In the context of increased awareness for complying with the multiple requirements for sustainable development, the stakeholders need to have the proper information for analyzing the corporate behaviors from various perspectives. Thus, the purpose of this research is to investigate and map the sustainability patterns of European companies at the beginning of 2019, in order to uncover valuable insights into the corporate sustainable behaviors. The Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performances of 1165 European companies were considered by applying the Kohonen neural network for clustering purposes at three main levels: (1) ESG overall level, including country and sectoral perspectives; (2) ESG thematic level; (3) ESG four-folded innovative level (stakeholder, perspective, management level and focus views). All three analyses carried out show a three-clustering solution—Lower, Middle and Higher ESG clusters. Most firms are top ESG performers and the companies with good ESG scores also have more related controversies. The results highlight the sustainability profiles of the examined companies. Firstly, the environmental and social priorities are preferred over corporate governance targets. Secondly, companies tend to implement a business-customized ESG approach for achieving organizational efficiency and competitiveness. Thirdly, there is a higher consideration of employees, external-directed measures, operational issues and process-orientation in the corporate ESG performance and development. The ESG approach of the European reporting companies is mainly mature, strategic and long-term oriented, aimed to increase the corporate competitiveness and to support the societal well-being altogether.

In a global setting where the requirements for development equally address the economic viability but also social and environmental sustainability, the healthy and efficient growth of rural communities poses substantial challenges. Our paper focuses on specific conditions and constraints that influence the progress of agritourism business initiatives as viable entrepreneurial solutions for self-sustainable rural communities in Romania. To assess the impact of economic, social and tourism-related factors on agritourism entrepreneurship for Romanian counties during 2010–2015 periods, we conducted several Ordinary Least Square regression models. The results emphasize that economic indicators like regional GDP and kilometers of national roads have a positive influence on the number of agritourism business units; also, a positive impact on agritourism entrepreneurship was identified for tourism-related factors like: number of employees and corresponding salaries in tourism, total tourists, share of tourism firms and their turnover in total firms and turnover of the region, as well as preference of tourists for agritourism. The conclusions highlight the direct link between resilient agritourism entrepreneurship and sustainable development of the region and open further research directions.

The recent crisis has deeply changed the present business environment and new priorities are now emerging for companies in order to meet the economic and social criteria that the society is imposing on them. On a pragmatic approach of business ethics, companies are developing their contribution to social causes by considering a large area of corporate social responsibility CSR projects, aimed at inducing bidirectional benefits, expressed at corporate and societal level. Taking this general context into account, the aim of our present research paper is to investigate and measure the corporate participation in supporting art and culture initiatives in Romania and Bulgaria, in a comparative and empirical approach intended to shed a new light on the development of specific CSR in the two above mentioned countries. In this respect, we analyze the top companies by revenues in Romania and Bulgaria and we construct an innovative index AC-CSR Index for quantifying their implication in art and culture projects in the last years, as a part of their recognized accountability towards society as a whole. The AC-CSR Index, derived as a composite measure of arts and culture actions, aims at encompassing the performance of top companies regarding a broad-spectrum of corporate culture responsibility engagements. The main results emphasize an increasing thoughtfulness of companies in Romania and Bulgaria to this class of CSR projects, especially considering the leader position of the analyzed companies. More detailed results and comments about the AC-CSR Index are also presented

Proposal of Decision Criteria Based on Product Characteristics for WEEE Recycling in Romania: A Managerial Approach