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

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.

Citation

Bigné Alcañiz, E., Alvarado Herrera, A., Currás Pérez, R. and Rivera Alcami, J.J. (2010), "Latest evolution of academic research in corporate social responsibility: an empirical analysis", Social Responsibility Journal, Vol. 6 No. 3, pp. 332-344. https://doi.org/10.1108/17471111011064726