Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings The authors find a positive relationship between political connections and CSR reporting. Originality/value 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.

This paper reports the results of an exploratory analysis, focused on Euronext Lisbon listed companies, which aimed to obtain an image of the characteristics of politically connected firms and of the politicians connected to them. Our results show that the majority of listed companies are politically connected and politicians, in some cases, are involved with several companies. The size of connected firms is significantly higher than of their non-connected peers. However, measures of financial equity to assets, return on assets and effective tax rate on income not seem to be significantly different in the two observed groups. Concerning to the politicians serving on the board of directors and supervisory board, this paper shows that the majority is or was a minister, all of them have an academic degree and are male genre, and the main area of their degrees is law followed by economics.

Purpose This paper aims to examine the relationship between board demographic diversity and human rights reporting for a sample of large Western European companies. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings 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. Research limitations/implications The sample includes only large companies from Western Europe and the analysis covers only one year. Originality/value 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.

The aim of this paper is to propose a model of social reporting that allows improving the communication of sociability and quantify the sociability. The research approach follows a qualitative methodology, applying a single method approach. The observations are the result of an empirical analysis carried out on the Italian-Stock-Exchange listed companies that have an independent social or sustainability balance sheet. The findings of this research are based, first, on collection of data about the sample, in order to identify the strong and weak points in terms of its management and economic evaluation, and secondly on the introduction of an alternative method of social accounting, with the objective of measuring the sociability of company communication

This survey aims to analyze the relationship between corporate social responsibility and the investment decision of pension funds. In fact, in Italy, the absence of welfare and the lack of social security coverage should encourage the younger generation to join complementary pension form, but this does not always happen for many reasons analyzed by the survey. Companies can play an active role in the new integrated welfare, for example, by ensuring complementary pension form. In this way, however, companies must have a recognition like becoming, if judged socially responsible, target company for the investment of pension funds.This survey examines, therefore, the relationship among: Pension Funds, CSR, target company, company socially responsible. This would allow companies to play an active role in the welfare and at the same time, to be offset by the loss of cash flow resulting from the obligation to forward to the funds the growing TFR.