Citation: Morales-Parragué, M.;
Araya-Castillo, L.; Molina-Luque, F.;
Moraga-Flores, H. Scientometric
Analysis of Research on Corporate
Social Responsibility. Sustainability
2022, 14, 2291. https://doi.org/
10.3390/su14042291
Academic Editors: João Carlos de
Oliveira Matias and Paolo Renna
Received: 12 January 2022
Accepted: 9 February 2022
Published: 17 February 2022
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Article
Scientometric Analysis of Research on Corporate
Social Responsibility
Mario Morales-Parragué
1,2,
*, Luis Araya-Castillo
3
, Fidel Molina-Luque
4
and Hugo Moraga-Flores
5
1
Facultad de Economía, Gobierno y Comunicaciones, Universidad Central de Chile, Santiago 8320000, Chile
2
Law and Business Administration Program, University of Lleida, 25003 Lleida, Spain
3
Facultad de Economía y Negocios, Universidad Andrés Bello, Santiago 7591538, Chile; luis.araya@unab.cl
4
Facultad de Educación, Psicología y Trabajo Social (GESEC-INDEST), Universidad de Lleida,
25003 Lleida, Spain; fidel.molinaluque@udl.cat
5
Departamento de Contabilidad y Auditoría, Universidad de Concepción, Concepción 4070386, Chile;
hmoraga@udec.cl
* Correspondence: mmorales@fen.uchile.cl; Tel.: +56-9-97428221
Abstract:
This work shows how Corporative Social Responsibility (CSR) has been filtering into
different management areas, providing an insight into its evolution, and presenting literature reviews
and efforts to incorporate conceptualisations and recommendations on its application. It can be
understood through a scientometric and bibliometric analysis, using the WoS documents on the
“Social Responsibility” concept in the “Business and Economics” category, analysing a total of
8728 papers up to the year 2020. In this work, CSR is associated with views from different fields of
study in economics and business, highlighting diverse management fields; it seeks to explain the
correlation between CSR and concepts from such fields of study, suggesting that there is a need to
order and question the current understanding of CSR and show its relevance so it can be considered
an area of specialisation within the management of businesses.
Keywords:
corporate social responsibility; CSR; stakeholders; management; scientometric
analysis; VOSviewer
1. Introduction
Papers by Bowen [
1
] and Levitt [
2
] on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) sparked
an academic, political, and business debate on its nature and implications for organisational
management. From then on, efforts have been made to offer views and classifications that
could help its understanding and contribute to the construction and application of the CSR
concept [
3
–
8
], which seems to be capturing the interest of various management areas to be
studied. The huge amount of scholarly output, the many efforts to categorise it, and the
discussion to guide its understanding and study, pose a major academic challenge. The
analysis of the field of study, i.e., CSR-related concepts, is an important step in planning
research on this topic.
This work shows how CSR has been developing since its early academic debates,
exploring current approaches, and studying CSR’s relationship with other fields. The
research starts by extensively analysing the literature that describes the efforts made by
scholars over time in order to be able to understand and categorize CSR. It also shows
how the literature is becoming increasingly complex as it relates to multiple areas of
management. A bibliometric and scientometric analysis is then carried out to explore
the growth of scientific production over time and contribute to the understanding of its
current state. With these two combined studies, the idea is to question whether or not CSR
should be considered as an area of specialisation within management and business, or
as a fundamental alternative to organisational management and start a debate to build a
common understanding of CSR and explore a new ways to apply it.
Sustainability 2022, 14, 2291. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14042291 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability
