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This study aims to analyse the relationship between countries’ regulatory context and voluntary carbon disclosures. To date, little attention has been paid to how specific climate change-related regulation influences companies’ climate change disclosures, especially voluntary carbon reporting.

The New Institutional Sociology perspective has been adopted to examine the pressure of a country’s climate change regulation on voluntary carbon reporting. This research uses Tobit regression to analyse data from 2,183 companies in 12 countries that were invited to respond to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) questionnaire in 2015.

The results show that countries’ specific climate change-related regulation does influence both the participation of its companies in the CDP and their quality, as measured by the CDP disclosure score.

The sample is restricted to 12 countries’ regulatory environment. Thus, caution should be exercised when generalising the results to other institutional contexts.

The results are of use to regulators and policymakers to better understand how specific climate change-related regulation influences voluntary carbon disclosure. Investors may also benefit from this research, as it shows which institutional contexts present greater regulatory stringency and how companies in more stringent environments take advantage of synergy to disclose high-quality carbon information.

By linking regulatory and voluntary reporting, this study sheds light on how companies use voluntary carbon reporting to adapt to social expectations generated in their institutional context.

This is the first research that considers specific climate change-related regulation in the study of voluntary carbon disclosures.

This paper aims to analyze the influence of organizational and contextual factors on companies’ decisions to set absolute emissions targets and science-based targets (SBTs).

This study uses a sample of 23,166 observations across 69 countries from 2016 to 2020 to analyze the likelihood of firms to establish absolute emissions targets and SBTs.

The results show that firm size, governance, climate-related regulation and moral acceptance in the country in question positively influence companies’ decisions on these matters. Furthermore, while profitability has a positive influence on the participation of companies in the SBT initiative (SBTi), both the financial risk involved and sector emissions intensity can discourage companies from participating in the SBTi or from establishing absolute emissions targets.

This study may allow regulators and policymakers to encourage carbon information disclosure with a greater focus on aspects that specifically contribute to evaluating ways of promoting effective behavior on the part of companies in the fight against climate change.

The results of this study serve to support the demands of civil society, as well as to guide regulators in the design of measures in the fight against climate change and steer the decision-making of investors in moving toward a low carbon economy.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine whether organizational and contextual factors affect companies’ propensity to set absolute emissions targets and SBTs.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the psychological strategies as well as the rhetorical and discursive arguments developed in organizations and by individuals when they have to cope with the paradoxes and changes related to CSR.

This study uses the perspective of the paradox as an analytical framework to parse strategies developed in organizations as they cope with tensions and changes related to CSR. The authors conducted 50 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders and the authors performed a qualitative analysis with the information compiled.

The main strategies for dealing with CSR paradoxes and changes consist of developing perceptual and motivational biases as well as explicative heuristic ones through which, from a discursive perspective, a coherent and conciliatory framework is presented with rhetoric that play a fundamental role in justifying CSR as a present hope over a future illusion regardless of the past reality.

The lesson to be drawn from the exploration is the following: managers and CSR officers need to leave behind fear, anxiety and defensive attitudes and accept the paradox by re-contextualizing the tension as a stimulus for conscious and reflexive confrontation with emotional equilibrium, this being defiantly motivating as a sensemaker. In this way, the approach to the present inconsistencies in CSR should not involve a dismissal of conflictive situations but rather the development of the capacity to transcend the tension emanating from them and to learn to manage organizations from this paradoxical reality.

In this paper, the authors present an empirical framework that incorporates different factors of the impact of COVID-19 on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in La Rioja, Spain, in relation to the value chain, gender and family business and allows the evaluation of these impacts on the SMEs' outcomes.

The authors conduct exploratory research based on phone interviews with 329 business managers from SMEs in La Rioja (Spain), from June 1 to June 30 2021, using ordinary least squares linear regression and matching procedures to test the study hypotheses.

The results show that the impact of COVID-19 related to primary activities in adding value, such as inbound logistics, operations and marketing, have a positive influence on innovation outcomes in SMEs, as do female managers. Family SMEs present poorer innovation outcomes.

At the organizational level, this paper may be of interest to management, and at the national and regional levels to policymakers, since it could help to develop policies that support SMEs' sourcing, operations and marketing in order to prepare for potential value chain disruptions. Additionally, this research may help decision-makers to foster and promote innovation in SMEs as a way of ensuring their resilience.

In this paper, the authors provide novel evidence about the effect of COVID-19 in SMEs. Moreover, it has been shown that the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered the redefinition of supply chains at the organizational level.

There is a traditional discrepancy in the specialized literature on how the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) should be understood. Additionally, there is a further situation, which in our opinion is also contradictory; many organisations are developing CSR projects; on the other hand, there is a proliferation of news on these organizations that lead us to question what the true extent of their commitment to CSR is. To that purpose, we have developed a case study that has allowed us to verify that one of the most active organisations in Spain in terms of the CSR adopted is using it basically as a marketing instrument, since it is using its at least formal compliance with institutional rules in order to increase its legitimacy in front of its main stakeholders.

The purpose of this article is to identify the impact of differing teaching contexts on the approaches to learning of accounting undergraduates in different European countries by the use of a study process questionnaire.

The questionnaire used was Biggs’ R‐SPQ‐2F (Biggs et al.). This is a 20‐item questionnaire that identifies the learning styles of individual students in terms of deep and surface approaches.

Significant differences were found in the approaches to learning of the students in the countries concerned. The differences were rooted in two subcomponents: motive and strategy. Gender differences were also identified.

A major factor in the development process of future accountants is the education process that they undertake. This study identifies a methodology that is capable of comparing accounting students in different countries and potentially identifying the underlying reasons why the quality of the learning outcomes achieved may differ under differing educational systems.

The purpose of this paper is to identify, prioritise, and contrast the needs in terms of the development of vocational skills in final year undergraduate accounting students from two distinct countries. The study aims to survey and analyse the views of Malaysian and UK students.

A questionnaire was used to gather the data. Quantitative analysis was then used as the basis of a comparative study. The data for this study were collected via questionnaires completed by Malaysian exchange students on their arrival at UK university and the students of that UK university.

The results indicate that both sets of students accept the need to develop vocational skills in order to perform competently as an accountant. There is however clear differences in the views of the Malaysian and UK students concerning the specific skills that they perceive as being priorities to be developed. The students also hold differing views of the major barriers to the development of vocational skills in higher education.

Previous studies have established the need to prioritise vocational skills development. Studies have also established the views of employers and students. This study contrasts the views of students from two contrasting contexts. The study establishes that students from differing countries perceive differing priorities in terms of vocational skills not only between students but also between students and the currently stated views of employers and professional bodies internationally.

The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) has become an international instrument for carbon reporting of companies. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of some factors of the institutional environment of organizations (regulatory pressure, sustainability normative demands and interconnectedness) on the evaluation obtained by Spanish companies in this project.

This paper has proceeded to make a multiple regression analysis in order to analyze the relationship between the dependent variable (“Carbon Disclosure” qualification) and independent variables (regulatory pressure, sustainability normative demands and interconnectedness) supported on the computer program Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS).

The results show that the interconnectedness of companies through their participation in associations that fight against climate change is the analyzed factor with a higher predictive power and statistical significance. Also, the regulatory pressure and normative demands from sustainability indexes, such as Dow Jones Sustainability Index, influence the carbon reporting of organizations participating in the CDP.

The main limitation of this paper is the reduced number of Spanish companies participating in the CDP.

This paper highlights the importance of the role developed by the associations fighting against climate change, since they allow the members to belong to a network through which they share resources, norms and values that positively and significantly influence their behaviour related to carbon reporting.

The purpose of this paper is to show that some important astronomical information is still not taken into account in the documental description of historical star catalogues.

A sample of 28 historical star catalogues (eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries) from the Royal Institute and Observatory of the Spanish Navy was selected in order to analyse their structure and to identify information patterns.

The analysis shows that there are a number of technical parameters which are not present in the cataloguing standards and which should be taken into account in the bibliographic descriptions of these specialised documents since they are of great interest to astronomers and astrophysicists. On the other hand, star catalogues provide some cartographic information which can be described by these standards but whose corresponding fields are not widely used by cataloguers.

A proposal of new technical parameters is given in order to try to improve the bibliographic records of these astronomical resources. Some directions are also given in order to identify the sections of the catalogues where these parameters may be found, making the task of locating them easier.