Corporate Social Responsibility in Difficult Times

CEOs can improve the non-financial performance of the firm by posting CSR initiatives of their firms on social media. CEOs can enhance stakeholder support behaviours and their perspective towards them by disseminating information about their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. A company’s reputation, stakeholder-company relationships, and other non-financial performance are all improved over time through these actions. This chapter highlights the necessity for CEOs to more actively involve stakeholders in CSR activities using social media because stakeholder’s inadequate awareness of and negative perception towards firm’s CSR activities continue to be significantly hampered in the firm’s attempts to maximize the non-financial performance of the firm through their CSR initiatives. This chapter highlights the importance of social media usage for CSR communication. This chapter presents five action plans that define how CEOs and senior executives can use social media platforms for CSR communication. The chapter highlights that the success of CSR communication can be influenced by many factors, including message content, social media communication platforms, and communication strategies (one-way or two-way communication).

In this paper, the author continues with developing a philosophy of multiple simultaneous un/natural disasters (MSDs) in terms of the basic development of aesthetics, philosophy of religion, and ethics of MSDs. The paper is a continuation of the research from the initial papers, namely “Un/natural disasters, Philosophy of multiple simultaneous un/natural disasters” (Krkač, 2022a) and Un/natural disasters II, Epistemology and ontology of multiple simultaneous un/natural disasters (Krkač, 2022b). The main issues in this text are aesthetics, philosophy of religion, and ethics of and in multiple simultaneous un/natural disasters in terms of setting the scene. These are being analyzed in conceptual-morphological terms. The critical finding concerned with the three mentioned aspects is the following: concerning aesthetics that the dichotomy of disaster-ugly vs. non-disaster-beautiful doesn’t apply universally; concerning religion that it can produce a lot of confusion and wrong beliefs and actions if misused during MSDs; and concerning ethics that morality and ethics of MSDs are determined by concepts that are not available in traditional moral and ethical theories, namely by proper attention, adaptation, and responsiveness (AAR) of human action before, during, and after an MSD.

This study examines the association between environmental sustainability, governance factors and national culture with COVID-19 impact. We aim to draw implications for thinking and researching environmental accountability at a higher level than the organisation. We draw on the conceptual lens of deep ecology. Using a sample of 44 countries, we find that countries with a higher level of corporate carbon emissions experienced a greater impact from COVID-19. Moreover, countries with higher accountability and government effectiveness are associated with a lower COVID-19 impact, implying that productive policy responses to the pandemic were employed in such settings. The study also finds that the positive association between carbon emissions and COVID-19 impact is less pronounced for countries with an individualism culture. This suggests that policy responses, such as social distancing, may have yielded better results in these cultural contexts. Furthermore, it is found that the positive impact of carbon emissions on COVID-19 impact is lower for countries having long-term orientation and environmental value orientation cultures.

In an era where for-profit organizations are not sufficient to deal with the current global challenges, hybrid organizations presented themselves as the light at the end of the tunnel by existing in the blurry line between not-for-profit and for-profit organizations and integrating both social and economic goals. The existence of both goals within the organization forms an internal tension that places hybrids in a dilemma (Battilana and Lee in Academy of Management Annals 8:397–441, 2014). These tensions are manifested in the different set of values that every social entrepreneur (and his/her) team hold, so it seems that values may help us comprehend the motivations or intentions of social entrepreneurs to create hybrid organizations. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to propose a bundle of different socio-economic values based on Schwartz (Advances in experimental social psychology. Academic Press, New York, 1992) theory of human values to accommodate the different forms of hybrid organizations to better comprehend the value creation vis-à-vis value capture enigma.

The article deals with the integration of the financial market of the Eurasian Economic Union countries. The current situation and barriers to integration, in particular, for the banking sector of the EAEU countries, are investigated. The necessity of implementing banking innovations in the digital economy to transform the format of banking services was substantiated, and prospective directions of digitalization that contribute to the sustainable development of the banking system of the EAEU countries were analyzed. The study applied methods of theoretical generalization to identify approaches to the digital path of sustainable development of the banking sector.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) currently occupies an important place in the training programmes of organisations and empowers universities and training institutions to focus on this prospective area. Businesses need to be community-oriented and through CSR, they recognise some of the insights of this discipline which is heavily influenced by Carroll’s CSR dimensions. At UdM, a public university in Mauritius, there was a need to integrate CSR into the learning curriculum and a first course was undertaken through the provision of a 25-h programme. With regard to the length of the course and the mode in which it was delivered, the CSR course was assessed in two stages: pre- and post-assessment. These were based on the CIRO and the Kirkpatrick model. The results showed that the context and contribution of the CSR training programme were important in ensuring that the course was relevant to the learning needs of the students. At the same time, students achieved satisfaction in the form of positive feedback such as relevance and engagement, including learning outcomes that were more focused on the philanthropic and ethical content of the course compared to the economic and legal content. The main recommendation following the evaluation of CSR was to extend it to future programmes of the university and to improve its content so that CSR is positioned as a valuable future training component in a university curriculum. There is also the question of aligning the programme with the constant evolution of CSR so that the trends from the outside can be matched with training resources from the inside.

Since the Coronavirus-2019 or COVID-19 outbreak caused the worldwide lockdown, the business world is overall regressing. Nearly every worker/consumer had to stay at home for more than a month and some even lost their jobs. The coronavirus is also causing global concern and economic hardship for consumers, businesses, and communities. Businesses and their employees were compelled to intensify working from home. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) were critical in allowing economic activities to seemingly continue and a major section of the population to continue generating income by supporting teleworking from home. Most companies have already decided on business continuity plans, but these plans are not prepared to face the fast-moving process and yet unknown facets of the pandemic. For businesses to stay afloat, many turned to digital technologies, using tools like videoconferencing, cloud services, virtual private networks, Emails, and File Servers among others. Businesses that had pre-existing telework capabilities or quickly adapted, were best positioned for seamless transitions to working from home while maintaining laudable output levels. However, telecommunication was not the hero during the pandemic. Small businesses closed. To survive, businessmen even tried to adapt and devise strategies to modify their business methods but many failed. Eventually, remote working engendered some downsides like the fading gaps between family and job, personal and work time, distraction by pets, children, chores, television, and even neighbourhood activities. The study investigates the impact of COVID-19 on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Mauritius. The current research assists in gaining a deeper understanding of the current lived realities of individuals afflicted by the pandemic. Two major obstacles to research and development in the COVID-19 context, namely “time limits” and “physical distancing”, are addressed. These findings may contribute towards the formulation of key policies and best practices that will define the pandemic’s responses henceforth. This research highlights the role of corporations in promoting CSR among SMEs in Mauritius, as well as in specific sectors using telecommuting to counteract unemployment. It also focuses on the importance and the role of CSR in the achievement of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This study aims to identify the levels of commitment of companies in Madagascar to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) through their practices and to propose a typology of these practices. A categorisation of the CSR practices of thirteen companies in Madagascar was carried out through a theory check. Scales from 0 to 6 were determined for each of the ten dimensions of CSR to find the CSR institutionalisation and the profile of each company. A combination of the latter two elements forms the CSR model of each company. Four categories of CSR models were found: institutional inconsistency, lack of policy-performance coherence, strategic inconsistency and policy-performance coherence. All these practices can be improved. However, companies that are involved in CSR have to optimise their performance in this sense by making more efforts to sustain the results while integrating human resources (HR). Companies that do not assume their social responsibility, in order to face the recessionary situation, will find a way to strengthen their resilience by initiating and committing to a CSR approach that is calibrated to their capacities and resources. And the ideal would be to ensure at the same time sociological and psychological CSR. This has contributed to and expanded the literature on CSR. This paper advances the research in CSR throughout a modelisation of CSR practices and strengthens the resilience of companies through the CSR approach. It shows the way on the actions to be taken in this direction. Nonetheless, there may be other models of CSR practices in Madagascar.

Traditional reporting has failed to meet evolving needs of stakeholders in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. A combination of financial and non-financial data reporting using the organisation’s holistic approach was required. The integrated reporting (IR) concept emerged with a global coalition, the IIRC (International Integrated Reporting Council), coming up with its framework. This paper investigates the determinants of IR in the Australian context. Data were collected for the top 100 companies listed on the ASX for 2018–2019. The source includes annual reports from companies’ websites and the Thomson Reuters Refinitiv Eikon database. Logistic regression was used to test hypotheses. Consistent with pre-defined hypotheses, firm size, growth opportunities and board activity positively influenced companies to have their integrated reports assured. The other exogenous variables used in the study, such as profitability, industry category, board size and board independence, were statistically not proven to bear any significant effect on the assurance of IR. This study contributes to the existing literature by investigating the idiosyncratic factors contributing to external assurance of integrated reports in a developed economy context.

Literature review suggests that environmental strategic alignment and the environmental management accounting practices’ adoption are influenced not only by institutional pressure (coercive, mimetic and normative), but also by the organization’s characteristics. The aim of this paper is twofold: (a) to analyse, from a theoretical point of view, the implications of considering the environmental variables into the companies’ strategy, management and accounting information systems; (b) to develop a case study in order to understand the strategies, practices, management tools and environmental/sustainability disclosure adopted by a large Portuguese group, operating in an environmental sensitive industry, and the role performed by its accounting information system. Environmental issues have been incorporated into the group’s strategy and management practices as result of external pressures, from legislative and stakeholders demands. This proactive strategy was materialized by (a) an organizational restructuring, including an environmental/sustainability; (b) the changes in the production process, introducing clean technologies and a circular economy approach; and (c) the environmental management systems’ implementation and certification in all industrial centres. The information generated by the accounting information system reflects the relevance of environmental variables for the group, as for the cost accounting and in the financial accounting. However, the status quo of environmental management accounting (EMA) development is unsatisfactory, perhaps as result of the lack of common guidelines to implement EMA in a business context.