Corporate social responsibility (CSR) continues to be an important topic in organisations worldwide. This paper considers the implementation of CSR by state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In this type of organisation, the state acts as a powerful stakeholder as it acts as representative, guarantor and shareholder of public interests. SOEs would seem to be an ideal testing ground for assumptions about CSR that have been imported from the (US) private sector, in particular, how stakeholders can influence and be influenced by CSR policies. Against this background and drawing on diverse literature, this paper presents the features and challenges identified in the SOE sector in relation to CSR. It proposes a systemic view of CSR to identify relevant possibilities to help the advancement of CSR in this sector and from a perspective that considers the wider context of SOEs. Findings suggest that although senior SOE managers show awareness of and commitment to CSR principles through a number of fixed or static elements, there remains an imperative need to enhance their application of CSR in SOE plans, strategies and daily activities, in other words to adopt a more proactive, stakeholder awareness and dynamic view of CSR.

PurposeCompanies increasingly find themselves under pressure to adopt socially responsible forms of operation. Since organizational change is crucially influenced by knowledge creation and sense‐making, this paper aims to determine how knowledge management (KM) processes can foster (or impede) progress towards corporate social responsibility (CSR).Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews the KM literature to identify areas of knowledge management that are particularly relevant to managing a company's social and environmental externalities.FindingsDistinguishing between two related but analytically distinct approaches to knowledge management, namely an element and a process view, the paper develops a conceptual model of how knowledge management can impact on CSR.Originality/valueDistinguishing between elements of knowledge and processes of managing these allows a more systematic and comprehensive approach to managing knowledge around CSR.

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T his paper presents two modes of systems thinking education to help make sense of previous and future experiences in this field as well as in soft operational research in general. Using Abbott's ideas on professional knowledge I present these modes as based on either (1) abstracting or (2) engaging. The former emphasises the value of systems thinking in helping people understand abstractions to deal with complex situations. The latter focuses on using abstractions to facilitate students' engagement with complex situations in areas outside operational research including sustainability and project management. I present each mode based on my experience in a higher education setting in the UK, and I highlight key elements and possibilities for these modes that could inform future developments in systems thinking and operational research education.

While smart meters can provide households with more autonomy regarding their energy consumption, they can also be a significant intrusion into the household’s privacy. There is abundant research implementing protection methods for different aspects (e.g., noise-adding and data aggregation, data down-sampling); while the private data are protected as sensitive information is hidden, some of the compulsory functions such as Time-of-use (TOU) billing or value-added services are sacrificed. Moreover, some methods, such as rechargeable batteries and homomorphic encryption, require an expensive energy storage system or central processor with high computation ability, which is unrealistic for mass roll-out. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving smart metering system which is a combination of existing data aggregation and data down-sampling mechanisms. The system takes an angle based on the ethical concerns about privacy and it implements a hybrid privacy-utility trade-off strategy, without sacrificing functionality. In the proposed system, the smart meter plays the role of assistant processor rather than information sender/receiver, and it enables three communication channels to transmit different temporal resolution data to protect privacy and allow freedom of choice: high frequency feed-level/substation-level data are adopted for grid operation and management purposes, low frequency household-level data are used for billing, and a privacy-preserving valued-add service channel to provide third party (TP) services. In the end of the paper, the privacy performance is evaluated to examine whether the proposed system satisfies the privacy and functionality requirements.