The Relationship of Corporate Social Responsibility with Business Performance—A Bibliometric Literature Review

Emmanuel Jeffrey Dzage () and György Norbert Szabados
Additional contact information
Emmanuel Jeffrey Dzage: Ihrig Károly Doctoral School of Management and Business, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Debrecen, Böszörményi út 138, 4032 Debrecen, Hungary
György Norbert Szabados: Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Debrecen, Böszörményi út 138, 4032 Debrecen, Hungary

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 7, 1-25

Abstract: The significant role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in achieving sustainability and in meeting the expectations of stakeholders has been well documented. Using a collection of 2173 publications on CSR and its connections with business performance, this study conducted a bibliometric investigation using the Systematic Literature Network Analysis (SLNA) technique combined with network visualizations to demonstrate the current research trends, most topical themes and the developing areas of interest in the growing field of CSR and its linkages with business performance for an approximate period from 2004 to 2023 as published in the Scopus database of two decades. The goal was to explore the research gaps by analyzing the most cited authors and most impactful publications by year, location, subject area and document type. The study also outlined the trends by topic prevalence, commonly used keywords and citation networks based on co-occurrence and co-authorship to identify the current thematic gaps. The results reveal a mild rate of growth in scholarly interest around the field of CSR and business performance until 2022, where a manifold increase in publications was recorded. An expanding focus on human, social and organizational behavior, economic systems, financial and social performance, leadership, stakeholder management and management science was identified, although there is a scarcity of studies around issues regarding developing countries, climate change, CSR disclosure and small businesses. These findings demonstrate the current state of the research and offer interesting insights and timely research directions as a roadmap for future studies.

Keywords: bibliometrics; corporate social responsibility (CSR); literature review; business performance; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/7/2637/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/7/2637/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:16:y:2024:i:7:p:2637-:d:1362322

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().