An Examination of the Conceptual Structure of Corporate Social Responsibility Research Through Co-Word Analysis

Asking the organizations to behave responsibly toward the society is an issue that has been increasingly affective on the building blocks of sustainable development (i.e., economy, society, and environment) in the last decades of the 20th century. This has led to the appearance of a concept called corporate social responsibility. This type of responsibility goes beyond economic and financial inquires and includes duties that are necessary for preserving, protecting, and helping the society. The purpose of this study was the examination of the conceptual structure of social responsibility research from 1975 to 2020. To this end, the analyses of co-word and social network data were used. The statistical population included 20168 documents indexed on the Web of Science database. The results showed that from among the 9442 keywords used in the documents, the top five highly frequent words have been corporate social responsibility, performance, management, CSR, and effect. The article “Strategy & Society” has been the most cited article (3527 citations), and Garcia Sanchez has been the top author in terms of document number (73 documents). The US is the top country in terms of the overall document number (4049 out of 20168). Moreover, the findings show that the “Journal of Business Ethics” has been the top publisher of articles in terms of document number (1496 articles), and “Copenhagen Business School” has been the top university in the world in terms of the number of documents (144 documents). The results of this study can provide researchers with a comprehensive outlook in their efforts to attain a deep understanding of the conceptual map of social responsibility research.