The multidisciplinary nature of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) committee reflects the commitment as well as the expectations and demands of diverse stakeholders. So far, CSR committees have been mainly considered as variables of control in larger corporate governance models and independent variables that determine CSR or environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure and its reporting quality. However, the effect on corporate performance has been biased to financial performance, so the potential of the analysis of the effect it may have on different facets of non-financial performance has not been exploited. Which it should, since it can be a fundamental tool to achieve sustainability. The objective of this contribution is to test whether companies with a CSR committee not only leads to higher economic scores, but also to higher ESG (environmental, social, governance) scores. To do this, we used regression panel data models in 197 listed firms in Spain, France, Germany, and the UK during the period 2005–2015 including the perspective of European organizations and completing the extant studies in US-based samples. Our results showed that 90% of companies in the sample had a CSR committee in 2014, and that those companies had significantly different ESG scores than those without a CSR committee. Having a CSR committee also triggered better non-financial performance when considering the four scores and the four countries independently (except for the economic scores in Spain). These results have great implications for practitioners, reflecting the importance of promoting these tools in an organization to enhance non-financial performance and sustainability.

This study analyses the relationship between board gender diversity and the ESG scores for Spanish, French, German, and English listed companies. Previous academic literature shows controversial results regarding the benefits of female participation in boards of directors, however many studies have only used an aggregated indicator to measure performance or they do not have compared the results among countries. The empirical section of this research uses a sample formed by 205 companies from France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom for a period of 19 years (from 2002 to 2020). The results obtained through a panel data estimation confirm a positive and significant relationship between board gender diversity (BGD) and the social and the corporate governance score in all cases. However, the relationship between BGD and the environmental score is only confirmed in the case of Spain, France, and Germany. Therefore, even though in these countries, the actions to promote gender equality have been different and at different times, the results are mostly homogeneous.

Social dimension is a fundamental element in the evaluation of initiatives and policies that are demanded and promoted by public and private organizations as well as society as a whole. Thus, there is a thriving interest in social impact research, especially from the point of view of its measurement and valuation. In this work, we explored the rising attention on the concept of social impact to identify salient agents in the field and categorize the conceptual structure of research. To achieve this, we used evaluative and relational techniques combining traditional bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer and a text mining analysis based on natural processing language (NLP) to search for documents with the term “social impact” in the title. The documents were extracted from the database Web of Science (WoS) for the period of 1938–2020. As a result, we mapped the concept of social impact from up to 1677 documents, providing an overview of the topics in which the concept was used (e.g., health, finance, environment and development, etc.) and the trends of research. This work seeks to serve as a roadmap that reflects not only the evolution of social impact but also future lines of research that require attention.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse if there is a circular relationship of causality between the labour dimension of corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP).Design/methodology/approach: The sample is formed by the best companies to work for in Spain according to the labour reputation (LR) ranking developed by MERCO from 2006 to 2013. This study overcomes the limitations of previous studies using the panel data methodology (System generalised method of moments) and the Granger causality test.Findings: The results suggest that the labour dimension of CSP cause CFP, but there is not causality in the opposite direction.Originality/value: Studies about the relationship between dimensions of CSP and CFP demonstrated that there are divergences in the results depending on the dimension analysed. Despite managers and employees are interested in the impact of labour dimension of CSP on CFP, there are few studies about it and they have important limitations.