Kemi C. Yekini

Organisations are increasingly expected to respond to societal and environmental issues within their supply chains. The nuances of this expectation necessitate the consideration of the disparities in corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices within supply chains. Drawing on the stakeholder theory, this paper examines the meanings and influences on socially responsible purchasing (SRP) in supply chains. It adopts an interpretivist qualitative methodology, relying on data from semi‐structured, face‐to‐face interviews with practitioners from multi‐national and indigenous organisations in Nigeria. Our findings present a useful understanding of SRP based on the specific endogenous‐level and exogenous‐level influences. In particular, we develop an encompassing scope for SRP's meaning, outlining its key components, clarifying its boundaries and highlighting inconsistencies in its description. Our study provides a fresh understanding of SRP, with attendant contributions to the broad literature on CSR, corporate governance and supply chain management. It also offers insights to managers, purchasers, suppliers, financial analysts and policy‐makers in embedding SRP.

In this chapter, we show how to interpret the financial statements of firms in the oil and gas industry. We first provide a tour of fundamental building blocks of financial statements noting items that are peculiar to the oil and gas industry. We present analysis of typical oil and gas firm financial statements considering profitability, efficiency, liquidity, and leverage. We use ratios and present two approaches to analysis – trend analysis and common size analysis. We end the chapter with a note on non-financial information and how that complements the analysis of financial data. Financial ratios are only useful for financial information analysis, but other non-financial information should be considered when conducting analysis of performance to get a full picture.

Despite the proliferation of studies on corporate social responsibility (CSR), there is a lack of consensus and a cardinal methodological base for research on the quality of CSR communication. Over the decades, studies in this space have remained conflicting, unintegrated, and sometimes overlapping. Drawing on semiotics—a linguistic-based theoretical and analytical tool, our article explores an alternative perspective to evaluating the quality and reliability of sustainability reports. Our article advances CSR communication research by introducing a theoretical-cum-methodological perspective which provides unique insights into how to evaluate the quality of CSR communication. Particularly, we illustrate the application of our proposed methodology on selected U.K. FTSE 100 companies. Our two-phased analysis employed the Greimas Canonical Narrative Schema and the Semiotic Square of Veridiction in drawing meanings from selected sustainability/CSR reports. In addition, we present a distinctive CSR report quality model capable of guiding policy makers and firms in designing sustainability/CSR reporting standards.