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This article reveals a low commitment of Andalusian publicly-owned enterprises with environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting. The results will be useful for practitioners in public water utilities and other GOEs to improve their level of disclosures. The authors stress that managers need to be trained with the skills necessary to provide a better level of ESG disclosure. In addition, managers, along with regulators and policy-makers, need to work together to introduce realistic forcing mechanisms in current and future regulations to enhance their compliance with mandatory ESG reporting requirements. This article analyses environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting by municipally-owned water companies and how it differs from the way other government-owned enterprises report. This article contributes to the literature in two main ways: it examines how the notion of hybridity can impact on ESG disclosures in GOEs and responds to the call by accounting scholars for the use of hybridity framework to provide insights into ESG reporting activity in GOEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reveals that compliance with mandatory disclosure requirements improves over time. However, simply publishing regulations is not sufficient to drive a substantive change in terms of transparency. This study has implications for regulators and professionals about legitimizing laws passed about accounting and reporting by public sector organizations. This article fills an important gap in the field of mandatory disclosure research by examining whether, over time, Spanish SOEs have had higher levels of compliance with the mandatory disclosure requirements contained in the Spanish Law on Transparency and Good Governance. Drawing on institutional theory, and its relationship with resource dependency perspective, the authors conclude that the initial strategy adopted by Spanish SOEs was driven by the coercive pressure exerted by the government by introducing new transparency regulations. Meanwhile, the later strategic response might be associated with the combined influences of normative and mimetic pressures. The findings show that levels of disclosure improved significantly but that just passing a law is not sufficient to increase the level of transparency in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Numerous sustainability assessment tools are being created and applied in the higher education sector. In light of such diversity, there is a need to provide a common guideline for sustainability assessment which makes easier the comparison among universities. Using as a reference the Spanish university system, the main aim of this paper is to develop a multi-item quantitative tool for measuring sustainability performance at universities. Design/methodology/approach: To accomplish this task, the first step was to review the literature on sustainability assessment in universities. After reviewing the literature, the authors found more than 1,000 items. The next step was to select those items which were able to fit to the Spanish university context. On this basis, the authors selected a total of 268 items. These items were discussed in a workshop with senior management members from eight Spanish universities with the aim of analyzing the validity and relevance of the items selected. Findings: Then, the proposal for measuring sustainability in Spanish universities was composed of a total of 156 relevant items. In addition, these items were grouped according to seven different dimensions (corporate governance, students, staff, society, environment, companies and continuous improvement). Also, it is important to note that these items were not associated with political risk and they were linked to provide more reliable information to assess sustainability in universities. Originality/value: Recent literature have stated that the existing tools specifically developed for assessing higher education institutions performance toward sustainability have some weaknesses. Then, one of the main contributions of this study has been the creation of a new multi-item quantitative tool aimed at measuring the integrated consideration of social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability in universities.

Purpose: This study aims to analyze the main factors that might determine the extent to which Spanish organizational management educators use environmental stand-alone subjects to equip students with alternative views of business. To give a more qualitative study, this paper also provides a more detailed curriculum analysis from a double point of view: first, the authors analyze the environmental integration in curricula by means of the presence of environmental embedded subjects. On the other hand, the authors analyze the main environmental topics covered by curriculum of Spanish universities. Design/Methodology/Approach: A Web content analysis and non-parametric mean comparison statistics of the curricula of undergraduate degrees at all universities in Spain was conducted. Findings: One of the main conclusions of this paper is that public universities in Spain are more likely to require an environmental course than private universities. Other factors, such as size, political orientation or chairs/research institutes are not statistically explanatory of environmental education. Another important finding is that environmental training in management courses offered by Spanish universities is still relatively underdeveloped. Comparatively, the authors found that the most common method of teaching environmental issues in Spain is by means of embedded subjects (horizontal integration) in comparison with stand-alone subjects (vertical integration) as a response of the necessity of providing a systemic and holistic approach toward environmental aspects. From this perspective, the main topics covered in curriculum are environmental management, sustainable tourism, environmental economy or environmental impact. Originality/Value: There is a lack of empirical research focuses on analyzing determinant factors to environmental education in management undergraduate curricula of Spanish universities. Indeed, most of previous studies provide a descriptive review of environmental courses in management education.

In public areas, employees are both consumers and producers in information. For sustainable usage of information, employees should be aware of information systems security (ISS). Information systems security (ISS) is critical in further developing public sector information systems, such as e-government. Most ISS breaches are committed by insiders rather than outsiders. This study investigates the applicability of adult social bond theory, which proposes social controls in the form of social bonds that provide deterrence based on the potential shame an employee would feel from committing an ISS breach. The proposed research model consists of four antecedents for adult social bonds: commitment, attachment, belief and job stability. Individual ISS compliance is set as the dependent variance and deterrence and shame are set as the mediators between social bonds and compliance. Analysis of 672 data points largely supports the research model, proving the applicability to ISS of social bonds and social control. Belief seems to have the strongest effect on individual compliance. Implications are discussed and further studies are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]