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This paper aims to ascertain whether a company with a solid reputation for corporate sustainability leadership deems its workforce to be as important as its external stakeholders when developing and communicating its sustainability activities, and to evaluate its workforce’s recognition of such activities.

To achieve these aims, a case study of a leading Brazilian company was carried out. The authors conducted an interview with the corporate sustainability department and submitted a survey by questionnaire to its employees. The data were complemented by documentary analysis of the company’s annual reports, sustainability reports, corporate website, newsletters and press releases.

Results suggest that the company does attribute significant importance to its workforce and that its employees have sound knowledge of its sustainability practices and engage with them.

Given that the research adopts a case study approach, the scope for generalisation is limited.

The present study explores a neglected aspect of extant research – the relations between corporate sustainability and human resources.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between board demographic diversity and human rights reporting for a sample of large Western European companies.

Grounded on resource dependence theory, the authors hypothesize that greater gender, age and nationality diversities will translate into enhanced levels of human rights reporting. The authors use ordinal logistic regression analysis to analyze the association between these types of board diversity and such reporting.

The findings suggest that the companies in the sample attribute little importance to the reporting of information pertaining to the issue of human rights. They also suggest that only the diversity of nations represented in the board of directors is significant in explaining this type of reporting.

The sample includes only large companies from Western Europe and the analysis covers only one year.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first empirical analysis of factors influencing human rights reporting conducted on a multiple-country setting. It is also the first investigating the association between boards of directors’ demographic diversity and such reporting.

Based on a lens of analysis combining legitimacy and stakeholder theories, this paper aims to explore some factors which influence anti-corruption (AC) reporting in large multinationals from emerging countries.

An ordinal logistic regression is used to assess the relation between the AC reporting and multinationals’ industrial affiliation, number of countries of operations, membership of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and public ownership. The sample was drawn from the 2016 Transparency International Report “Transparency in Corporate Reporting – Assessing Emerging Market Multinationals”.

Evidence suggests that in emerging countries, listed multinationals, which operate in a large number of countries or are members of the UNGC, present significant levels of AC reporting. Unexpectedly, results also suggest that such reporting is not significantly affected by the corruption risk level of the industries to which the multinationals belong. Finally, results suggest that in emerging markets, the dependency for resources may also affect AC reporting.

This paper contributes to the extant literature, by exploring different determinants of AC reporting, namely, a thus far unexplored one: public vs private ownership. This paper also contributes to the literature by providing insights into the relationships in a specific context: that of emerging countries. Finally, the reliance on the international community for the provision of resources is shown as a factor that potentially affects AC reporting.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether firms from countries presenting higher levels of corruption are more likely to have higher levels of earnings management than their counterparts from countries with lower levels of corruption. It also explicitly examines how this relationship compares between emerging and developed economies.

Using multiple regression analysis, this study tests the hypothesis of positive association between the countries’ level of corruption and the level of earnings management using a sample of foreign firms with American Depositary Receipts in the US market.

Findings indicate that higher corruption perception is related to higher incentives for firms to manipulate earnings in the case of emerging countries. Such results are not identified in developed countries where the level of minority investors’ protection is higher. Findings also indicate that in developed countries earnings management is negatively related to investor protection, which is not the case for emerging countries.

As far as the authors are aware, this study is the first to examine the effects of corruption on earnings management on the basis of accounting firm-level data.

The purpose of this paper is to examine differences in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting on the websites of football clubs based in five European countries with different levels of football corporatisation.

The study examines CSR reporting on the internet by football clubs based in five European countries. Multiple regression analysis is used to analyse some factors which influence reporting and test a set of hypotheses.

The findings suggest that clubs from countries in which the level of corporatisation is higher disclose more CSR information. Also, clubs with higher public visibility disclose a higher variety of CSR information.

This study adds to the scarce research on CSR reporting in professional sports leagues by providing new empirical data and by extending prior research comparing such practices within different international frameworks of CSR.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the management of collective intellectual capital (CIC) occurs in a seaport through the actions of the network coordinator.

A case study was conducted in a seaport, focusing on the actions taken by a network coordinator – a port authority – to develop the seaport’s CIC. The seaport is conceptualised as a meta-organisation, composed by interdependent actors which may possess different interests and different levels of power.

Evidence suggests that the mobilisation of different dimensions of power, in both coercive and non-coercive ways, is needed to promote a higher level of collaboration. Indeed, by mobilising non-coercive dimensions of power, the network coordinator can foster a sense of community within the meta-organisation, grounded in a trust-based collective culture that can potentiate collaboration, and thus allow the attainment of a more “sustainable” type of CIC.

Despite the validity of the interpretations provided by the case study, generalisation of this study should only be conducted in a theoretically framed manner.

The findings can provide network coordinators with a better understanding of the consequences of using different dimensions of power to leverage its intangible assets and enhance the meta-organisation’s performance.

The paper focus on the IC management of a specific type of meso-level unit, which possess some particular characteristics of its own: a seaport. Also, the paper aims to fill a gap in literature regarding the management of different dimensions of power and its effects over IC creation.

This study aims to address the topic of ethics, responsibility and sustainability (ERS) orientation of students enrolled in schools of economics and management master’s degrees. It examines the effect of educational background and gender on Portuguese students’ orientation towards ERS, as well as the extent to which there is a relation between the scientific area of the master degree in which the student is enrolled and his/her ERS orientation.

The authors used a sample of 201 students from several master degrees offered by the School of Economics and Management of a large public Portuguese university and analysed their ERS orientation using a survey by questionnaire.

Findings suggest that there are differences in orientation across gender, with female students valuing ERS more than their male counterparts. Educational background has minimal effects on the responses. It was also found some sort of selection effect in terms of the scientific area of the master degree and ERS orientation.

This study contributes to the literature by analysing the issue of whether students with an educational background in economics and management present different ERS orientation than their counterparts, as well as by examining whether there is some sort of self-selection into the study of disciplines in which ERS orientation is likely to be a week. As far as the authors are aware, this is the first study analysing this type of issue regarding ERS.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the discussion surrounding the definition of accounting proposed by Carnegie et al. (2021a, 2021b) and further elaborated by Carnegie et al. (2023) from/under an institutionalist political-economy (IPE) based foundation and to specifically extend this approach to the arena of social and environmental accounting (SEA).

By adopting an IPE approach to SEA, this study offers a critique of the use of the notion of capital to refer to nature and people in SEA frameworks and standards.

A SEA framework based on the capabilities approach is proposed based on the concepts of human capabilities and global commons for the purpose of preserving the commons and enabling the flourishing of present and future generations.

The proposed framework allows the engagement of accounting community, in particular SEA researchers, with and contribution to such well-established initiatives as the Planetary Boundaries framework and the human development reports initiative of the United Nations Development Programme.

Based on the capability approach, this study applies Carnegie et al.’s (2023) framework to SEA. This new approach more attuned to the pursuit of sustainable human development and the sustainable development goals, may contribute to turning accounting into a major positive force through its impacts on the world, expressly upon organisations, people and nature.

This paper aims to examine the relation between firms’ political connections and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in Portugal. The authors argue that in settings where the existence of political connections are viewed as damaging collective interests of stakeholders, political connected firms can deal with legitimacy issues from such connections by resorting to CSR practices and the reporting thereof.

Using archival data from a panel sample of 36 firms from Portugal between 2009 and 2012, the authors examine the relationship between political connections and CSR reporting by way of regression analysis.

The authors find a positive relationship between political connections and CSR reporting.

This study draws on legitimacy theory to highlight that CSR can be used to deal with stakeholder activism and vigilance pertaining to suspicion related to the existence of political connections.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether differences in media exposure regarding corporate corruption appear to influence companies’ anti-corruption disclosures. The authors also examine whether the level of press freedom in firms’ home countries affects disclosure and the impact of media exposure in different ways.

The authors use Transparency International’s 2012 ratings of anti-corruption disclosure by the 105 largest multinational firms in the world, press freedom assessments from the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders, and media exposure measures based on a search using the Dow Jones Factiva database. The authors assess relations using regression analysis controlling for other firm-specific factors potentially impacting disclosure choices. Finally, the authors consider the potential effect of other country-level factors.

The results indicate that media exposure, using either an existence or an extensiveness measure, is positively related to differences in sample companies’ anti-corruption disclosures. The authors also find that disclosure is more (less) extensive where home country press freedom is less (more) restricted and that reduced press freedom appears to reduce the impact of media exposure on the disclosure. The authors further document that press freedom levels explain more difference in anti-corruption disclosures than other country-level factors potentially influencing the practice.

Because the investigation is limited to very large international firms for a single year, the degree to which the findings apply to other companies and time periods cannot be assessed. Further, the authors cannot determine how the findings would hold using an alternative disclosure rating scheme. Finally, the authors do not assess whether differences in the source of media exposure impact the findings.

The findings suggest that, to the extent that improved anti-corruption disclosure reflects greater corporate attention to corruption issues, the media may be a powerful player in addressing this social ill. Unfortunately, the results also indicate that media efforts may not be sufficient to bring about change in locations where the freedom of the press is limited. Further, the results suggest that disclosure appears to be a function of exposure to social and political exposures, and the authors therefore question whether it will actually lead to improved corruption performance.

The study is the first to consider the impacts of media exposure and press freedom on corporate social disclosures.