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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.

Achieving project performance goals in extremely resource-constrained environments, such as those of social enterprises, is challenging. These organizations often employ bricolage – making the most of available resources – to navigate challenging landscapes. This study aims to understand how bricolage capabilities enhance or attenuate organizational project outcomes in resource-constrained social enterprises.

An exploratory survey was conducted to understand project management practices in Canadian social enterprises. Established scales were used to measure constructs with confirmatory factor analysis, and linear regression was employed to analyze relationships.

The study provides empirical evidence of the positive influence of bricolage on organizational project performance, with a crossover interaction observed for moderators – entrepreneurial leadership and project management capabilities. While project capabilities strengthen the positive impact of bricolage capabilities on project performance, entrepreneurial leadership has the opposite effect.

The insights from this study offer an initial roadmap for project managers for effective resource acquisition and utilization through bricolage, ultimately enhancing project management effectiveness in resource-constrained environments.

Despite the crucial role of bricolage capabilities in resource-constrained environments, the project management literature has largely neglected this concept. It is unclear how organizations use bricolage to manage projects. This lack of understanding challenges organizations, hindering their ability to apply bricolage consistently and thoughtfully in managing projects. Our study provides a deeper understanding of how bricolage facilitates project performance and enriches our understanding of it as an effective resource mobilization strategy within social enterprises.

Supply chains are increasingly incorporating social perspectives into their activities. It is often argued that social initiatives in supply chain management (SCM) are a response to external pressures. However, it is still undetermined whether these initiatives can improve economic performance. Additionally, it is proposed that digital transformation in supply chains, also described as Smart Supply Chain, can support social performance. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the association between digital transformation, social performance in SCM and economic performance.

The study is based on a survey of 473 companies in Brazil, a country where social needs create high pressures on companies to respond to the country’s challenges. The data collected underwent testing using ordinary least squares regression and bootstrapping techniques to examine the mediation effects between Smart Supply Chain, social performance and economic performance.

The findings indicate that digital transformation supports social performance. Additionally, adopting social initiatives helps to increase firm performance in the context of an emerging economy, while social initiatives mediate between digital transformation and firm performance.

This paper provides a new perspective on the social side of supply chains by demonstrating the close relationship between digital transformation and social engagement initiatives. It argues that aligning digital transformation strategies and technologies with social performance is crucial for companies to establish stronger connections with stakeholders.

The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that drive superior social enterprise performance for women-led social enterprises. The authors examined the role of individual entrepreneur cognitive characteristics contributing to social enterprise performance and recommended a framework for women's social entrepreneur development.

The authors conducted an exploratory qualitative study of 22 women founders of social enterprises using a semi-structured questionnaire. In-depth interviews were conducted, and the transcripts were analyzed using thematic content analysis.

This study found a significant impact of self-efficacy on the performance of social enterprises among the studied subjects. Social support in the form of material, information and emotional support enhanced the ability of women social entrepreneurs to better achieve business sustenance and continuance of operations. The business skills of the women social entrepreneurs led them to move from just social impact generators to becoming thought leaders. The strong prosocial motivation of the founders contributed to building their resilience in the face of adversity.

This study extended the existing theories on social entrepreneurship by bringing the dimensions of entrepreneurial resilience in driving social enterprise performance along with business skills. Thus, it provided an enhanced explanation to the existing body of knowledge on contributors to superior social enterprise performance.

This study gathered insights into the role of entrepreneurship education focused on business skills, especially for women social entrepreneurs in achieving superior performance for their social ventures. This also reconfirmed the role of social support and how structurally this could be provided by educational systems to aspiring women social entrepreneurs.

The practice of social entrepreneurship by women social entrepreneurs has been growing. Its importance in developing economies because of its ability to make grassroots changes at the lower levels of society was substantive. Women have shown more inclination toward social business with an affinity for prosocial contribution. By focusing on nurturing these social enterprises, governments as well as global agencies like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum could accelerate social change. Furthermore, support for the current women social entrepreneurs as change-makers making a difference in society could be achieved.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research study was one of the first studies on women social entrepreneurs focusing on the factors of self-efficacy, social support and entrepreneurial resilience contributing to social enterprise performance. This study combined the social entrepreneurship intention theory with entrepreneurial resilience and business skills to understand the factors leading to successful social enterprise performance for women social entrepreneurs.

The social venture (SV) is an increasingly popular form of organization to pursue social goals using a commercial approach. Although marketing plays an important role in SV research and a key driver of the performance of SVs, how and the extent to which market conditions play a role remains understudied. This study examines if market turbulence can moderate marketing capabilities and performance relationships.

The authors developed several hypotheses rooted in the marketing literature and tested them using data collected from a sample of 109 SVs from East Asia (i.e. Hong Kong and Taiwan). Using multiple regression analysis and structural equation modeling, the authors analyzed the marketing capabilities and financial and social performance relationships and the positive moderating role of market turbulence.

The results suggested that market turbulence is a positive moderator which influences the effect of the marketing capabilities–financial performance relationship, but not the marketing capabilities and social performance relationship.

This paper attempts to interrogate the SV's marketing capabilities–performance relationship in the East Asian context and how market turbulence may enhance or weaken the relationship. This is one of the earliest papers in this research area. The key findings from this research offer valuable theoretical contribution to the study of SV performance.

Social media is widely regarded as a strategic resource to improve firm performance. However, there are mixed findings on how businesses can use social media for better performance. This study aims to propose and test a mechanism through which social media can influence firm performance.

A survey approach was used to collect data from 262 small businesses in South Africa. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM) to assess the hypothesised relationships.

The findings support the significant role of social media in fostering firm performance. It is observed that the use of social media influences firm performance through three key customer-centric constructs: the strength of customer–firm relationships, customer orientation and customer co-creation. Additionally, the relationship between the strength of customer–firm relationships and firm performance is moderated by customer co-creation.

The study provides new insights into the mechanism through which social media fosters firm performance. Due to a lack of universality in establishing the direct effect of social media use on firm performance, providing evidence of an indirect path becomes vital for advancing knowledge on social media use in business. As such, this study contributes to the literature on social media and entrepreneurship by demonstrating a novel mechanism through which social media influences firm performance.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) is the worst pandemic in recent memory in terms of its economic and social impacts. Deadly second wave of COVID-19 in India shook the country and reshaped the ways organizations functions and societies behave. Medical infrastructure was unaffordable and unsupportive which created high distress in the Indian society, especially for poor. At this juncture, some pharmaceutical firms made a unique social investment when they reduced price of drugs used to treat COVID-19 patients. This study aims to examine how the market and the society respond to the price reduction announcement during the psychological distress of COVID-19.

Market reactions have been analyzed by conducting an event study on stock market data and visual analytics-based sentiment analysis on Twitter data.

Overall, this study finds positive abnormal returns on the day and around the day of event. Interestingly, this study finds that returns during the time of high distress are significantly higher. Sentiment analysis conveys that net sentiment is favorable to the pharmaceutical firms around the day of event and it sustains more during the time of high distress.

This study is unique in contributing to the business and industrial management literature by highlighting market reactions to social responsibility of business during the time of psychological distress in emerging economies.

Corporate responsibility and sustainability (CRS) have emerged as an important topic today. At the same time, alliances and coopetition arrangements, as vehicles for inter-firm collaboration have been shown to support firm performance. Still, there has been a lack of research into how coopetition (collaboration with competing firms) in this area may support firm performance.

This study aims to untangle the relationship between coopetition arrangements including CRS and firm performance. The model permits garnering social performance, which is a key to CRS, and to move beyond the traditional view of the coopetition–firm–economic–performance relationship. This study is based on a survey and primary data from 215 firms in Australia. This study uses multiple indicators for the concepts. Relationships are estimated by multiple regression analyses.

Using survey data from 215 firms in Australia, the research findings confirm that coopetition in CRS can lead to improved firm performance, both in relation to financial and social performances. However, the association between coopetition in CRS and financial performance loses its significance when social performances is introduced as an additional control variable. Further, stakeholder attributes (i.e., effective power and legitimate stake) moderate the relationship between coopetition in CRS and firm financial performance. However, there was no evidence of moderation for the coopetition in CRS – firm social performance relationship.

This study contributes to both coopetition and corporate social responsibility research. This study demonstrates that improved firm performance may be achieved through the promotion of CRS initiatives when a coopetitive approach is adopted, particularly where an understanding of stakeholder attributes is also evident. Firms do not need to shoulder corporate social responsibility alone. They need to find well-fitting partners. There are new ways to improve sustainability in terms of nature and human relationships.

Firms do not need to shoulder Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) alone. They need to find well-fitting partners.

This study provides very novel insights by having integrated the literature on coopetition, corporate social responsibility and sustainability resulting in a new conceptual framework that combines coopetition in CRS and performance. The new conceptual framework has both practical and research implications for coopetition in CRS and firm performance.

This study aims to examine the potential threshold effect in the association between corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance and social reputation.

This study includes an international and cross-sector sample covering 41 countries, nine sectors and 45,395 firm-year observations. It applies a parabolic relationship, rather than linear regressions, between CSR engagement and social reputation via CSR awarding. This implies that CSR performance should increase until a certain point to gain a social reputation but then should decrease after reaching that threshold point considering limited financial resources.

The findings of country-industry-year fixed-effects logistic regressions confirm the threshold effect with an inverted U-shaped relationship between CSR and CSR awarding. More specifically, firms increase their environmental and social engagement until a certain point, and then they reduce it after reaching a social reputation. This finding is confirmed by three dimensions of the environmental pillar (i.e. resource use, emissions and eco-innovation) as well as four dimensions of the social pillar (i.e. workforce, human rights, community and product responsibility). The findings are robust to alternative samples, alternative methodology and endogeneity concerns.

The findings of this study have implications for firms about the better allocation of available funds between CSR and operations. The findings could be particularly useful for CSR teams/committees of the firms who formulate CSR policies and how to mobilize firm resources for better social enhancement via environmental and social reputation.

This study examines deeper the nature of the association between CSR engagement and social reputation and considers the possibility of an inverted U-shaped relationship between them. The determination of a threshold effect suggests that CSR engagement increases social reputation, but once it reaches a certain point, social reputation will decrease owing to financial resource constraints.

This study investigates the influence of social trust on the attainment of corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) objectives.

This study conducts panel regression analysis on a distinctive dataset for 2009–2017 on Chinese firms.

The analysis reveals a significant positive association between social trust and firm-level ESG practices. Moreover, the impact of social trust on shaping ESG outcomes is further amplified by factors such as economic growth, corporate governance standards and institutional quality. This relationship remains statistically positive when the authors employ alternative measures and methodologies, such as the instrumental variables, propensity score matching and difference-in-differences approaches. Notably, the results of heterogeneity tests indicate that the Trust–ESG nexus is more prominent for state-owned enterprises and firms with substantial market capitalization, superior profitability and higher leverage.

This study expands the comprehension of the determinants of ESG and underscores the influential role of social trust as an informal institution in enhancing a firm's ESG performance.