Digital Transformation and Corporate ESG

Dear Colleagues,

Currently, green and low carbon, energy savings, and environmental protection have become the consensus for enterprises wishing to shape sustainable business models, build highly resilient organizational capabilities, and construct responsible innovation ecosystems. Rather than purely examining financial performance, ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) is a new evaluation concept that focuses on the sustainable development of enterprises from three dimensions: comprehensive environment, social responsibility, and corporate governance. ESG is essential for encouraging enterprises to achieve high-quality development, common prosperity, and “carbon peaking & carbon neutrality”. Thus, an increasing number of companies are investing in ESG and strengthening ESG disclosure, aiming to enhance entire value and corporate image from multiple perspectives by responding to stakeholders' needs for non-financial information (Alkaraan et al., 2022). Until December 2021, 114 stock exchanges worldwide promoted ESG information disclosure for listed companies, involving nearly 56,000 listed companies (Wang et al., 2022). Faced with “carbon peaking & carbon neutrality”, how enterprises can achieve better ESG performance has become an important issue.

Due to Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet, the world has entered the era of digital economy. The deep integration of emerging digital technologies represented by Internet+, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and blockchain with the real economy has provided effective technical means to boost the digital transformation of enterprises, becoming an essential technical force for ESG development. Digital transformation enables enterprises to gain competitive advantages in products and services, business models, and ecological governance by changing the allocation structure of corporate resources inside and outside enterprises. It also empowers the intelligent transformation and upgrading of traditional industries. Digital transformation presents diversified values (Hu et al., 2022; Gerard & Simon, 2022), such as promoting enterprises’ willingness to innovate green technologies, enhancing their motivation to invest in environmental protection, reducing negative externalities of ESG and information asymmetry, achieving cost reduction and efficiency increases, and enhancing enterprises' ESG practices.

Current studies have mainly focused on the impact of digital transformation on economic performance, enterprise value, and corporate governance structure (Saarikko et al., 2020). As a result, the non-financial value of digital transformation, particularly the mechanism of its impact on ESG, have received little attention. To this end, this Special Issue aims to conduct an in-depth discussion and research on topics related to “Digital Transformation and Corporate ESG” at the theoretical, methodological, and application levels, either by empirically testing existing theories or by attempting to discover or construct new analytical frameworks to solve the practical dilemma of corporate ESG performance in the process of digital transformation. This Special Issue welcomes manuscripts employing qualitative or quantitative methods to conduct rigorous academic research based on digital transformation and ESG practice. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

1. Digital economy and the high-quality development of enterprises;
2. Factors driving digital transformation of enterprises;
3. Evaluation of corporate digital transformation capability;
4. Digital transformation and corporate innovation;
5. ESG governance and corporate value co-creation;
6. ESG evaluation systems in the context of digital transformation;
7. Corporate strategic transformation in the background of digital economy and ESG;
8. Digital transformation and corporate ESG in the context of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.

References:

1. Wang, H.J., Wang, S.Z., Zhang C., & Guo, L.F. (2022) Does Digital Transformation Improve ESG Responsibility Performance? Empirical Research Based on MSCI Index. Foreign Economics & Management, Online first. doi: https://doi.org/10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20221128.202.
2. Hu, J., Han Y.M., & Zhong, Y. (2022) How Corporate Digital Transformation Affects Corporate ESG Performance—Evidence from Chinese listed companies. Review of Industrial Economics, Online first. doi: https://doi.org/10.19313/j.cnki.cn10-1223/f.20221104.001.
3. Alkaraan, F., Albitar, K., Hussainey, K., & Venkatesh, V. G. (2022). Corporate transformation toward Industry 4.0 and financial performance: The influence of environmental, social, and governance (ESG). Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 175, 121423. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2021.121423.
4. Gerard, G., & Simon J.D., S. (2022) Digital transformation, sustainability, and purpose in the multinational enterprise. Journal of World Business, 57(3), 101326. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2022.101326.
5. Saarikko, T., Westergren, U. H., & Blomquist, T. (2020). Digital transformation: Five recommendations for the digitally conscious firm. Business Horizons, 63(6), 825-839. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2020.07.005.

Dr. Guanglei Zhang
Prof. Dr. Jiaojiao Qu
Prof. Dr. Jintao Lu
Dr. Krisztina Szegedi
Guest Editors

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• digital transformation
• ESG
• Industry 4.0
• digital economy