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The purpose of this paper is to present empirical evidence about relationships between the corporate governance (CG) mechanisms of the Spanish savings banks, their financial and social performance and their profitability prior to their collapse.

The authors use a structural equation model (SEM), taking the return on assets as the dependent variable, and CG, corporate social responsibility and efficiency as explanatory constructs. SEM methodology provides interesting features that allows a better definition of some organisational characteristics.

Results indicate that CG characteristics, including the politicisation of governance bodies, did not affect the financial performance. The size of the board of directors had a significant influence on social responsibility. In addition, results suggest that the whole board focused on social issues, whereas non-executive members were less concerned about economic issues. Greater money allocation to social welfare programmes resulted in higher profitability, which can be explained by competitive advantages, reputation and customer satisfaction.

Nowadays, some political parties demand either for the creation of a public banking sector or banks with social goals. This paper provides interesting insights into the debate.

The influence of personal attributes of board members on performance needs to be analysed in greater depth in the non-profit sector. The SEM methodology allows us to include some board attributes and performance dimensions in a better way than with other methodologies.

The objective of this paper is twofold: first to determine to what extent Spanish public hospitals are using their web sites to provide useful information to users and to improve hospital‐patient relationships, and second to determine which factors have an influence on web site adoption and level of development over time.

The web sites of public hospitals were searched for and analysed in 2005 and 2008. Their contents and features were scored using an 86‐item checklist. Several hypotheses were proposed regarding the influence of internal and external factors on web site adoption and level of development. Logit and linear regressions were conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

Half of the Spanish public hospitals do not have a web site. The hospital web sites were acceptable in the information dimension but should improve their interactive features, as well as their navigation and usability. No significant improvements were observed during the period analysed. The size of the hospitals was a determining factor for web site adoption and level of development in both years. However, from 2005 to 2008, external factors – in particular internet penetration – became a significant factor to explain the adoption and level of development of web sites.

Citizens are increasingly relying on the internet to search for health‐related information. Hospital managers should exploit the advantages of implementing and properly developing a web site in order to improve the patient‐care provider relationships and offer citizens reliable information about healthcare.

To date, no empirical study has analysed the factors that influence the implementation of hospital web sites or the evolution of their contents and quality over time.

The glass ceiling is a metaphor used to characterize the gender inequality of women at the top in most large western organizations. This situation has prompted many business organizations, NGOs and governments to encourage large organizations to promote more women into the executive suite and onto boards of directors. While there is little controversy about this initiative, this paper argues that there should be because it directly challenges the principle that merit should outweigh diversity. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper reviews research that purports to show that women are unfairly under-represented in the most senior positions in large western organizations. It also reviews the arguments that more senior women would improve the performance of these organizations. This research is then used to develop a model of why there are markedly fewer women than men at the top of large organizations.

This study finds that most of the research studies purporting to show that there is a bias against promoting women to the top of large western organizations are unsound because they are poorly designed and/or fail to accommodate alternative explanations for this effect. Thus, the current number of women who run these organizations may be a good reflection of their contribution to the management of these organizations. These findings suggest that many of the policies that are promoted to help women break through the glass ceiling are misguided.

Large organizations should think carefully about following the advice of special interest groups who vigorously promote this social cause.

Social policy advocates need better research from which to advance their cause that there are currently too few women in senior management positions of large organizations.

This is one of only a handful of papers that challenges the current orthodoxy that artificial glass ceilings are restricting the potential contribution of women to the better management of large organizations.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it identifies whether sustainability reporting has become an institutionalized cultural norm in the daily routines and organizational practices of Spanish public hospitals. Second, it finds out why sustainability reporting has become (or not) an institutionalized norm in the Spanish public hospital field.

To accomplish the research aims, the authors have adopted a qualitative method approach by combining two main data sources: (1) a documentary analysis of reports published by 60 Spanish public hospitals that consistently maintained their commitment to this activity over the past 10 years; and (2) a semi-structured interview with seven hospital managers and with seven participants from professional organizations.

The authors have found that sustainability reporting has not become an institutionalized practice in the Spanish public hospital setting. Based on the notion of normativity, the findings indicate that the institutional conditions that support the emergence of a norm are not met (Bebbington et al., 2012). In particular, the lack of a coherent normative framework, the absence of congruence with previous similar practices and the lack of clarity in the norm explain why a reporting norm has not emerged. Currently, the societal context has not developed an appropriate discourse around the development of sustainability reporting in the Spanish public sector.

The contribution of this research is double: (1) From a practical level, this paper contributes to the accounting literature by analyzing the development of sustainability reporting practices in the public sector; (2) According to the notion of normativity, the novelty of this paper is to explore whether a sustainability reporting norm emerges in Spanish public hospitals.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how different variables can affect the amount of information reported by Spanish enterprises owned by the central state as well as by local and regional governments, all categorized as state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

Using, as a reference, the obligations of information disclosure contained in the Spanish Law 19/2013 on Transparency and Good Governance, the authors performed a web-content analysis of web pages of all Spanish SOEs and the authors examined a sample of Spanish enterprises owned by regional and local governments.

The results show that the amount of information reported by Spanish SOEs is quite reduced and limited. Among the variables examined, the most influential ones for explaining the amount of information reported are the nature of public ownership and the institutional size.

This study contributes to the literature by exploring the potential determinants of the online disclosure of mandatory information reported by enterprises whose ownership is shared by private and public organizations. Thus, this research could help public managers make decisions and improve public confidence.