Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility, ESG Factors, and Sustainability Performances: Data Envelopment Analysis Applications
Dr. Ahmed Mohamed Habib
Dr. Nahia Mourad
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Sustainability is the key to a better future. By analyzing how sustainable firm processes and activities positively affect society as a whole, specifically firm performance, and by developing a theory to inform practice through well-grounded guidelines for firms, scholars can help raise awareness of the need to incorporate these sustainable practices in the integrated reporting of firms.
Interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has grown exponentially over the last two decades. Several analytical studies corroborate the positive effect of CSR on firms’ competitive advantage, performance, and value. Nevertheless, this topic still requires a deeper analysis and a theoretical foundation. CSR practices positively contribute to society by supporting sustainable economic, social, and environmental development. A deeper analysis of how CSR practices grounded in both rationales help firms improve their corporate performance can be a way to raise firms’ awareness of sustainability. Therefore, the trend of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) framework has emerged, which helps stakeholders understand how an organization manages risks and opportunities related to environmental, social, and governance criteria (sometimes called ESG factors). ESG takes the holistic view that sustainability extends beyond environmental issues to achieve continuous improvement. Analyzing how firms develop holistic solutions for sustainability requires a deeper study of firm resources and capabilities.
In this context, data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been shown to be a well-established and promising tool for such purposes, especially because it provides essential information for benchmarking, continuous improvement, and achieving best practices. DEA is an optimization-based management science technique for identifying the best practices of a group of decision-making units (DMUs), whose performance is categorized by multiple performance metrics that are classified as inputs and outputs. The construction of composite indicators, in particular, is a stream of research in the DEA literature for assessing sustainable performance that has been gaining traction in recent times. This is because the indices are easy to communicate and can measure multidimensional concepts that may not share common units of measurement. In addition, studies examining sustainability using DEA are scarce. Therefore, the topic of this special issue is timely, and it is expected that the contributed articles will be of interest to a wide audience, from academics to practitioners, NGOs, and governmental bodies. It is expected that these research papers will assist relevant decision and policymakers in their attempt to measure sustainability performance and improve design policies aimed at allocating resources and achieving best practices.
This special issue welcomes original high-quality research articles that focus on building robust DEA-based index systems to benchmark and analyze sustainable performance across various empirical contexts. Theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical studies are encouraged. We will accept original high-quality manuscripts from different disciplines that address topics related to the scope. The development of new and enhanced solutions is of considerable interest. Contributions from both the academic and practitioner communities are supported.
Dr. Ahmed Mohamed Habib and Dr. Nahia Mourad,
Guest Editors