The goal of this paper is to evaluate the level of activities of companies that operate in the Czech market in the social area of CSR and to ascertain how the companies perceive CSR. The paper is written from an ethical point of view. On the basis of several theoretical concepts we present a design to evaluate CSR activities of the companies. This way we analyze the CSR activities of two companies in the Czech market. These two companies should represent the cream of the crop in CSR in the Czech market. Another perspective is being presented by conducting a survey among a wide group of companies in the Czech market. This survey is aimed at CSR activities of the companies and both their internal and external perception of CSR. Companies are analyzed and compared due to the size of their staff (small, medium and large), and the location of their headquarters (Czech and foreign). On the basis of these analyses we present a set of recommendations.

Corporate Social Responsibility is a topic which is very often discussed lately. The diploma thesis focuses on this trend of corporate communication and shows it on the example of company Unilever. In the practical part of the thesis the comparison of global and local CSR strategies of Unilever is being described.

The goal of this work is to propose a social responsibility strategy for the University of Economics in Prague. This work aims to identify priorities for social responsibility in a public institution such as the University of Economics and propose a plan for realisation and implementationof the strategy. The challenge of the thesis is to clearly show that even for an organization like the University of Economics, it is relevant to build a social responsibility strategy in the long term.

Politicization has an ambivalent reputation among public administration scholars. While considered an effective instrument to safeguard political control over ministerial bureaucracy, partisanship of senior civil servants is likewise associated with patronage and deemed detrimental to professionalism and meritocracy. To scrutinize this contradiction, the article examines how a party¿political background of senior civil servants influences their decision-making behavior. Two theoretically derived conceptions of loyalty are put therefore to the test: responsiveness and responsibility. Effects are captured by using vignette technique in 40 in-depth interviews with former senior civil servants from ministerial departments at federal and state level in Germany. The results are surprising insofar as they reveal that politicized senior civil servants neither act more responsive nor less responsible than their non-politicized peers. These findings challenge common assumptions and call for a more refined analysis of the conditions under which politicization leads to negative effects.

This dissertation presents three essays in financial economics with regards to corporate social responsibility and ratings. The first essay develops the first model for the CSR rating agency who has incentives to shirk while the rated firms have incentives to manipulate information through deceptive public relations (greenwash). Depending on the size of the socially responsible investor base and its composition, three possible regimes can be inferred from the model. The first one is where the rating agency is catering to mainly a large group of sophisticated SR investors who compensate the rating agency for the value of information. The second one is where the rating agency is catering to mainly a large group of trusting SR investors who compensate the rating agency for the value of institutional certification. In either of these two regimes, the weight of the large group of SR investors should generate higher market valuations for higher-rated firms that motivate firm managers to perform greenwashing. The third regime is where there are just too few SR investors to justify the effort to produce informative signals and to drive apart market valuations for rated firms. The second essay investigates the empirical predictions of the model described in the first essay. I challenge the conventional wisdom of commercial CSR ratings being informative in a first attempt to understand how this ratings market operates. Using a novel difference-in-difference identification strategy, I show ratings significantly decreased for firms targeted by a regulatory crackdown on informational manipulation that inflates ratings. I find that better environmental ratings predict worse future corporate behavior via a novel set of benchmarks (i.e. penalties, lawsuits, and media coverage) while neither environmental nor social ratings appear to offer incremental predictive value beyond size and other standard firm characteristics. Higher-rated firms are associated with higher market valuations relative to their lower-rated counterparts. My findings point to a world in which the ratings business is primarily catering to a large group of trusting investors who buy ratings not for the value of information but for the value of institutional certification. The third essay examines the ratings of a recently emerged rating agency competitor and find its ratings are of no better predictive quality. I introduce a novel set of measures, `corporate badness (CB) ratings', for corporate environmental and social performance. In contrast to the leading commercial ratings, worse CB ratings correctly predict more future corporate bad behavior out-of-sample. These CB ratings provide a way to study ratings disagreement, which can be used to disentangle greenwashing from the other information contained in the leading commercial CSR ratings.

This dissertation defends a Hegelian model of our relationship to social roles. This model functions both as a new interpretation of Hegel’s own view, and as a contribution to the contemporary debate about role obligations. On this model, it is constitutive of our agency, and therefore obligatory, to carry out our social roles. Yet, ‘carrying out’ our roles also necessarily involves that we persistently develop our roles, and the social order of which they are part, towards realizing the human good. In that process, we are required to lead society through a process of social evolution, whose basic structure mirrors the development of natural life at a higher, self-conscious level. From the standpoint of Hegel scholarship, the main upshot of my interpretation is that Hegel’s vision of social participation does not only leave room for social critique, as commentators have recently argued, but rather centrally requires such critique. In fact, I argue that Hegel has – what I will call – a Neo-Aristotelian model of social critique (centered around the idea of ‘living unity’) that is an essential component of his account of how we should relate to social roles, but that has been hitherto overlooked. From the standpoint of the contemporary debate on role obligations, the main upshot of my interpretation is that Hegel offers an account that neither limits the normativity of social roles to those roles we have actually accepted, nor to the roles that are reflectively acceptable. Instead, Hegel develops an account on which even reflectively unacceptable roles give us obligations – namely obligations to evolve them, through a process of social experimentation, into something better. It is this view – and the central function that it attributes to social evolution as part of our role obligations – that make Hegel an interesting, but often overlooked, contributor to the debate about role obligations today.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management specialising in Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation, Johannesburg 2016 / Social entrepreneurship has the potential to address and solve social problems and challenges, poverty and inequality among others, which are rife across subSaharan Africa. This academic field holds great potential, is surprisingly under researched and lagging behind in practise. A study of the influence of perceptions within the institutional environment on the decision to become a social entrepreneur is therefore critical in developing an understanding of social entrepreneurial intentions in the context of a developing and emerging economy. This study proposed to use the theory of entrepreneurial event and the institutional theory to investigate the influence of the external environment on the development of social entrepreneurial intentions and its antecedents among tertiary level students in Gauteng, South Africa. This study was quantitative and cross sectional in nature; a structured and closed-ended questionnaire was distributed electronically to the target population. 193 students participated in this study, with the final sample consisting of 128 responses. In order to analyse the data, linear multiple regression was employed. The key findings indicated that the regulatory environment has a positive and significant influence on perceived feasibility and social entrepreneurial intentions. Moreover, the findings indicated that the normative and cognitive environment have a positive but insignificant relationship with social entrepreneurship intention and its antecedents – perceived feasibility and perceived desirability. There is a negative relationship between the regulatory environment and perceived desirability, normative environment and social entrepreneurship intention, cognitive environment, perceived desirability and social entrepreneurship intention. The implications of this research for policy makers and educators is to focus on shaping the perceptions of the institutional environment as well social entrepreneurship, and the attitudes of students and society at large towards positive perceptions to influence social entrepreneurial intentions. / GR2018

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) continues to gain attention amongst corporate bodies and is the medium through which the private sector contributes to development. The last decade has seen a significant growth in CSR initiative in South Africa, partly due to the implementation of public polices such as the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Code of Good Practice and the various industry charters that obligate corporate institutions to contribute towards the reconstruction efforts of the nation. As a result many organizations have adopted strategies that include social development projects as part of their core business objectives, thus the initiation of certain projects and programmes as part of their CSR contributions to the reconstruction efforts. Although CSR has roots in philanthropic activities, it has become evident that when CSR initiatives are designed strategically to embody the holistic views of business goals towards profit making as well as community goals that promote positive development. Anecdotal evidence suggests that projects collapse after corporations discontinue funding due to lack of community involvement which renders CSR initiatives unresponsive to the developmental needs of communities. The study sought to explore the extent to which corporate social responsibility initiatives were responsive to the educational needs of beneficiaries in Johannesburg. It also explored beneficiary perceptions on how CSR initiatives can be sustained. The study population was drawn from Tiso Foundation and three partnering organisations. A qualitative case study design was utilised in the study to obtain in depth information from the research participants concerning the CSR initiatives of Tiso Foundation. Semi-structured interview schedules were used to conduct interviews with both beneficiaries of the CSR initiatives and key informants. The research sample consisted of 16 beneficiaries of Tiso Foundation’s CSR initiatives and 6 key informants that were drawn from Tiso Foundation and partnering organizations. The findings revealed that the CSR initiatives were responsive to the needs of the beneficiaries by providing them access to education and skills development. The findings also established the nature of beneficiary participation in CSR initiatives as partially participatory. The study recommended that CSR initiatives should take a developmental approach towards programme executions to ensure full participation of beneficiaries in order to ensure sustainability of the programmes even after funding is discontinued. The study also iv suggests the collaborative partnership of government and the private sector towards sustainable development by enhancing and complimenting each other’s efforts.

The current study aimed to examine whether or not employee perceptions of their organisations corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices impacted upon organisational commitment and intention to stay. Moreover, this research aimed to determine whether or not an individual’s perception of their organisations CSR practices was impacted upon by their preference for CSR. As an initial step, it was essential to determine whether or not individuals had a preference for certain CSR practices. The current study defined CSR in terms of three distinct constructs: environmental CSR, external social CSR and internal social CSR. Environmental CSR encompassed any action undertaken in order to promote environmental sustainability while external social CSR dealt with initiatives aimed at assisting individuals and communities in need. Lastly, internal social CSR was operationalised as the degree to which organisations address social asymmetries with regards to gender, race, sexual orientation and disability. An exploratory factor analysis demonstrated that employee perceptions of CSR do not occur in terms of the three distinct constructs described above. Rather, employee perceptions occur in terms of actions which impact employees within the workplace, labelled internal CSR, and those that are focused outside the organisation, termed external CSR. Employee perceptions of internal CSR are thus concerned with the degree to which organisations adequately address social asymmetries based on gender, race, sexual orientation and disability. Conversely, perceptions of external CSR are concerned with the adequacy of organisational initiatives aimed at environmental sustainability and assisting individuals and communities in need. The results derived from the multiple regression suggests that both internal and external CSR predict organisational commitment ( = 4.92, p < .0001; = 2.64, p = 0.0095 respectively) and intention to stay ( = 0.13, p = 0.0032; = 0.15, p < .0001 respectively). In terms of the strength of the predictions, internal CSR is a moderate predictor while external CSR is a weak predictor of both organisational commitment and intention to stay. With regards to employee preference for CSR practices; results derived from analytic hierarchy process and ward’s minimum variance clustering method demonstrate that the sample, composed of 119 participants, could be split into two clusters. Both clusters demonstrated that external social CSR was the most preferred CSR practice. Results from t-tests demonstrated that employee preference did not impact upon employee perceptions of external CSR ( = 0.10; p = 0.92) and internal CSR ( = 0.25; p = 0.80).

There is a widespread view amongst private investors and public investment corporations that socially responsible investing leads to substandard returns relative to Conventional investing. Conventional portfolios are portfolios with sin stocks or lowly ranked stocks in terms of the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors whilst Socially responsible Investments (SRI) are portfolios with stocks regarded as socially desirable with high ESG rankings. We constructed two portfolios using the JSE stocks and the Bloomberg rankings in accordance with the ESG rankings guidelines. As an additional analysis, we also assessed the performances of the JSE socially responsible index, JSE TOP 40 and the FTSE JSE ALL SHARE. Using different performance measures such as the CAPM, Fama French, Carhart 4 factor model, Sharpe ratio, and Treynor ratio; we found interesting evidence contrary to the beliefs of many investors. No statistically significant difference in performance is found between our self-constructed portfolios, and the different indexes such as JSE SRI, JSE TOP 40 and the FTSE JSE indexes. We have separated beliefs from reality/ facts in this paper that socially conscious investors can perform well in South Africa.