Drawing on the complexity theory and responding to the recent calls to use such creative methods that mix between a quantitative and qualitative approach. Therefore, this study fills the literature gap, adding novelties, showing evidence from the unexplored (or underexplored) European context and, consequently, shedding light to inconclusive results in previous research concerning the effect of audit committee (AC) and board characteristics on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure by applying a novel research methodology: the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The data were collected from Eikon database for a sample of the top 69 nonfinancial European companies (based on market capitalisation) for the period 2016-2018. The study results support the equifinality and complexity tenets of complexity theory. It also suggests that CSR disclosure relies on a complex configuration of some AC attributes, for example, independence, financial expert member, chair independence, size and activity, and other board characteristics (independence, gender, size, activity, and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) duality). These characteristics play a leading part as a recipe ingredient and, in an appropriate combination, promote achieving high CSR disclosure levels. Our empirical results offer multidimensional and valuable insights for professionals, regulators, and policymakers in establishing and revising the guidelines regarding the AC and board of directors' composition.

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This is the first study that presents a full picture of the field by using a combination of two methodologies, bibliometric and social network analysis (SNA). Thus, this work maps the knowledge of previous research and suggest new avenues for future research for the relationship between board characteristics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and CSR disclosure (CSRD). We analysed 242 articles published on Web of Science database (WoS) journals for the period 1992-2019. The results show that board characteristics have a significant impact on CSR literature in terms of citations and high-quality journals. Moreover, the trend of the papers published in the field is increasing in the last five years. Our work clusters the literature according to keywords and draws the primary authors' networks. This study also draws potential future avenues for research in the field in terms of research gaps (governance mechanisms, variables, countries, etc.). Furthermore, our results suggest some potential areas of interest for future political reforms of board of directors' guidelines.

Recent financial scandals worldwide have intensified concern for business (and especially accounting) ethics. Hence, under an overall economic and social sustainability approach, it is crucial to improve the effectiveness of business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) education, in terms of its impact on business students' awareness of ethical issues. However, stand-alone business ethics/CSR courses are uncommon in Spanish universities. Accordingly, this paper aims at examining the influence of ethics courses on students' awareness of business ethics in unfriendly environments. We test our hypotheses, through hierarchical regression, in a sample of 551 management students of a Spanish university. Our results suggest that business ethics/CSR courses increase awareness of the importance of ethics in: (i) business courses, (ii) recognizing accounting ethical implications, and (iii) workplace decisions. Our findings also show that a joint interactive effect of gender (female students) and age (older students) increases the impact of business ethics/CSR courses on students' awareness of the importance of: (i) ethics in workplace decisions, and (ii) the recognition of accounting ethical implications. Our results also support the relevance of different learning styles and the convenience of adapting ethics/CSR teaching methods depending on students' characteristics. Research and practical implications are derived from our findings.

Interest is growing towards including business ethics in university curricula, aiming at improving ethical behaviour of future managers. Extant literature has investigated the impact of ethics education on different ethics‐related students' cognitive and/or behavioural outcomes, considering variables related to training programmes and students' demographic aspects. Accordingly, we aim at assessing students' understanding of business ethics issues, by focusing on the differences in students' perceptions depending on gender, age, work experience, and ethics courses taken. Testing our hypotheses on a sample of 307 management students at a Polish university, and controlling for social desirability bias, we obtained mixed and partially surprising results. We found significant differences in students' understanding of business ethics depending on their gender and age (female and older students showed more ethical inclinations), but not depending on having taken ethics courses—actually perceptions of such courses worsened after taking them. Besides, work experience was not a significant variable. Moreover, course exposure intensiveness (i.e., number of ethics courses completed), and time passed since completion of the latest course, did not confirm hypothesized effects on most of the dependent (sub)variables. These findings stimulate further questions and challenges for future research (e.g., around course design and methodology, and social/cultural/contextual issues).