Recommendations

The recommendations target advancing corporate and financial social responsibility as prerequisites of sustainable financial sucess. The findings of public servant expert interviews about CSR outline the importance of global governance of corporate social conduct. Based on stakeholder consensus, governments may craft CSR frameworks that are backed up by institutional support. Corporations should educate leaders to adopt social responsibility policies in business plans. Accountability and transparency advance CSR.

Public Private Partnerships (PPPs)

The start-up of the global alliance network on ICT for development (GAID) was qualitatively analyzed to derive recommendations for the improvement of PPPs. The evaluation covered web contents, publications, interviews, emails, and blog responses. Since the inception in 2006, GAID has successfully leveraged its position as a UN-related organization that keeps ICT for development on the global agenda. GAID has brought together constituents on ICT for development comprising governmental officials, corporate executives, academia, and civil society. The accessibility and harmonization of ICT best practices standards have been advanced. GAID has secured funding, launched conferences, and extended its network in flagship initiatives, regional networks, and communities of expertise. Some of the partnerships initiatives have successfully linked with the GAID network and facilitated information exchange in conferences, trainings, and workshops. Others had difficulties in integrating with GAID mainly due to resource limitations and a lack of expertise. The current situation of the GAID network implies areas for improvement regarding additional resource mobilization, network establishment and maintenance, as well as business planning, goal achievement strategies, and measurement.

Empirical Part

The empirical investigation is targeted at describing corporate and financial social responsibilities within market systems with a special attention to global governance provision under the auspice of international organizations. Expert interviews on CSR and SRI aim at understanding social welfare notions of public and private actors. The innovative combination of corporate and government in PPP social service provision will be analyzed with a focus on the network start-up phase. The impact of political divestiture as a means of financial social responsibility, but also measurement impediments will be subject to scrutiny. The exploration of social and psychological SRI motives will complement classic finance theories by behavioral economics insights.

Social Responsibility

Responsibility refers to the human care about others' wellbeing. Motives for responsible behavior are connected to altruism—as a search for meaning beyond the self—and positive reinforcement of sympathy within society. Responsibility is part of human nature and learned within the societal context. Leaders are role models who face an extraordinary obligation to responsibility in balancing multiple stakeholder needs. Responsibility considerations underlie human decision-making fallibility. This chapter explores social responsibility.

Discussion

The discussion features empirical limitations and an outlook for future research. Exploratory expert interviews with public servants served as an exploratory step to understand public administrators' views of CSR. Future research could address social responsibility as a worldwide societal phenomenon. Behavioral economic studies the emergence of responsibility in human beings. Capturing external influences on social responsibility fallibility aids in tackling contemporary responsibility challenges having arisen out of globalization

Global Governance

Global governance advances societies by enhancing social responsibility in market systems and improving governmental efficiency. CSR becomes a feature of global governance when corporations provide social welfare, but also when CSR serves a multi-stakeholder conflict resolution means in public private partnerships (PPPs). Governments foster corporate social service provision as this flexible, soft-law approach benefits from comparatively low resistance. Under the lead of international organizations, the contributions of CSR to global governance have foremost been institutionalized by the UN Global Compact (UNGC). The United Nations Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and Development (UN GAID) is a currently-launched global governance PPP. This chapter explores global governance.

Market Agents' Social Representations of SRI

In August 2008, exploratory expert interviews were conducted with 94 financial investors and executives of the New York financial community on their perception of SRI. The semi-structured interviews featuring open-ended questions and collected free associations on SRI. The categorization of the contents sheds light on investors' and fiduciaries' interpretation of SRI. A core-and-periphery analysis depicted the main and emerging contents of the common body of knowledge on SRI. Investors and financial fiduciaries are ambiguous about SRI. While they attribute profitability, long-term perspectives, and innovative future potential with SRI, the majority of respondents also revealed knowledge deficiencies regarding the disparate branches of SRI. At the same time, SRI evoked efficiency considerations, fiduciary responsibility predicaments, and associations about losses of degrees of freedom. SRI is seen as a market-dependent and volatile niche market option. Future improvements for SRI must raise SRI's effectiveness in addressing social deficiencies and create a higher degree of accountability.

Political Divestiture

In the wake of historical and political events, stakeholder pressure can trigger divestment from politically incorrect markets. Six evaluation studies of political divestiture from South Africa during Apartheid were meta-analyzed to find a pattern of stakeholder pressure, political divestiture, and corporate endeavors. The meta-analysis covered the question of whether corporations divesting from politically incorrect markets are more likely to experiencing an increase, decrease, or no change in market value, and it found varying results – some studies suggest a positive effect, others a negative impact, and even no overall performance pattern of political divestiture and corporate value was reported. The study also detected a research gap on the impact of political divestiture on corporations operating in politically fractionate markets. Future research may compare values of divesting corporations with those operating in politically incorrect markets. The instringent results are attributed to stem from methodological limitations. Political divestiture is captured by the event study method which was evaluated for validity threats. Internal validity limitations of event study designs stem from confounding and contaminating history occurrences, sample selection biases, and inappropriate time frames. Insider trading information leakage but also industry specificities imply additional validity drawbacks. The external validity is challenged by geographically limited and time-targeted studies as well as non-typical samples that feature a lowered replicability and generalizability of the findings.

Socially Responsible Investment (SRI)

The most common forms to align financial investments with ethical, moral, and social considerations are screenings, shareholder advocacy, community investing, and social venture capital funding. Screenings integrate the evaluation of corporate financial and social performances into portfolio selections. Positive screenings target corporations with sound social and environmental responsibility. Negative screenings exclude entities featuring morally and ethically irresponsible corporate conduct. Shareholder advocacy is the active engagement of shareholders in the corporate management by voting, activism, and dialogue. The majority of shareholders exercise their voting rights by proxy resolutions, in which a third party has the right to advocate for the shareholders before the corporate board. Negative shareholder activism comprises political lobbying, consumer boycotts, stakeholder confrontation, and negative publicity. Community investing describe ear-marks of investment funds for community development, but also features access to financial products and services to un(der)served communities. Social venture capital supports pro-social start-ups and social entrepreneurs for the greater goal of increasing the social impact of financial markets. This chapter explores socially responsible investment.