Environmental, Social, Governance: Implications for businesses and effects for stakeholders

Abstract

The main goal of the Special Issue is to reflect and analyze ESG issues to provide important insights into the positive and negative implications for corporate strategy, financial and operational performance and stakeholder relations. New implications for companies and for stakeholders associated with ESG rules and practices as well as suggestions to guide policy making, have been addressed in the Special Issue. | BACKGROUND AND FOCUS OF THE SPECIAL ISSUEThe number of firms that employ sustainability strategies and disclose Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) information is growing worldwide, as ESG concerns are rapidly increasing (Engle III et al., 2020). As pointed out by Larry Fink, Blackrock Chairman and CEO, in his 2020 letter to the CEOs of portfolio companies, "BlackRock announced a number of initiatives to place sustainability at the center of our investment approach, including: making sustainability integral to portfolio construction and risk management; exiting investments that present a high sustainability-related risk, such as thermal coal producers; launching new investment products that screen fossil fuels; and strengthening our commitment to sustainability and transparency in our investment stewardship activities." Moreover, in 2019, the CEOs of nearly 200 companies declared that shareholder value is no longer their main objective and are abandoning the long-held view that shareholders' interests should come first (Business Roundtable, 2019), bearing in mind that "Most CEOs want to do the right thing by all their stakeholders, and most shareholders want to support them in being responsible" (Summers, 2019). This rethinking of purpose is in line with an increasing number of companies that have voluntarily integrated social and environmental policies in their business model and operations, reporting their environmental and social performance, in addition to their financial performance (Serafeim, 2014). Corporate governance and sustainability concerns have gained

Exploring antecedents of innovations for small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises' environmental sustainability: An interpretative framework

“…The entrepreneurial capacity to adopt GIs has become a dominant topic in almost all economic discussions taking place among scholars, practitioners and policymakers (Cheng et al, 2018;Engle et al, 2021;Ma et al, 2020;Santamaria et al, 2021). This is because GIs represent the point of intersection of different needs that come from various interlocutors at multiple levels.…”

Corporate Fight against the COVID-19 Risks Based on Technologies of Industry 4.0 as a New Direction of Social Responsibility

“…Consumers (the second beneficiary) are more interested in the safety (from the positions of observing sanitary and epidemiological norms) of the process of products' realization than in the company's responsibility as an employer and realization of "green" projects. This reduces the value of the traditional direction of corporate social responsibility for interested parties (beneficiaries) and actualizes the new direction-corporate COVID-19 risks management (Engle et al 2021). As the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis has shown, one of the most popular forms of transforming a company's work according to the new requirements of government and society (market) is the employees' transition to remote work.…”

An Overview of the European Policies on ESG in the Banking Sector

“…All these initiatives have been beneficial given that the disclosure requirements at a national level have been quite diverging [32]. Moreover, through the introduction of clearer criteria for the classification of the activities performed by industrial companies, they set the stage for the introduction of more specific guidelines and regulations.…”