NGOs, corporate social responsibility and sustainable development trajectories in a new reformative spectrum: ‘New wine in old bottles or old wine in new bottles?’

Abstract

Non‐governmental organisations (NGOs) have the potential to combine social objectives with trading activities, while social reporting represents a tool for disclosing NGOs' peculiarities. Although the number of NGOs adopting social reporting is increasing, research is still lacking on the relationships between firms and NGOs and their impacts at the government level, at which policy makers must both favour social/environmental commitments and ensure that NGOs pursue their core objectives, also when carrying out trading activities. This paper investigates the challenges of policy making in this field by analysing NGOs in Italy, the first country to make social reporting compulsory. We randomly selected 20 social reports from the Italian NGO register to analyse eight components regarding the disclosure of their impact. The results show that a compulsory requirement leads to a paradox, given the trade‐off between stakeholder engagement principles on the one hand and disciplinary power and accounting as action at a distance principles on the other, leading NGOs to account for their output rather than for their impact. We thus contribute to the literature about NGOs and corporate social responsibility (CSR), delineating the relevance of a paradox perspective. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only study to apply this perspective to the analysis of CSR and sustainable development trajectories in NGOs.

Beyond the business case? Retracing the walk of Corporate social responsibility and financial performance relationship in the Oil and Gas sector

“…However, despite this perspective of CSR or "Nexus of Contracts," Reinhardt et al (2020) argued that although laws supports administered of profit maximization for shareholders but still there is some gap for companies to sacrifice profits for social cause. On the other hand, Esposito and Antonucci (2022) warned about the repercussions of sacrificing profits. Academicians attempted to resolve the conundrum of generating consistent profitability while upholding standards for CSR by taking these factors into consideration (Carroll, 1991).…”

Corporate social responsibility and technological perspectives in healthcare: An exploratory analysis of the evolution of the anti‐corruption system through multiple case studies

“…For several years, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has considered the long‐term effects of organisations on social, cultural and environmental spheres (Dobers & Halme, 2009; Esposito & Ricci, 2021; Esposito et al, 2021). The impact that an organisation's activity can have on the social context in the short and long terms must be considered and managed for collective well‐being (Esposito & Antonucci, 2022). Therefore, CSR is increasingly oriented towards a sustainability strategy that, among the areas of interest, also places anti‐corruption at the centre of policies (Naeem & Welford, 2009).…”

The financial and green effects of cultural values on mission drifts in European social enterprises

“…Carè and Wendt (2018) and Zolfaghari and Hand (2021) argue that empirical studies analyzing the performance of SEs are scarce and very recent. This could be attributed to the difficulty in estimating the performance of SEs (Battilana & Lee, 2014; Esposito & Antonucci, 2021; López‐Penabad et al, 2020; Staessens et al, 2019). This is complex because SEs must perform both socially and economically (Carè & Wendt, 2018; Dacin et al, 2010, 2011; Esposito, Dicorato, et al, 2021).…”

“…More than in the past, SEs must now pay attention to economic performance, due to the growing pressure exerted by various stakeholders, which could eventually compromise the achievement of social goals (Esposito, Brescia, et al, 2021; Jiao, 2020; Schubert & Willems, 2021; Wellens & Jegers, 2014). For this reason, we analyze sustainable SEs (Esposito & Antonucci, 2021) and if they simultaneously pursue economic, social, and environmental goals (Esposito, Braga, et al, 2021; Kamaludin et al, 2021). On this basis, Battilana and Lee (2014) stated that SEs are prone to mission drift, a phenomenon that occurs when economic goals prevail over social ones.…”