Abstract
Research on corporate social responsibility continues to advance in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), although the results remain fairly contentious and fragmented. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability today are strong trends in the corporate world. This article discusses the literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) research in SMEs with the goal of understanding the history and research patterns over the last 20 years based on the review of 120 papers. We describe the contribution of literature in terms of epistemological orientation and identify the state-of-the-art of CSR research by linking it to a bibliometric analysis. In this paper, we contribute to the literature by finding a growing interest of CSR in Europe and North America and a relative increase in CSR empirical studies vis-a-vis a relative decrease in descriptive papers. According to our results, we rank CSR research in SMEs at a growing stage but with theoretical limitations when it comes to evolving into a mature stage and, eventually, provide a reference point for the theoretical and methodological positioning of future research.
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Notes
These criteria can be summarized as, i) no currently available theory has adequate scope to explain the phenomenon or the underlying cause-and-effect relationship associated with it; and ii) no research design or methodology is superior to others when investigating the various aspects of the phenomenon.
This law establishes that 20% of the effort produces 80% of the results. Therefore, in this study, productivity per authors means that a minority of authors is responsible for most of the articles published in CSR-SMEs.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to appreciate the collaboration of the editor-in-chief (Dr. Jöern Block), and the two anonymous reviewers for their assistance on the previous version of this document. We also thank Juan Carlos Trujillo Lora for some extremely useful suggestions.
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Guillén, L., Sergio, A. & Manuel, C. Research on social responsibility of small and medium enterprises: a bibliometric analysis. Manag Rev Q 72, 857–909 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-021-00217-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-021-00217-w