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The 2008/2009 World Financial Crisis underlined the importance of social responsibility for the sustainable functioning of economic markets. Heralding an age of novel heterodox economic thinking, the call for integrating social facets into mainstream economic models has reached unprecedented momentum. Financial Social Responsibility bridges the finance world with society in socially conscientious investments. Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) integrates corporate social responsibility in investment choices. In the aftermath of the 2008/2009 World Financial Crisis, SRI is an idea whose time has come. Socially conscientious asset allocation styles add to expected yield and volatility of securities social, environmental, and institutional considerations. In screenings, shareholder advocacy, community investing, social venture capital funding and political divestiture, socially conscientious investors hone their interest to align financial profit maximization strategies with social concerns. In a long history of classic finance theory having blacked out moral and ethical considerations of investment decision making, our knowledge of socio-economic motives for SRI is limited. Apart from economic profitability calculus and strategic leadership advantages, this paper sheds light on socio-psychological motives underlying SRI. Altruism, need for innovation and entrepreneurial zest alongside utility derived from social status enhancement prospects and transparency may steer investors’ social conscientiousness. Self-enhancement and social expression of future-oriented SRI options may supplement profit maximization goals. Theoretically introducing potential SRI motives serves as a first step toward an empirical validation of Financial Social Responsibility to improve the interplay of financial markets and the real economy. The pursuit of crisis-robust and sustainable financial markets through strengthened Financial Social Responsibility targets at creating lasting societal value for this generation and the following.

Contemporary debates on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are framed in a global context; however, there is ample evidence that national and institutional frameworks define CSR practices. Questions about the activities of Transnational Companies (TNCs) in their host countries further highlight growing CSR concerns, developments and challenges in specific regions. Our aim in this chapter is to examine the theoretical arguments on the relationship between context and CSR, looking at the role of situational conditions in driving responsible corporate behaviour in a global environment.

Drawing on discourse analytic concepts, we use insights derived from our comparative research on transnational companies’ (European and non-European) self-presentations of CSR-related actions in a developing country, Ghana, to illuminate our argument.

The discussions demonstrate that context relationships are crucial in CSR practices since they contribute to a wide variety of implicit meanings that provide in-depth understanding of companies’ responsibilities in specific regions. Our empirical analysis showed that linguistic categories of the TNCs related more to responsibilities that focused on ethos than logos, which suggests credible CSR messages to a large extent.

The chapter contributes to the emerging literature on the context-specific nature of CSR in two important ways. First, it provides insights to further the debate on the utility of balancing local and global requirements in corporate CSR actions. Second, our linguistic-based model of analysing CSR communication content, which we demonstrate from our study, offers a novel approach to assess companies’ real intentions, motives and perspectives on CSR in the wake of growing corporate scandals.

Diverse understanding of corporate social responsibility (CSR) abounds among scholars and practitioners in Nigeria. The purpose of this chapter is to reinvent CSR in Nigeria through a deeper understanding of the meaning and theories of this nebulous concept for better application in the industry. The qualitative research approach is adopted, relying on critical review of scholarly articles on CSR, website information of selected companies and institutional documents. It was found that there are diverse meanings of CSR in the reviewed literature, but the philanthropic initiatives and corporate donations for social issues are the common CSR practices in Nigeria. Besides, the eight dominant theories of CSR that find relevance for applications in the industry are shareholder/agency, stakeholder, legitimacy, instrumental, social contract, conflict, green and communication theories. The implication of the discourse is that better understanding and application of CSR theories would strengthen conceptual, theoretical and empirical research in the field of CSR. Besides, CSR theories are useful sources of information for practitioners for designing social responsibility policies and practices as well as for providing scholars with sound theoretical framework for academic research.

This study aims to examine the effect of corporate governance mechanisms on social responsibility in Latin America.

The hypotheses were tested using a sample of 371 companies based in eight Latin American countries, resulting in 4,823 observations.

The results show that more independent boards, with greater female representation and the presence of a sustainability committee lead companies to behave more ethically. The findings indicate that corporate governance mechanisms play an important role for companies to engage in social responsibility actions.

Governments can use these findings to draft regulations that encourage Latin American companies to disclose more non-financial information and to support a more diverse board composition. The evidence shows that the quality of national governance plays a key role in times of crisis by encouraging more responsible behavior by companies.

This study broadens the scope of application of agency theory and the resource-based view by demonstrating that the board of directors is a unique composition and that organizations must understand how to balance external and internal members on their boards in order to achieve higher social and environmental performance.

Este estudio tiene como objetivo examinar el efecto de los mecanismos de gobierno corporativo en la responsabilidad social en América Latina.

Las hipótesis se probaron utilizando una muestra de 371 empresas con sede en 8 países de América Latina, lo que resultó en 4.823 observaciones.

Los resultados muestran que directorios más independientes, con mayor representación femenina y la presencia de un comité de sustentabilidad llevan a las empresas a comportarse de manera más ética. Los hallazgos indican que los mecanismos de gobierno corporativo juegan un papel importante para que las empresas realicen acciones de responsabilidad social.

Este estudio amplía el alcance de la aplicación de la teoría de la agencia y la visión basada en los recursos al demostrar que la junta directiva es una composición única y que las organizaciones deben entender cómo equilibrar los miembros externos e internos en sus juntas para lograr un mayor impacto social. y desempeño ambiental.

Los gobiernos pueden usar estos hallazgos para redactar regulaciones que alienten a las empresas latinoamericanas a divulgar más información no financiera y apoyar una composición de directorio más diversa. Nuestra evidencia muestra que la calidad de la gobernanza nacional juega un papel clave en tiempos de crisis al fomentar un comportamiento más responsable por parte de las empresas.

The appraisal of corporate reputation based on third-party corporate social responsibility (CSR) indices appears to have been institutionalized. The endorsement of such an approach by sustainability custodians and influencers undermines the uptake of the morality and legitimacy of CSR. This study takes a social realist perspective, which suggests that social phenomena such as CSR and corporate reputation are shaped by social structures and power relations. This study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between CSR and corporate reputation and understand ways in which the constructs are influenced by cognitive factors.

This study surveyed 411 respondents across five shopping malls and analyzed the data using path analysis of the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. The mall-intercept survey sought to critically assess expectations of CSR vis-à-vis evaluation of corporate reputation. Based on a case study of three Johannesburg Stock Exchange listed companies, CSR expectations were measured along the philanthropic, economic, ethical and legal dimensions, while evaluation of corporate reputation was based on product quality, financial performance and social responsibility. SEM path analysis was used to extrapolate the predictive outcomes of CSR on corporate reputation.

Reputation for product quality and social responsibility is underpinned by the fulfillment of ethical CSR expectations, while philanthropic gestures enhance the evaluation of financial performance. Legal CSR significantly influences the reputation for social responsibility and product quality. Fulfillment of economic CSR expectations influences the reputation for product quality. However, no relationship was established between economic performance and social responsibility. Involvement in economic, philanthropic and particularly, legal CSR, are not indicative of the reputation for financial performance. Conversely, companies’ involvement in economic CSR does not suggest a higher propensity for social responsibility.

The predictive outcomes of CSR expectations on corporate reputation can reveal situated understanding of actual perceptions of corporate behavior.

Ethical business conduct is synonymously associated with social responsibility while espoused corporate philanthropy signals strong financial performance. The awareness of consumers’ cognitive evaluation of corporate reputation can offer a pathway to corporate communication professionals, policy makers and agencies to rethink and reposition CSR efforts.

Insensitivity to taken-for-granted cultural prescriptions and reliance on market-based reputational rankings undermine mutually beneficial stakeholder relationships and the social license to operate.

This study brings to the fore, cognitively dominated indicators of consumers’ perceptions of the reputation for CSR, to foster nuanced and halo-removed approaches to social responsibility. The authors show for the first time how companies’ skewed focus on corporate philanthropic giving paradoxically signals a capitalistic notion of social responsibility and unethical business conduct. This study offers a halo-removed orientation to the appraisal of CSR and corporate reputation.

The purpose of the paper is to examine five themes arising from definitions of corporate social responsibility (CSR): responsibility to the community and society; promoting democracy and citizenship; reducing poverty and the inequality between rich and poor; employee rights and working conditions; ethical behaviour. The paper also aims to evaluate three important articles on CSR, and investigate conceptual value added, with reference to these five themes.

The paper uses a Hegelian dialectical method to analyse CSR. This method is used to evaluate Friedman's classic 1970 article, the 2004 Christian Aid Report, the 2006 Corporate Watch Report and the conceptual value added aspects of CSR.

The evidence suggests strongly that, irrespective of the subjective will of CEOs, corporate profitability acts as a fetter to authentic social responsibility.

As CSR tends to be reduced to a range of marketing techniques, of varying degrees of sophistication, the paper calls for a discussion on ways in which producers and distributors can become authentically responsible to the societies in which they operate.

An analysis of CSR that employs Hegelian dialectics provides a means of explaining the relevance of the contradictions inherent in contemporary corporate and consumer behaviour. A study of these contradictions helps us to understand the widely reported gulf between the theory and practice of CSR advocates. Such an understanding is likely to be of value to those academics, students and others seeking to theorise, and bring into being, authentic social responsibility.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the ISO 26000 (global corporate social responsibility standard) adoption and financial performance. The current study aims to explore whether ISO 26000 social responsibility standard adoption has an impact on financial performance.

The study is based on a sample consisting of French companies listed on the CAC-All-Tradable index for the period 2010-2017. This study is motivated by using panel data estimated feasible generalized least squares method.

The results show that that good corporate governance can improve the financial performance. This positive impact is also noticed in the case of labor relations and conditions, environment and community involvement. However, it does not apply to human rights, fair operating practices and consumer issues, as there is no significant relationship between these dimensions and the financial performance.

The findings may be of interest to the academic researchers, investors and regulators. For academic researchers, it is interested in discovering how the adoption of ISO 26000 can improve financial performance. For investors, the results show that it is appropriate for different countries to adopt the ISO 26000 guidelines and introduce societal practices in their activities.

This paper extends the existing literature by examining the effect of the ISO 26000 standard for financial performance in the French context. The study of corporate social responsibility through its seven societal dimensions has enabled us to understand the guidelines relating to the ISO 26000 standard.

Although the topics of business ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are not new, this article focuses on the changing role of both subjects in the current business world. Having heard much about CSR in the past, the authors were under the impression that it had taken hold as a movement and more and more corporations were leaning toward ethical business practices and social responsibility. Media attention on the shocking revelations of the tobacco industry stimulated their interest in investigating this impression. Their research indicates that, although some corporations are still practicing unethical behavior, many more indicated that they have a social responsibility to their stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how chief executive officer values and ethics have been translated into what we now term corporate social responsibility in a stakeholder view of the firm.

To fulfill this purpose, the reflections of early business scholars on top management's impact on corporate social responsibility are examined and linked to more contemporary views.

In response to stakeholder expectations of corporate social responsibility it is the chief executive officer's values and ethics, moderated by managerial discretion, that frame the firm's actions and ethics.

The aspiring executive may evaluate the ethics of industries and firms against his or her own values to identify zones of greatest synergy, while the firm's executive search process can consider including an assessment of the fit of candidates' personal values.

This paper builds on the works of early management scholars to specifically link contemporary corporate social responsibility decision making with executive values.