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The present work investigated the effect of corporate social responsibility and top management support on employee ecological behaviour (EEB) with the mediating role of green culture and green commitment. Social identity theory (SIT) was used to describe the association between green culture, green commitment and EEB. Further, a conceptual model that summarises the interaction between perceived corporate social responsibility, top management support, green commitment, green culture and the adoption of ecological behaviour was developed.

The paper opted for a quantitative design using convenience sampling by collecting the data through a structured questionnaire gathered from 308 academics working in five Malaysian higher education institutions.

Corporate social responsibility and top management support positively influence green culture and commitment. Moreover, green commitment positively influenced EEB and fully mediated the relationship between corporate social responsibility and EEB and between top management support and EEB.

The academic staff of universities was the target population of this research. Nevertheless, universities have a diverse population with complex activities that can affect the implementation of a sustainable workplace within the campus. Future research should also examine non-academic staff, including administrative, technical and operational staff, due to different employees' perceptions.

As far as the authors know, this is the first study to assign the mediator role to green culture in a relationship between top management support and EEB amongst academic staff in the Malaysian context. Future research should consider other intervening variables that influence adopting ecological behaviour.

Environmental issues have triggered the need for sustainable behavior around the globe. The tourism industry’s rapid growth also contributes to environmental degradation through natural resource depletion and excess water and energy utilization. Based on social identity theory, this study aims to assess the impact of environmental corporate social responsibility initiatives on green customers’ citizenship behavior. Furthermore, the study assesses the mediating effects of green trust, customer–company identification and green image.

This study is a quantitative approach, and purposive sampling technique was used to collect the data from the hotels’ customers from northern areas of Pakistan. This study used partial least square-structural equation modeling to analyze the data of 426 customers.

The study’s findings show that environmental corporate social responsibility initiatives significantly impact green customers’ citizenship behavior, green trust, customer–company identification and green corporate image. However, the relationship between green corporate image and green customers’ citizenship behavior was insignificant. Furthermore, the study’s results revealed that green trust and customer–company identification partially mediate between environmental corporate social responsibility initiatives and green customers’ citizenship behavior.

The findings suggest that hotels’ environmental corporate social responsibility initiatives improve green customer citizenship behavior, green trust and enhance customer–company identification. Therefore, hotel industry managers should consider reinforcing existing environmental corporate social responsibility initiatives and make further efforts to highlight the importance of such initiatives for environmental sustainability, which ultimately affects customers’ green customer citizenship behavior.

This research developed a novel framework to understand green customers’ citizenship behavior in the tourism industry. It extended the literature on environmental corporate social responsibility initiatives and green customers’ citizenship behavior. In addition, the research adds value by confirming the significant direct and mediating role of customer–company identification in tourism industry context.

This study aims to explore the strategies corporations use in engaging stakeholders to sustain healthy corporate partnerships and create value for the corporate entity and the society in which they operate and their influence on the corporate manager’s cognitive abilities and decision-making.

The authors used an interpretive research approach leveraging the strengths of qualitative method of content analysis and comparative and critical analyses to report the results. Interpretive methods incorporate social theories and standpoints that view reality as the social construction of understandable events in the context of organizational communication.

The findings of this study suggest that corporations are assumed to follow and execute the principles of engaging stakeholders to achieve corporate social responsibility (CSR) claiming to manage a sustainable and responsible business practices that recognize local cultures, human rights and protect the environment. However, little attention has been paid to the cognitive reasoning of the individuals responsible for CSR and corporate sustainability (CS) as opposed to the growing concerns about strategies corporations use in engaging stakeholders to sustain healthy corporate partnerships and create value – especially the processes that take place during engagement and decision-making including cognitive offloading.

Stakeholder engagement requires practical approaches that enable corporations and individuals charged with decision-making responsibilities to understand, respond and fulfill their CSRs. To achieve CSRs, corporations and managers responsible for relevant decision-making would need to involve stakeholders in social performance planning, as social reporting/auditing has long been advocating for preventing managerial biasness, groupthink and increased information dissemination via detailed reporting practices toward more collaborative stakeholder relationships. Thus, it is crucial for corporations to implement enhanced stakeholder and managerial decision-making strategies such as integrative approaches to achieve balance in the trio elements of sustainability as well as the growing use of paradox perspective to understand the nature of the tensions being sought to balance and, in the process, provide opportunity for a better evaluation of complex sustainability issues for innovative approach to resolving them. While cognitive decision-making is at play, in practice, managers tasked with making decisions must ensure the most effective stakeholder engagement strategies that are transparent and inclusive are used.

The main contribution of this study is its argument regarding the tools corporations use in engaging key stakeholders and the cognitive reasoning of the individuals responsible for CSR and CS. The study further contributes to interpreting the integrative approach to achieving balance in the trio elements of sustainability as well as the growing use of paradox perspective to understand the nature of the tensions being sought to balance and, in the process, provide an opportunity for a better evaluation of complex sustainability issues for an innovative approach to resolving them.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is going through a critical period that challenges its capacity to respond to social and environmental crises, which could be associated with the growing Corporate Hypocrisy (CH) phenomenon. This study aims to identify the theoretical perspectives of the scientific literature on CH as a contemporary phenomenon concerning CSR.

We adopted a sequential mixed-method approach in this study. First, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of the publications on the Web of Science database. Subsequently, we performed a content analysis of CH with CSR.

The literature review revealed two main research paths: the first deals with the perceptions of hypocrisy; the second relates to the company’s responsibility for disclosure. In addition, we found that researchers use different expressions to refer to the gap between discourse and action in organisations. Some authors suggest subtle differences between these terms, while others use them interchangeably. The causes of this phenomenon vary according to the facets of hypocrisy and the negative implications for the reputation and credibility of companies.

This study contributes to understanding the dissociation between CSR statements and practices. To this end, it combines and collates the literature on a phenomenon studied from different sides using numerous designations.

This study aims to provide further insights into the connection between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and companies’ credit ratings, while also exploring the role of corporate governance as a moderating factor. The hypotheses for this relationship are rooted in both legitimacy and stakeholder theories.

Using a sample of French non-financial listed firms from 2007 to 2020, this paper uses the ordered probit model introduced by Greene (2000). The issue of endogeneity has also been addressed.

The study reveals that CSR practices positively impact companies’ credit ratings by enhancing solvency and financial performance. Specifically, firms that prioritize CSR, particularly in the social and environmental dimensions (such as community relations, diversity, employee relations, environmental performance and product characteristics), tend to have higher credit ratings and a reduced risk of default. This suggests that credit rating agencies likely incorporate CSR performance when assigning credit ratings. Furthermore, the quality of corporate governance acts as a moderator, strengthening the relationship between CSR and credit ratings. The findings remain robust even after accounting for key firm attributes and addressing potential endogeneity between CSR and credit ratings.

This research provides valuable guidance for policymakers, corporate managers, investors and other stakeholders, as it offers insights into the influence of CSR activities on risk premiums and financing costs. For financial institutions, expanding credit decisions to encompass non-financial factors such as CSR can result in more accurate predictions of firm credit quality compared to relying solely on financial indicators.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study stands out as the first to systematically examine the relationship between CSR and credit ratings within the French context. Moreover, it distinguishes itself by investigating the moderating influence of corporate governance on this relationship, setting it apart from prior research.

The reform and opening-up of capital market is valued for promoting sustainable development, while its impact presented as the form of deregulation of short-selling on the green innovation of enterprises in developing countries remains unclear. The purpose of this study is to outline the significance of gradual reform of financial markets in developing countries for low-carbon transformation and provide implications for achieving carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.

Based on the green subdivided patent data and financial data of China’s A-share listed companies, this paper takes the implementation of securities margin trading program as a quasi-natural experiment and applies the difference-in-differences (DID) model to examine the impact of deregulation of short-selling constraints on the enterprises’ green transformation.

The findings reveal that the initiating securities margin trading program significantly enhances the green innovation performance of enterprises. These findings are valid after performing a series of robustness tests such as the parallel trend test, the placebo test and the methods to exclude other policy interference. Mechanism analyses demonstrate a two-faceted effect of the securities margin trading program on the green innovation of enterprises, in which short-selling policy increases the pressure on capital market deregulation and meanwhile induces the environmental protection investment. The heterogeneity results demonstrate that the impulsive effect imposed by securities margin trading program is more significant in experimental group samples with characteristics of lower financing constraints, belonging to heavy polluting industries and possessing better environmental supervision capability.

First, previous studies have focused on the impact of financial policies implemented by banking institutions on the green innovation of enterprises, but few literatures have explored the validity of relaxing short-selling restrictions or opening the capital market in the field of enterprise’s green transformation in developing country. From the view of securities market reform, this paper broadens the incentive and supervision effects of the relaxation of short-selling control on enterprise’s green innovation performance after the implementation of securities financing and securities lending policy in China’s capital market. Second, previous studies have explored the impact of command-and-control environmental regulations, as well as market-incentivized environmental regulations such as green finance, low-carbon pilots and environmental tax reform, on the green transition of enterprises. Recently the role of the securities market in the green development of enterprises has received more attention in academia. The pilot of margin financing and securities lending is essentially a market-incentivized regulatory tool, but there is few in-depth research on how it affects the green innovation of enterprises. This paper enriches the research on whether the market incentive financial regulation policy can contribute to the green transformation of enterprises under the Porter hypothesis. Third, some previous studies used the ordinary panel regression model to explore the impact of financial policy on enterprise’s innovation performance. However, due to the potential endogenous problems of the estimated model, it might get biased conclusions. Therefore, based on the method of quasi-natural experiment, this paper selects the margin trading pilot policy as an exogenous shock to solve the endogenous or reverse causality problem in traditional measurement model and applies the DID model to study the relationship between core indicator variables.

Drawing on legitimacy and upper-echelon theory, this paper aims to investigate the moderating role of corporate governance in the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and board gender diversity (BGD).

Using Morgan Stanley Capital International measures of social and governance performance, the authors use 2,950 firm-year observations from US companies for the years 2016–2020 to show that good performance on social issues drives BGD.

The panel data model indicates that the relationship between CSP and BGD is strengthened when firms display robust corporate governance.

This study contributes to the extant literature through empirical consideration of CSP as a predictor of BGD, a relationship that has rarely been examined. It further highlights the significant role of corporate governance in ensuring that women have access to corporate boards. Discussion and findings highlight that social performance and governance may significantly contribute to the diversity of socially cognizant boards.

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in assisting firms in their response to public emergency crises under the integrated view of government emergency response.

Using event study and survival analysis method, the authors examine whether CSR can act as a stock price stabilizer for companies from China by splitting the stock price fluctuations into two phases – CSR price insurance, which decrease the shock on stock prices during the emergency crisis, and CSR price recovery, which helps stock prices rebound faster during the postcrisis phase.

The authors’ empirical results confirm the stabilizer role of CSR during crisis and that effective government response can strengthen such effect. Furthermore, the authors examine the different aspects of the government’s response and the impact of multiple waves of public emergency.

This study provides empirical evidence on the topic of CSR and the government’s response to public emergency under the emerging context.

This study explores the influence of female executives on the misalignment between corporate ESG commitments and practices, a phenomenon known as ESG decoupling. It also enhances the understanding of female power on affecting ESG decoupling under different ownership settings.

This study uses a quantitative research design to explore the impact mechanism of female executives’ proportion on corporate ESG decoupling under different ownership contexts based on a sample of 2,585 firm-year observations from publicly traded Chinese companies between 2011 and 2021.

Based on agency theory, upper echelons theory and gender socialization theory, our findings indicate that (1) female executives are significantly effective in reducing ESG decoupling, and (2) this effect is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) compared to state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

This study contributes original insights into the ESG decoupling literature by demonstrating the external influences of corporate governance structure, particularly in the context of China’s unique corporate ownership environment. It also provides strong social implications by highlighting the role of gender dynamics in corporate governance, corporate social responsibility (CSR) behaviors and ESG alignment.