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Prior research finds that firms disclosing a focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR) experience less negative reactions following a corporate misstep. We predict that this “insurance effect” is limited to cases of ordinary failures (i.e., failures not directly related to the social or environmental impacts of the firm) and may provide no protection when a failure is directly related to CSR. Further, we hypothesize a potential “backfire effect,” where investors react more negatively to a CSR-focused firm in the case of a CSR-related failure than to a traditional firm experiencing the same failure. In-keeping with attribution theory and expectancy violations theory, our results support the predicted limitation of the insurance effect. In addition, we find that the limited insurance effect is mediated by reputational assessments. Although directionally consistent, the proposed backfire effect is not statistically significant. Overall, our results suggest that CSR is not a panacea for dampening the penalties associated with business missteps, and managers seeking to benefit from CSR engagement should be diligent in monitoring their firms' future CSR performance.

This study aims to explore the development and significance of sustainable finance instruments, mainly sustainable bonds. The purpose is to provide policymakers, regulators and researchers with insights into the current state of sustainable finance research and also provide future research directions.

This study used Scientific Procedures and Rationales for Systematic Literature Reviews as a review protocol and addressed four research questions concerning publication and citation trends, major themes and future research directions in sustainable bonds.

This study indicated growing attention in sustainable bond research, with increasing publication and citation trends. Along with identifying research themes, the findings include future direction on pricing and risk assessment, market dynamics and growth potential, policy and regulatory environments and global perspectives with local context.

Although this study provides a robust analysis of the current literature, it relies on existing publications and may not capture the latest developments in sustainable bond research. However, policymakers can benefit from insights into the growth and dynamics of sustainable bonds, enabling them to implement effective policies and regulations. Investors and businesses can use this research to inform their environmental, social and governance investment strategies and decision-making processes.

This paper suggests a comprehensive overview of the state of research in sustainable bonds, highlighting the emerging trends and research priorities. It also underlines the significance of sustainable finance in achieving sustainability goals and provides a roadmap for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the conversion of the former coal mining site in Kamp-Lintfort into a public park and learning space for biodiversity. In 2020, an urban green space was established, featuring various aquatic and terrestrial habitats and a high level of biological diversity in the city centre with broad community support.

This study presents secondary data of a literature review on participatory management of biodiversity in urban green spaces, with a focus on the sustainability context, participation approaches, theoretical frameworks and the role of education. The example of Zechenpark Kamp-Lintfort (Germany) shows how urban green space development can meet the challenging demands of inner city development while fostering knowledge generation via citizen science and participatory biodiversity management. The study collected primary data on plant biodiversity using a citizen science approach to raise awareness and create opportunities for human–nature interaction.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 is the most important development goal in the context of participatory biodiversity management of urban green spaces. Most of the studies have a place-based focus and integration of local knowledge is the main reason for a participatory approach. The findings show how a green learning space can offer opportunities for digital learning as well as participatory biodiversity management in urban areas. The project lead to an increase in local citizens’ awareness of biodiversity. Based on a literature review, this report identifies challenges and opportunities for establishing a green learning space for biodiversity education. The example illustrates that an urban green space can provide numerous possibilities for citizens and students to get involved and that it can foster the sustainable development of a new urban neighbourhood.

A place-based approach limits generalisability. To overcome this limitation, a literature review was conducted, and the location was compared to two parks with similar site conversion history.

The example of developing an urban green space can inspire universities to take an active role in biodiversity management in urban green spaces, integrating biodiversity into university activities and creating a positive impact in the urban environment.

Analysis of studies in the field shows that education deserves a more prominent role in theoretical frameworks.

The study represents an example of transition and citizen-led participatory management of biodiversity from a medium-sized city, transformation processes covering these aspects are underrepresented in literature.

The governance of our towns and cities requires an approach that connects people with nature and places. Digital technology can be the glue that does this, if it serves the needs of the various stakeholders, including urban communities. It means identifying the potential connections across people, digital, and place themes, examining successful approaches, and exploring some of the current practice (or lack of it) in spatial planning and smart cities. This can be considered using a range of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies with other methodologies which combine the use of socioeconomic and environmental data about the urban environment. This ambient domain sensing can provide the ecological and other data to show how digital connectivity is addressing the placemaking challenges alongside providing implications for urban governance and communities.

In this paper, the author advocates recognizing, developing, and promoting “critical interactionism” as a legitimate and pragmatically useful scholarly project. The author argues that critical interactionism includes different interactionist traditions, critical approaches, methodological styles, and sensitizing concepts – as long as they tell us something about how power and inequality operate. I review two fundamental elements of this project that constitute its past and likely future: (1) theoretical interventions that excavate critical insights, diversify founders, integrate critical theories, and promote interactionism's usefulness for critical inquiry and (2) empirically grounded conceptual interventions that shed light on generic processes of inequality reproduction. Although the larger discipline of sociology continues to marginalize interactionism yet selectively adopt its principles, critical interactionism has the potential to break through what David Maines called the fault line of consciousness. The promise of critical interactionism is that it can simultaneously make interactionism more relevant to our discipline and make our discipline more relevant to the social world.

The chapters emphasise the importance of data management from the perspective of the business management process, where big data is the most crucial and pressing technical and business issue in the modern realm of technology. The same data has a significant influence on the current financial environment. Organisations are facing challenges in explicating complicated financial data manually and using it to drive their decision-making processes. Data-driven decision-making is a dominant tool for any professional. It enhances precision, alleviates risk, improves efficacy, aids financial management, offers customer insights, provides a competitive edge, supports strategic planning, enables performance tracking, fosters innovation and has predictive capabilities. The power of data makes the organisation more prosperous and resilient in the face of change. By making informed decisions based on data and analytics, organisations can unlock their full potential and achieve sustainable growth. The chapter suggests a data-driven culture in the organisation with the help of strategising in terms of data collection, analytics and data management by establishing governance and regulatory practices to ensure data security and integrity. The latter part covers the forecasting and transformative ability of data by integrating machine learning and deep learning models. The chapter also covers the visualisation perspective of the data by transforming the information into a visual setting, illuminating the hidden insights and making them tangible and relatable. The chapter closes with a suggestion for managers to stay competitive, make more reasoned and sound decisions and adapt to the evolving business environment.

This study aims to explore customers’ second-hand clothing purchases and their engagement on the Facebook marketplace.

A conceptual model is developed, building upon the online second-hand shopping motivation (OSSM) scale. Data gathered from 409 respondents was analysed using covariance-based structural equation modelling.

The results highlight that economic, convenience, ideological motivations and environmental concerns impact customers’ purchase intention. Conversely, status consumption was found to impede customers’ purchase intentions. Notably, the elements of social media engagement, including consumption, contribution and creation, demonstrated significance as a consequence of customers’ second-hand clothing purchase intention.

This study’s findings contribute to the knowledge encompassing sustainable fashion consumption, information systems and second-hand social media shopping. It uniquely explores customer behaviours related to second-hand clothes shopping on the Facebook marketplace by building upon the OSSM scale. These findings offer valuable insights, showcasing the determinants that can increase customer-centric social media engagement. These results inform online retailers on Facebook marketplace about sustainable practices, aligning with UN Sustainable Development Goals 12, 13 and 8, to promote a green global economy.

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI), democracy and carbon intensity. This study examines the influence of types of democracy on the relationship between inward FDI and carbon intensity. For this purpose, it uses five varieties of democracy, including a composite democracy indicator as moderating variables.

This study applies the fixed-effects panel quantile regression approach that considers unobserved heterogeneity and distributional heterogeneity using panel data from 160 countries during 1990–2020. By taking into account sudden changes in the volume of inward FDI, an event study is conducted across various sub-samples of democracy to check the robustness of the results.

The results show that FDI has a significantly negative impact on carbon intensity of the host country in the upper quantiles. In general, different types of democracy have a significant positive impact on carbon intensity across different quantiles. After considering the other factors, including industry intensity, trade openness, green technology, fossil fuel dependency and International Environmental Agreements, there is evidence that all types of democracy moderate the relationship between FDI and carbon intensity, thereby supporting the halo effect hypothesis. In addition, the interaction effects have a significant negative impact on carbon intensity of low- and high-carbon-intensive countries.

This paper offers several contributions to the literature on the effect of FDI and democracy on carbon intensity. This study overcomes the limitations related to the conceptualization and measurement of democracy found in the literature. While prior research has predominately concentrated on how democracy promotes the selection of FDI host-country locations, this study seeks to answer the question of whether democracy type has any effect on inward FDI, thus contributing to improving carbon intensity. Furthermore, this paper analyses the interaction effect on carbon intensity in different countries with different carbon intensity levels separately.

This research was initiated by motivation from a real business problem that delves into lean management practices in dairy farm operations. It investigates how lean management practices can be applied as an improvement strategy in the dairy business to evaluate its impact on performance, where profitability is a decisive factor.

Based on the qualitative design, a 5-phase action research methodology was used in this study, where multiple data collection sources were used, including focus group discussions, on-site observation or Gemba walks and process mapping. The impact is evaluated by comparing the key performance measures with the same period before and after research.

The research revealed that lean management practices can significantly improve dairy business performance. It explained vital aspects of lean management practices and their sequence with examples of first-hand applications. It explained, how lean management practices were applied in dairy farm operations. Furthermore, the research resulted in significant benefits, in terms of quality, cost and profitability.

This research was conducted in a real business setting in the field environment, to improve dairy business performance. It was a distinctive application of lean management practices to solve a national problem. This could be used as a road map to bring continuous improvement at the national level to improve the performance of food value chains.

This research is unique because it addresses the methodological, population and empirical gaps in dairy farm operations. It adds value to the existing knowledge base by sharing best practices, developed and implemented for the first time to the best of our knowledge, like high-level process mapping and performance measures at different levels. Furthermore, the solutions can be simulated in related farm operations to bring breakthrough improvements in dairy business performance.

This study aims to analyze the mediating role that green practices (GPs) and green technologies (GTs) play in the relationship between lean manufacturing (LM) and industrial performance (IP). It is suggested that GPs and GTs are crucial for transforming lean routines into enhanced performance that simultaneously meet current environmental requirements.

The hypotheses are tested using a mixed methodology, which includes a partial least squares structural equation modeling approach and a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) applied to a multisectoral sample from three European countries (Spain, Sweden and Croatia).

The results confirm that GPs mediate the relationship between LM and IP; however, in the case of GTs, this mediation does not appear to occur, although GTs emerge as a peripheral condition in the subsequent fsQCA. These findings highlight the need to avoid an exclusively technocentric approach and underscore the importance of implementing green organizational practices alongside technology investments to achieve successful lean initiatives.

It seems clear that managers should apply GPs, combined with LM, to improve sustainability and efficiency and should apply GTs once a more mature lean-green culture has been established.

In recent years, the scientific community has increasingly focused on the impact of implementing GPs and GTs on IP within LM plants. However, to the authors’ knowledge, no study has yet analyzed the combined effect of both initiatives. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining, in aggregate, the moderating effect of GPs and GTs on IP in LM plants.