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The purpose of this paper is to explore the current status and identify the main trends in leading Russian companies’ corporate sustainability model transformation in the context of achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

A theoretical approach is based on the interpretation of corporate sustainability model transformation within the corporate social performance (CSP) framework. The corporate sustainability model is described according to Dyllick and Muff (2016) business sustainability (BST) 1.0-3.0 spectrum. The analysis is settled on survey data collected from leading Russian companies participated in the “Report on Social Investments in Russia” project conducted by the Russian Managers Association from 2008 to 2019.

This paper finds that the BST 2.0 is becoming a dominant model based on the “creating shared value” goal. The related CSP is characterized by their orientation to the principles of the UN Global Compact; by the emergence of a coordinating role for specialized departments of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and/or sustainability; and by the regular sustainability reporting. The SDGs are generally correlated with responsible business practices that are already in existence in companies. The emerging trend towards the advanced BST 3.0 model including the SDGs integration into the main business processes is constrained by the lack of active cooperation between companies.

The research sample includes only large Russian companies with a significant industry diversity, participating in the “Report on Social Investments in Russia” project, thereby restricting the analysis of non-participants. The relatively low repetition of participants in this long-term project does also restrict the degree of generalization. Future research could be based on the findings of this paper to create and test hypotheses via a nationwide study of Russian businesses as well as cross-national comparative studies.

The analysis of the corporate sustainability model transformation through studying the key CSP framework elements could support Russian companies in creating systemic changes of their principles, processes and outcomes measurements in the context of achieving the UN SDGs.

This study contributes to existing literature by combining the corporate sustainability model transformation analysis with the CSP framework. It describes the experience of large Russian companies that publicly position themselves as national leaders in the field of CSR and sustainable development.

The aim of this paper is to examine how companies officially recognized in Russia as corporate philanthropy leaders actually introduce, implement, and evaluate philanthropic activities. Focusing on the connections between these activities and corporate strategy, the paper seeks to investigate the main trends in corporate philanthropy development over the period 2007‐2010, assuming that corporate philanthropy is an integral part of corporate social performance.

A theoretical framework is based on the recognition of “strategic” philanthropy as a part as well as the main trend in current philanthropic activities of leading companies. The analysis as such is settled on survey data collected from participants in the national “Corporate Philanthropy Leaders” award competition conducted by the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti, PwC, and the non‐profit grant‐making organization “Donors Forum” from 2008 to 2011.

The results testify to strengthening connections between corporate philanthropy and corporate strategy, enhancing the strategic nature of philanthropy as such. Here the responding companies significantly diversified the directions of their philanthropic activities, whereas the distribution of corporate philanthropy by form showed a high stability that was practically unaffected by the economic crisis of 2008‐2009. A common practice is the professionalization of managing corporate philanthropy, with a growing role for CSR departments.

The study focuses on the activities of leading Russian companies participating in the national “Corporate Philanthropy Leaders” award competition, thereby restricting the analysis of non‐participants. Moreover, the evolution of competition surveys and their methodology as well as relatively low repetition of participants also restrict the degree of generalization. Future research could be based on the findings of this study to create hypotheses to be tested on a broader sample of Russian companies.

The majority of studies of corporate philanthropy in Russia are still covering the necessity of corporate philanthropy for resolving societal problems and describing particular “best practice” cases rather than analyzing the relation of corporate philanthropy to the whole system of CSP and its strategic applications. This study aims to address this gap by focusing on corporate philanthropy leaders as a first step to broad nationwide research.

Amid the expanding demand on the autism service delivery system, little knowledge is accumulated regarding access and availability of support and services in the region of Southern and South-Eastern Europe – critical for improvement of individual outcomes, as well as family quality of life. The purpose of this paper is to explore how service delivery systems are responding to the specific needs of autistic individuals with autism, as perceived by parents.

A qualitative exploratory descriptive method was used. Thematic analysis was used as a pragmatic method to report on the experiences of parents (92% mothers, n = 55) of children, youth and young autistic adults (76% male) across six South and South-Eastern European counties that participated in a survey involving a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection.

Thematic analysis revealed three broad themes: challenging pathways to service utilization, insufficient service options and providers’ competences and lack of continuous and meaningful support across life span.

The findings from this study add to the small body of literature specific to South and South-Eastern Europe, by exposing problems related to meeting the needs of autistic children and youth and potential ways to strengthen services, as perceived by parents. The findings have potential policy ramifications for the region in which the research was conducted.

The paper addresses the problem of what drives the formation of latent discussion communities, if any, in the blogosphere: topical composition of posts or their authorship? The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge about structure of co-commenting.

The research is based on a dataset of 17,386 full text posts written by top 2,000 LiveJournal bloggers and over 520,000 comments that result in about 4.5 million edges in the network of co-commenting, where posts are vertices. The Louvain algorithm is used to detect communities of co-commenting. Cosine similarity and topic modeling based on latent Dirichlet allocation are applied to study topical coherence within these communities.

Bloggers unite into moderately manifest communities by commenting roughly the same sets of posts. The graph of co-commenting is sparse and connected by a minority of active non-top commenters. Communities are centered mainly around blog authors as opinion leaders and, to a lesser extent, around a shared topic or topics.

The research has to be replicated on other datasets with more thorough hand coding to ensure the reliability of results and to reveal average proportions of topic-centered communities.

Knowledge about factors around which co-commenting communities emerge, in particular clustered opinion leaders that often attract such communities, can be used by policy makers in marketing and/or political campaigning when individual leadership is not enough or not applicable.

The research contributes to the social studies of online communities. It is the first study of communities based on co-commenting that combines examination of the content of commented posts and their topics.