7,153 research outputs found

    CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY – CORPORATE BRANDING RELATIONSHIP: AN EMPIRICAL COMPARATIVE STUDY

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    Current academic research on the relationship of firms’ CSR activities with corporate branding typically focuses on consumers’ and shareholders’ viewpoints. This research aims to shed light on how organisational members in firms perceive to be the impact of CSR activities upon their corporate brand strategy. Using a survey administered to companies in the U.K. and Bulgaria, the author investigate, firstly, organisational members’ perceptions of the impact of different CSR-related activities upon corporate branding and, secondly, their beliefs about what customers and shareholders think are the impacts of CSR-related activities upon brand image and brand identity. The findings indicated that while organisational members rated quality products, customer service and corporate governance highly as key components of CSR activity, they were much more ambivalent about their companies' commitment to broader actions which involve the 'community' and 'society'. This paper concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for future 'CSR education' among companies.Corporate social responsibility, corporate branding, brand image

    Business Ontology for Evaluating Corporate Social Responsibility

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    This paper presents a software solution that is developed to automatically classify companies by taking into account their level of social responsibility. The application is based on ontologies and on intelligent agents. In order to obtain the data needed to evaluate companies, we developed a web crawling module that analyzes the company’s website and the documents that are available online such as social responsibility report, mission statement, employment structure, etc. Based on a predefined CSR ontology, the web crawling module extracts the terms that are linked to corporate social responsibility. By taking into account the extracted qualitative data, an intelligent agent, previously trained on a set of companies, computes the qualitative values, which are then included in the classification model based on neural networks. The proposed ontology takes into consideration the guidelines proposed by the “ISO 26000 Standard for Social Responsibility”. Having this model, and being aware of the positive relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and financial performance, an overall perspective on each company’s activity can be configured, this being useful not only to the company’s creditors, auditors, stockholders, but also to its consumers.corporate social responsibility, ISO 26000 Standard for Social Responsibility, ontology, web crawling, intelligent agent, corporate performance, POS tagging, opinion mining, sentiment analysis

    Does good ESG lead to better financial performances by firms? Machine learning and logistic regression models of public enterprises in Europe.

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    The increasing awareness of climate change and human capital issues is shifting companies towards aspects other than traditional financial earnings. In particular, the changing behaviors towards sustainability issues of the global community and the availability of environmental, social and governance (ESG) indicators are attracting investors to socially responsible investment decisions. Furthermore, whereas the strategic importance of ESG metrics has been particularly studied for private enterprises, little attention have received public companies. To address this gap, the present work has three aims-1. To predict the accuracy of main financial indicators such as the expected Return of Equity (ROE) and Return of Assets (ROA) of public enterprises in Europe based on ESG indicators and other economic metrics; 2. To identify whether ESG initiatives affect the financial performance of public European enterprises; and 3. To discuss how ESG factors, based on the findings of aims #1 and #2, can contribute to the advancements of the current debate on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies and practices in public enterprises in Europe. To fulfil the above aims, we use a combined approach of machine learning (ML) techniques and inferential (i.e., ordered logistic regression) model. The former predicts the accuracy of ROE and ROA on several ESG and other economic metrics and fulfils aim #1. The latter is used to test whether any causal relationships between ESG investment decisions and ROA and ROE exist and, whether these relationships exist, to assess their magnitude. The inferential analysis fulfils aim #2. Main findings suggest that ML accurately predicts ROA and ROE and indicate, through the ordered logistic regression model, the existence of a positive relationship between ESG practices and the financial indicators. In addition, the existing relationship appears more evident when companies invest in environmental innovation, employment productivity and diversity and equal opportunity policies. As a result, to fulfil aim #3 useful policy insights are advised on these issues to strengthen CSR strategies and sustainable development practices in European public enterprises

    Technology Enabled Social Responsibility Projects and an Empirical Test of CSR\u27s Impact on Firm Performance

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    Multinational firms publish annual corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports to signal to stakeholders they are ‘doing better by doing good.’ However, many firms have not effectively integrated technology with CSR to generate impactful long-term solutions. The era of mindful consumption is about creating hi-tech opportunities to satisfy consumers as well as limit resource use. In this research we examine how CSR is revolutionized by technology. We present research based on in-depth conversations with experts and illustrative case studies on how AI is disrupting the world of CSR. Specifically, we examine how the latest technologies in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are changing perspectives on CSR for countries, industries, firms, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). We present an extended stakeholder framework to display the way technology is fundamentally changing how international business is conducted. This research also quantitatively examines the financial impact that CSR has on tangible returns for multinational enterprises (MNEs). Through the lens of institutional theory, we examine which industries CSR and sustainability yield the most beneficial returns over time

    Toward an Understanding of Responsible Artificial Intelligence Practices

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    Artificial Intelligence (AI) is influencing all aspects of human and business activities nowadays. Although potential benefits emerged from AI technologies have been widely discussed in many current literature, there is an urgently need to understand how AI can be designed to operate responsibly and act in a manner meeting stakeholders’ expectations and applicable regulations. We seek to fill the gap by exploring the practices of responsible AI and identifying the potential benefits when implementing responsible AI practices. In this study, 10 responsible AI cases were selected from different industries to better understand the use of responsible AI in practices. Four responsible AI practices are identified, including governance, ethically design solutions, risk control and training and education and five strategies for firms who are considering to adopt responsible AI practices are recommended

    Sustainability management : insights from the viable system model

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    A review of current literature on sustainability standards reveals a significant gap between their adoption and the implementation of sustainability into every level of the organisation. In this paper, it is argued that in order to overcome this challenge, an appropriate model of an organisation is needed. The Viable System Model (VSM) is proposed as such a model and, in order to illustrate this argument, it is used to interpret the ISO 26000 standard on Social Responsibility (SR). First, the VSM theory is introduced and presented by modelling the hypothetical company Widget Co. Then, the clauses of ISO 26000 are mapped on the Widget Co. model, together with detailed descriptions and examples on the organisational and managerial implications of its adopting the standard's guidelines. The result is the identification of generic SR functions that need to be performed by the various organisational governance systems, as well as their dynamic interrelations, thus clarifying implementation issues. Moreover, by identifying different SR management layers, VSM is suggested as a way forward to develop an integration model for SR issues and respective sustainability tools. Finally, a discussion is given on the implications of using this approach to integrate sustainability standards and the way this research contributes to recent developments in sustainability research

    CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY – CORPORATE BRANDING RELATIONSHIP: AN EMPIRICAL COMPARATIVE STUDY

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    Current academic research on the relationship of firms’ CSR activities with corporate branding typically focuses on consumers’ and shareholders’ viewpoints. This research aims to shed light on how organisational members in firms perceive to be the impact of CSR activities upon their corporate brand strategy. Using a survey administered to companies in the U.K. and Bulgaria, the author investigate, firstly, organisational members’ perceptions of the impact of different CSR-related activities upon corporate branding and, secondly, their beliefs about what customers and shareholders think are the impacts of CSR-related activities upon brand image and brand identity. The findings indicated that while organisational members rated quality products, customer service and corporate governance highly as key components of CSR activity, they were much more ambivalent about their companies'commitment to broader actions which involve the 'community' and 'society'. This paper concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for future 'CSR education' among companies

    Feature Extraction of Format of Corporate Social Responsibility Reports

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    As an important bridge that transmits signals to the market, the corporate social responsibility report has been an important theme among stakeholders in evaluating organizational efficiency and performance. Its quality will affect the decision-making and judgment of investors, thereby affecting the response of the capital market. In recent years, social responsibility reports have shown a trend of rich pictures and diverse text designs. On the one hand, social responsibility reports composed of black and white text can hardly meet the information needs of different readers. On the other hand, reports with rich pictures and various text designs can give information users a better reading experience. However, due to the lack of uniform standards on the format of social responsibility reports, there is still a lot of space for the research on the format of social responsibility reports. This thesis explores how to effectively extract the features of social responsibility reports, so as to further explore the feature dimension, set feature indicators and analyse feature data. Firstly, existing studies have proved that the format of the social responsibility report has an impact on the stakeholder's impression management, and the way of impression management is mostly based on the design of picture arrangement, text arrangement and page structure. Secondly, the guidelines of the Shanghai Stock Exchange (the guidelines on social responsibility reports issued by the Shanghai Stock Exchange), the GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) standards take the format as an important criterion for evaluating the quality of social responsibility reports. Based on this, interviews were conducted with five researchers in the field of social responsibility. Then, a social responsibility report was taken as an example to conceptualize the feature annotation to get the two-dimensional data. Since CSR has different year data, different page data and different feature data, therefore, this thesis used Seaborn graph software to describe the three-dimension feature data. Finally, this thesis takes a report of Vanke as an example to compare the social responsibility reports of Vanke in different years, and the comparison of the layout format of the real estate industry by Vanke and the financial industry by PingAn Bank
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