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.
From the first discussions on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the 1950s to today, there is evidence of a ramification of concepts associated with CSR that produce a web of relationships that evolves in different directions. This paper analyses the conceptual structure of the CSR field, contributing to understanding its development and evolution between 1975 and 2021, opening a discussion of what these concept relationships might show in the understanding, development, and future application of CSR in business and society. For this purpose, networks of concepts were identified by using the SciMAT software on 6861 papers obtained from the WOS database in the Business and Management categories in the field of study. The results show that the field still appears to be far from understood and is very focused on the interests of companies. We offer and opportunity to rethink its purpose from a perspective that integrates other dimensions that concentrate on the society–business relationship. Based on these results, this study presents new research directions to explore both the drivers and results of the application of CSR.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.