Suchergebnisse

Purpose
Corporate sustainability in China has become a subject of increasing international concern. Corporate sustainability disclosure (CSD) is considered a useful tool to facilitate the empowerment and acknowledgement of stakeholders in the quest for sustainability. However, the degree of cultural and political influences for being sustainably orientated can be significantly different between countries. This study aims to examine the perception of financial analysts, as CSD report users, in China about the level of importance of various indicators of corporate sustainability described in the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Guidelines.


Design/methodology/approach
A set of questionnaires was developed based on GRI G4 guidelines to measure the perception of financial analysts in China on the level of importance of each sustainability indicator described in the GRI G4. A five-point Likert scale was used to measure the report users' perceptions of each of the indicators.


Findings
The findings of this study increase our understanding of how Chinese CSD report users perceive corporate sustainability differently from the GRI guidelines. The main results show that the environmental aspect of sustainability was seen to be important in China, followed by the social and economic aspects. Indicator-wise, "water", "effluents and waste", "emissions", "compliance" and "energy" were perceived as vital in the environmental category, while "customer health and safety", "customer privacy" and "compliance" were considered significant in the social category.


Originality/value
This study addresses the need for differing corporate sustainability guidelines for different nations and cultures, specifically within the Chinese context. It also contributes to the corporate sustainability literature by adding to our understanding of how financial analysts in China, as CSD report users, perceive aspects of sustainability.

This study examines the extent of environmental and social disclosures in annual reports made by Chinese mining, utility and chemical industries. It also investigates the key drivers of the companies' environmental and social disclosures (CESD), thereby determining the motivations of the sample organisations towards corporate environmental and social responsibility. The study adopted dichotomous index to measure the extent of CESD among the three industries in their annual reports. Additionally, Ordinary Least Square was adopted to examine the determinants of CESD. By drawing on legitimacy theory, the results depict positive associations between the extent of CESD and firm size, profitability, and firm age. Engagement from industry association showed strong significance in environmental disclosure, whereas leverage was significant in social disclosures. Government ownership was found insignificant in the analysis. The study contributes with direct evidence to the extent of environmental disclosure and social disclosure made by three high-profile industries based on G3. The results showed that overall there is no significant difference between the extents of CESD of the three industries, indicating that high-profile industries behave similarly in terms of the content of information in disclosure. This study has also practical implications particularly for the regulatory body and the industry association when developing regulations and guidelines on environmental and social reports.

Today's institutions of higher education are facing an increased number of significant challenges taking place in the political, economic, social and technological environment. Accordingly, the issues of performance, accountability, and marketing strategies have become ever more important. It has been suggested that universities that are more market or customer orientated can perform better. In dealing with customers, most universities have utilised Web technologies for both informational and promotional purposes. The question is whether they have designed their Web sites well enough in order to gain the benefits from Web utilisation. Previous studies on quality of Web sites are not lacking, but most of them have focussed mainly on business Web sites. Empirical research that focuses on the Web site quality of institutions of higher education has been scarce. This study focuses on the websites of Schools of Accounting, and selects the websites of Schools of Accounting in New Zealand's universities as the research objects. The main objectives of this study are to develop and validate an instrument for measuring School of Accounting website quality from the perspectives of the users, and to implement the proposed instrument to measure and rank the quality of websites of Schools of Accounting in New Zealand. The results from this initial application substantiated the validity and reliability of the instrument.

AbstractThis paper measures and inclusively analyses the extent of Australian public universities' sustainability disclosures on three key reporting media, that is annual reports, stand‐alone sustainability reports, and websites. The study also compares the extent of the disclosures across university groupings. Content analysis was used to analyse the data by utilising the updated Graphical Assessment of Sustainability in Universities (GASU) indicators together with a weighted scoring scheme. Mann–Whitney and Kruskal–Wallis tests were applied in the comparison tests. The results of this study indicate that the extent of sustainability disclosures made by Australian public universities is overall fairly low, and the evaluation and comparison of the extent of sustainability disclosures among different university groupings overall show no significant difference. Overall, the findings suggest that there is a need to increase both the level of awareness and recognition of benefits resulted from performing sustainable development activities and the way these performances are better communicated to stakeholders.

PurposeThis study examines whether corporate governance enhances the financial and social business performance of three-to five-star hotels in Western Australia (WA) through the three dimensions of market orientation (i.e. customer orientation, competitor orientation and inter-function coordination) as mediators.Design/methodology/approachData were collected from managers of hotels in the WA capital city of Perth and its surrounding areas using a questionnaire. Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyse the data.FindingsThe overall result shows interesting findings of market orientation's mediating role. It is found that corporate governance may lead to better financial business performance through competitor orientation but not through customer orientation and inter-function coordination. Complementary, corporate governance may lead to better social business performance through customer orientation and inter-function coordination but not through competitor orientation.Originality/valueThis paper offers contributions to both literature and practice on what dimensions of market orientation are important to enhance the performance of hotels when corporate governance is applied.

PurposeThis study aims to examine the three dimensions of market orientation, namely, customer orientation, competitor orientation and inter-function coordination, which influence the accountability in the financial and social performance of tourism operators in large touristic cities.Design/methodology/approachIn total, 95 usable questionnaires as the required data were collected from the top managers of four- and five-star hotels in Iran.FindingsPartial least squares (PLS) results confirm that customer orientation and inter-function coordination influence both the financial and social performance of the hospitality sector yet reveal that competitor orientation has no significant relationship with social performance.Research limitations/implicationsThese findings not only highlight the compatibility of PLS with various forms of statistical analyzes but also furthers the current understanding of hospitality networks in megacity economies, where literature are scarce.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study can help policymakers, tourism associations and practitioners enhance the accountability and sustainable financial and social performance of the hospitality industry in megacities. This study proposes some unique measurements for the social and financial performance of the hospitality sectors.Originality/valueThe paper states some new measurements for the social performance of the hospitality sectors. In addition, measuring the impacts of market orientation on the financial and social aspects of hotels is totally unique.