Latest evolution of academic research in corporate social responsibility: an empirical analysis

Enrique Bigne (), Alejandro Alvarado Herrera, Rafael Currás Pérez and José Javier Rivera Alcami

Social Responsibility Journal, 2010, vol. 6, issue 3, 332-344

Abstract: Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to determine whether management‐ and marketing‐salient literature focused on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and related issues has evolved from 2003 to 2006, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and to learn which of three competitive epistemological evolutional views (progressive, variegational, normativist) best fits CSR evolution in both disciplines. Design/methodology/approach - Following an ex professo methodology developed by de Bakker, Groenewegen and Den Hond, a content analysis (CA)‐based empirical examination of 570 papers focused on CSR and corporate social performance (CSP) published in indexed management and marketing journals between 2003 and 2006 was conducted. The selected temporal scope is equivalent, in terms of CSR published papers, to the period 1972‐2002 analyzed by de Bakker et al. Three coders judged each paper by their epistemological orientation and discipline pertinence, achieving larger enough reliability coefficients. Findings - The epistemological evolution of CSR within the management and marketing literatures fits a progressive view, and both alternative evolutional perspectives, variegational and normativist, were rejected. This finding means that theoretical‐oriented papers (conceptual, exploratory or predictive) prevailed over prescriptive (instrumental and normative) and descriptive articles. This qualitative evolution has been accompanied by a significant growth in the total number of CSR papers published in the broad management field from 2003 to 2006. Research limitations/implications - Judgments were mainly based on papers' abstracts, titles and keywords. Full text analyses were only done on those cases where coders had doubts. Originality/value - The research contributes to a better understanding of the role of CSR within the management and marketing disciplines, as it is the first to analyse the epistemological evolution of CSR in the academic research. The findings serve to refute the ideas that CSR research has an intrinsic normative character, is still too embryonic or has a disoriented evolution.

Keywords: Social responsibility; Company performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:eme:srjpps:v:6:y:2010:i:3:p:332-344

DOI: 10.1108/17471111011064726

Access Statistics for this article

Social Responsibility Journal is currently edited by Prof David Crowther

More articles in Social Responsibility Journal from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().