A Study of Intellectual Movements of Corporate Social Responsibility in Iran's Accounting Journals (2016-2020)

Recognition of different aspects of corporate social responsibility is increasingly important. Therefore, knowing previously researched issues in this regard is considered as an unavoidable necessity for future studies. The main purpose of the present study is to review the content of published scientific papers in this term, gain more knowledge about social responsibility, and find out the research gaps in this regard. In the present research, content analysis, that is a qualitative method to analyze and identify previous research works during a five-year period from 2016 to 2020, was used. Ultimately, among 2372 scientific papers published in this regard, 68 articles in 16 specialized accounting journals with the keyword of social responsibility were chosen for analysis. The results showed that 38 articles out of 68 ones under review have dealt with economic impacts of social responsibility on corporate financial performance. Although the number of articles published in terms of the social aspect of this issue is less than those about economic aspects, the former with 12 subcategories has a more extensive thematic range compared to the latter. The percentage of social responsibility studies compared to all published articles is 2.87%. The main application of the findings in this paper is classification of the previously conducted research articles that is useful to find the gaps in terms of corporate social responsibility. Despite proved positive impacts of corporate social responsibility on the betterment of financial and non-financial performance of organizations in many internal and external research studies, lack of a unified standard for to report social responsibility on the one hand, and arbitrary behavior of directors to report social and environmental activities on the other hand, have made the information in this term less sufficient and as a result, research about social responsibility faces some challenges.