The universal growth of social media usage among tertiary students has been linearly associated with academic performance. As social media use continues its constant growth, its application among tertiary students is inevitable. Its influence on academic performance turns out to be an ever more important question to think about. Researchers have mixed results, some found social media usage having little to no effect, and others found negative and positive effects on academic performance. Using a sample of 808 students in ten public tertiary institutions, this study makes an effort on how to deal with these differing outcomes and to investigate the effect of social media usage on tertiary students’ academic performance. We explored the relationship of the frequency of students’ use of social media for educational purposes and their academic performance, as measured by their cumulative grade point average (i.e., CGPA) with academic self-efficacy and innovation characteristics as mediator and moderator, respectively. The results revealed that social media usage for educational purposes positively related to academic performance. It also demonstrated that the use of social media can negatively affect academic performance. This study makes it more noticeable the effect of academic self-efficacy as a mediator in further improving the academic performance of students. Additionally, the empirical results of the study demonstrated that the moderating effect of innovation characteristics between social media usage and academic performance was stronger. The practical relevance of the study is to help governments, politicians, policy makers, students, educational institutions, and other stakeholders to carve specific policies, guidelines, and initiatives in support of social media usage as an innovative and effective tool for learning and sustainable academic performance.

Prior CSR and firm performance research has produced mixed results. Even so, numerous researches examining this relationship from the perspective of international standardisation have primarily concentrated on developed economics. This leaves an obvious gap within the extant literature with regards to evidence from sub-Saharan Africa. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between the extent of CSR disclosure performance and firm value, in an emerging institutional setting. Using hand collected data of South African listed companies, we apply the GRI G3.1 guidelines, as a measure of disclosure performance. Based on the panel data fixed effect model, we document a positive but insignificant relationship between CSR disclosure performance and firm value. Secondly, a negative and insignificant relationship was found between environmental disclosure performance and firm value. Lastly, we found a positive and statistically significant relationship between social disclosure performance and firm value. Overall, our findings suggest that CSR disclosure has a limited effect on firm value. Our findings hold for a set of robustness tests. Our findings suggest that the incorporation of sustainability disclosure, on the basis of GRI, is moderately high among the selected companies. Implications of our results suggest that CSR disclosure may not necessarily influence firm value, despite its numerous benefits. We contribute to this line of research from a multi-theoretical perspective.

Background: There is growing literature promoting corporate governance mechanisms as important elements that could mitigate the inconclusive findings within the corporate social performance and firm profitability research. A key theoretical assumption within the extant literature that provides support for this proposition is that corporate social performance and firm profitability are organisational outcomes in the presence of good corporate governance.Aim: Firstly, the aim is to re-investigate voluntary social performance disclosure (SPD) and long-term profitability association from the perspective of international standards, using the Global Reporting Initiative G3.1 guidelines. Secondly, to examine the joint moderating effect of board independence and managerial ownership (MO) on the voluntary SPD and profitability nexus.Setting: The South Africa institutional setting, where recent corporate governance regimes require firms to voluntarily make corporate governance related disclosures on both shareholder-and stakeholder-related information is used as the study context.Method: Utilising manually extracted data of listed firms, over the period 2010 to 2015, the generalised least square regression and seemingly unrelated regression (with a 1-year lag as the main independent variable) are used to examine the stated hypotheses.Results: We found a positive association between voluntary SPD and long-term profitability. We also found that the presence of non-executive directors positively moderates the association between voluntary SPD and long-term profitability. Thirdly, the proportion of MO significantly positively moderates the association between voluntary SPD and long-term profitability. Lastly, the complementary role of the presence of non-executive directors and the proportion of MO significantly positively moderates the association between voluntary SPD and long-term profitability.Conclusion: This study finds support for scholarly theoretical arguments that organisational outcomes are largely possible in the presence of good corporate governance, which has a long-term implication for firms’ shareholder wealth maximisation. This study contributes to the ongoing research examining the notion of substitutive versus complementary effects of governance mechanisms, and a growing research literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure from the perspective of international standardisation. This study therefore makes far-reaching contributions to the corporate governance and social responsibility literature in an African context.

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