Ioannis E. Nikolaou

An Overview of Corporate Social Responsibility in Greece: Perceptions, Developments and Barriers to Overcome

The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Greece and present the challenges that need to be met in order to further promote socially responsible business behaviour in the domestic economy. This is the first attempt to provide a systematic analysis of CSR in Greece and adds to the existing pool of knowledge of CSR embeddedness in countries where CSR awareness is still rather low, a literature field that is still quite limited. Drawing from prior literature, the paper is built around three basic questions in relation to the Greek context: how is CSR perceived by Greek business professionals? How is CSR practised in Greece? And which issues evident in the modern domestic environment act as underlying barriers to the broader dissemination of CSR in Greece? The extant empirical work suggests that, while CSR in Greece appears to be developing, there is still scope for improvement and further diffusion of relevant practices. While some of the patterns shaping CSR in Greece have been analysed, much work still remains to be carried out in extending and deepening our knowledge in this part of Europe.

A framework to assist the financial community in incorporating water risks into their investment decisions

Recently, much attention has been paid to the fundamental meaning of water resources, with regard to the efficient operation of the business community and the viability of the financial market by a range of financial stakeholders such as the banking sector, insurance companies and investors. The main concern of these actors is to avoid significant financial losses associated with water problems namely, the deterioration of water quality, water overuse, supply chain risks and climate change effects. This article proposes a framework to assess business risks that are associated with water resource problems. The proposed framework is based on ideas from current benchmarking and scoring accounting systems which drew data from published corporate environmental reports. By identifying the relationship between environmental and financial issues, it would enable actors of financial markets to make better investment decisions. It was applied to a number of Greek businesses certified by the Environmental Management and Audit Schemes certification system.

Classifying current social responsibility accounting methods for assisting a dialogue between business and society

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to discuss the drawbacks of current social and environmental accounting methods and to present a classification for developing a new accounting model. Design/methodology/approach - The various social and environmental accounting methods are classified and discussed on the basis of various criteria such as the types of accounting principles and the content and information units utilized. Findings - Current social and environmental accounting methods utilize different criteria, measurement units and principles, a fact that makes the information provided ambiguous and problematic for a reliable business-society dialogue under a common and understandable context. A new classification is presented based on specific criteria in the prospect of developing a new accounting model. Research limitations/implications - The proposed new classification aiming to develop a new accounting model is a theoretical proposition which should be validated and tested in practice with a series of case studies before it can be recommended as an alternative to current accounting methods. Originality/value - The paper attempts to highlight the drawbacks of the current social and environmental accounting methods and proposes a new classification for the development of a new accounting model.

An Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Sustainability Reporting Assessment in the Greek Banking Sector

This paper aims to examine implementation of CSR in the banking sector by means of an analysis of the incorporation of environmental and social concerns into financial institutions’ decision-making, in order to evaluate the content of annual environmental (social or sustainability) reports published by Greek banks. It also analyses the various reporting strategies Greek banks adopt, as well as the emerging trends they tend to follow. A sustainability report assessment was implemented according to scoring systems based on the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines and the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu sustainability reporting scorecard. The study has identified the fact that Greek banks finished in exactly the same position in the overall ranking with both scoring systems. However, the GRI requirements are very demanding for Greek banks while they seem to cover a greater number of the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu requirements. The paper concludes by reporting on future CSR trends of the Greek banking sector, especially in the field of environmental and social strategies, as well as outlines some steps banks need to take in order to promote sustainability and thereby fulfil their stakeholders’ demands.

Environmental management practices and engineering science: A review and typology for future research

Current literature describes a number of environmental management practices and cleaner production methods that facilitate different industrial sectors to address their various environmental impacts. The high number of present practices makes their use especially difficult and complicated. This paper aims to shed light on this field by providing a typology of those environmental management practices (such as environmental management systems, environmental indicators assessment methodologies, and cleaner productions methods) and their limitations. It also describes the strengths and weaknesses of using such tools and thoughts for future research.

Financial and non-financial environmental information: significant factors for corporate environmental performance measuring

Nowadays, many companies implement strategies for managing their day-to-day negative impacts on the environment mainly due to direct and indirect pressure from stakeholders. The impact of these strategies can be recorded in financial and non-financial terms, both being necessary for measuring overall business performance. This paper summarises relevant literature on current environmental accounting methods and presents a conceptual model for recording and disclosing information on financial and non-financial environmental performance in a reliable and transparent manner. This model analyses the steps for interpreting business environmental strategies in appropriate terms in order to follow environmental financial information through formal financial statements (balance-sheets and profit and loss statements) as well as non-financial environmental information into balance footnotes.

A Framework for Evaluating the Social Responsibility Quality of Reverse Logistics

This chapter proposes the combination of basic principles of corporate social responsibility (CSR) with reverse logistics (RL) systems as a means of developing a social responsibility quality framework for evaluating RL procedures. More specifically, this chapter provides an overall framework including indicators for measuring reverse logistics social responsibility quality based on the triple bottom line approach (namely economic, environmental, and social aspects). This framework helps to tackle the weakness of the present environmental and sustainable RL systems. These are mainly based on measuring a limited number of social aspects, which are necessary for having a clearer picture of the quality performance of RL systems. The suggested framework could also play a critical role in measuring the contribution of a firm to sustainable development quality within the RL context.

Environmental Information, Asymmetric Information, and Financial Markets: A Game-Theoretic Approach

This paper examines the problem of asymmetric information in financial markets due to a lack of essential environmental information. The literature indicates that asymmetric information generates various problems for the actors of financial markets such as incomplete information for investment decisions and lending procedures, misallocation of financial market funds, the underestimating of stock price securities, and poor environmental risk management choices. To this end, this paper develops a game-theoretic approach to examine both the persistent nature of asymmetric information caused by the absence of accurate environmental information and to indicate how a well-organized, trustworthy, internationally agreed auditing accounting certification scheme could play a critical role in limiting the magnitude of this problem.

Intellectual property and environmental innovation: an explanation using the institutional and resource-based theories

Various studies have examined the relationship between intellectual property, Environmental Management Systems (EMSs) and innovation. Some of these studies have focused on identifying internal factors that provide competitive advantages to firms, which adopt EMS, while others examine external factors that promote environmental innovation to firms. This paper proposes a framework that encompasses internal and external factors to identify how EMS promotes innovation to firms, at the same time bearing the need to protect intellectual property. This framework is based on the institutional and resource-based theories and explains how firms may gain competitive advantage and enhance innovation from EMS implementation.

Business Strong Sustainability Performance: Evidence from Food Sector

A composite sustainability index is suggested to evaluate strong sustainability of businesses by utilizing the triple-bottom-line approach and principles of strong sustainability. On the one side, the proposed index is classified into three classical aspects of sustainability to measure financial performance, environment protection, and social justice. On the other side, it focuses on some basic concepts of environmental science in relation to carrying capacity, safe minimum standards, and critical capital mainly to design certain thresholds for indexes which businesses should attain. An application of the proposed methodology has been made to the food industry in order to draw some implications useful to overcome some of the shortcomings of previous studies. The findings show that the idea of integrating economic, social, and environmental thresholds into corporate indicators might be a good basis to evaluate the strong corporate sustainability performance and offer a comprehend signal to stakeholders.