TALK 1: Understanding corporate social irresponsibility; TALK 2: Corporate Social Responsibility in the Health Sector

Event: TALK 1: Understanding corporate social irresponsibility; TALK 2: Corporate Social Responsibility in the Health Sector

Date: On Wednesday 15 April 2026

Time: 12:15-13:45

Venue: Online via Zoom

Registration is free, but kindly confirm your attendance by sending an email to maks@um.edu.mt

Corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) is viewed as any company activity that leads to disadvantages or harm to other actors (Lin-Hi and Müller, 2013) and is defined as the “sets of corporate actions that negatively affect an identifiable social stakeholder’s legitimate claims” (Strike et al., 2006:852).

CSI represents irresponsible behaviour (perceived by unbiased observers) (Nunes, 2018) as being at the cost of the entire system. It manifests itself as “a decision to accept an alternative that is thought by the decision maker to be inferior to another alternative when the effects upon all parties are considered” (Armstrong, 1977:185).

Recently, researchers have recognized that both corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) represent distinct constructs, and instead of representing polar opposites, the terms of CSR and CSI may indeed co-exist (Mendiratta et al., 2023). As emphasized by Tench et al. (2012:11), “practitioners, academicians and activists alike can agree that social benefits are greater from focusing on reducing of CSI rather than on the promotion of CSR”.

Moreover, it is argued that the concept of CSI provides a more credible measure of company activity, mitigating the false impression of “superficial window dressing activities” (Nunn, 2012:79) of CSR symbolic actions or disclosure, which may give unearned competitive advantages of one company over the others.

Maria Aluchna PhD, Professor of Management, Head of Department of Management Theory Warsaw School of Economics, Chair of the Management Faculty Board Warsaw School of Economics, Chair of Sustainable Business and Finance bachelor program. Principal investigator and members in research grants, currently by National Science Center and National Agency for Academic Exchange.

She specializes in corporate governance, sustainability disclosure and strategic management. Expert of National Science Center (NCN), Foundation for Polish Science (FNP), Ministry of Science and Higher Education (MNiSW), Ministry of Technology and Development and Kościuszko Foundation. Off counsel in Głuchowski, Siemiątkowski i Zwara law firm. Member of European Corporate Governance Institute, International Corporate Governance Society, European Academy of Management (EURAM), International Society for Business, Economics and Ethics (ISBEE), Academy of Management (AOM), Academy of International Business (AIB).

The pandemic that besieged our world in late 2019 – the Corona virus 2019 commonly referred to as COVID-19 has seriously affected all countries of the world in a manner not seen for about 100 years. The pandemic has reshaped our world in an unimaginable way.

More than 2 million global citizens have lost their lives because of the pandemic, hospitals and other health service institutions that cater for people were brought to a point of no return. Private hospitals in some parts of the world were turning prospective patients away because there were no beds for them or health personnel to look after these prospective patients.

It was an unforgettable experience that will be remembered for centuries to come. How have health service institutions, governments, corporate entities, individual citizens, and society in general coped or are still coping with the pandemic?

This book intends to increase our readers’ understanding of how things have shaped up or still shaping up in this area since the pandemic. The pandemic has transformed global lives in different area. We are now able to do many things through the internet. Meetings – local, nation and international are now held freely using different software, lectures are held remotely by institutions to students based in different parts of the world, medical practitioners meet their patients remotely and prescribe medication, conferences are held remotely with attendees taking part in these conferences without stepping out of their homes and many other great things global communities are doing innovatively as a result of the unwanted and very painful pandemic.

Samuel o. Idowu, PhD is Professor of Accounting and Sustainability at the Guildhall School of Business and Law, London Metropolitan University. He is also a Professor of CSR and Sustainability at Nanjing University of Finance & Economics, China and Professor of Sustainability at 1st December 1918 University of Alba Iulia, Romania.

He is a fellow member of the Chartered Governance Institute, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Governance Institute and a named freeman of the City of London. He is the CEO and President of the Global Corporate Governance Institute an international network of CSR scholars in more than 40 countries around the globe. Samuel has published over one hundred articles in both professional and academic journals and contributed chapters in several edited books and is the Editor-in-Chief of three major global reference books by Springer – the Encyclopedia of Corporate Social Responsibility (ECSR), the Dictionary of Corporate Social Responsibility (DCSR) and the Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management (ESM) and he is a Series Editor for Springer’s CSR, Sustainability, Ethics and Governance books.

Samuel is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Sustainable Business (JSB) and the American Journal of Economics and Business Administration (AJEBA). Samuel has been in academia for more than 30 years winning one of the Highly Commended Awards of Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence in 2008 and 2014. In 2010, one of his edited books was placed in 18th position out of forty top Sustainability books by Cambridge University Programme for Sustainability Leadership and in 2016 one of his books won the outstanding Business Reference Book of the year of the American Library Association.

In 2018 he won a CSR Leadership Award in Cologne, Germany and in 2019 he won the 101 Most Impactful CSR Leaders Award in Mumbai, India. Samuel has attended and presented papers at several national and international conferences and workshops on CSR and made a number of keynote speeches at international conferences and workshops and written the foreword to a number of leading books in the field of CSR and Sustainable Development. And he has examined on a few PhD theses in the UK, Australia, South Africa, the Netherlands and New Zealand.