time effectively and uses the organisational resources efficiently to achieve better customer satisfaction. It also helps in growing card market share in this highly competitive and profitable segment of consumer products.

This paper illustrates a unique way of investigating an existing business process and designing a new business process that is very efficient and effective. The design process is quite generic which can be applied to other organisations, especially in the banking sector.

The purpose of this paper is to undertake a comparative case study (Stake, 2006) of two multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) building resilient water systems to address how they communicatively frame and manage key tensions. “Glacier” is the North American convener of an MSI focused on developing reliable and measurable standards of water stewardship in catchment areas around the world. “Delta” convenes a MSI centered on the water economy, with the goal to connect and help diverse organizations around “the business of water.”

Qualitative data were analyzed using Tracy’s (2013) pragmatic-iterative method, which envisions ongoing cycles of theme generation and refinement, and draws on both induction and deduction to identity and sort themes. The “reflexive circular process” it involves helped trace how tensional poles were framed and managed.

For Glacier, the key tensions were: creating new and distinct standards while reiterating extant measures; collective decision making although privileging corporate interests; and fixed impact performance that is nevertheless fluid. Delta also displayed three tensions: focus on the ecological issue connecting the MSI or partner benefits; broader ethics of water stewardship vis-à-vis local considerations; and avowing a bipartisan agenda although politics remained central to its everyday work.

The paper underlines how communicative framing and management of tensions are key to developing resilience for socioecological systems. It highlights how traditional organizational boundaries and collectives are disrupted in seeking resource system resilience, and suggests that texts and conversations might emphasize tensions differently.

First, MSI conveners and members working for resource system resilience should use visioning exercises to see how tensional poles might be dialectical, rather than focus on stark differences. Second, ongoing dialogue and evaluation can help trace alternative tension frames. Third, since context and MSI purpose matter in framing tensions, practitioners should be careful while transferring lessons learned across MSIs.

This paper contributes to resilience scholarship by underlining how the communicative management of tensions is vital to developing adaptive complexity and learning capabilities within broader socioecological systems – especially with MSIs working on complex wicked problems.

This study aims to provide researchers a holistic approach for comprehensive understanding of the Bitcoin-related research by discovering its trends, subjects, relations, keywords and concepts.

An integrated approach of bibliometric analysis, network analysis and concept linking analysis was proposed for exploring Bitcoin-related studies from 70 countries in the Scopus database.

The bibliometric analysis shows that electronic money and blockchain are the mainstream issues of Bitcoin, and the domain distribution of the literature is mainly in engineering-related fields. Through the network analysis of cocitations, co-occurrences and cowords, research clusters were discovered respectively from different perspectives. The authors also have mastered a multilevel concept linking diagram for six related major concepts.

The major contribution of this research is about providing an integrated and comprehensive approach to extract the mainstream issues that can help researchers conduct Bitcoin-relevant research. This study shows the development trend, context and clusters of Bitcoin-related studies from various perspectives networks and produces a visual concept linking diagram that will enable researchers to quickly understand the contextual relationship between Bitcoin keywords during literature analysis. In addition, the most crucial studies in the main topics are extracted to save the considerable time and labor that would be required to manually read all the literature and summarize the issues.