Conceptual Modeling for Corporate Social Responsibility: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Enterprises have been challenged to adopt practices of sustainability to benefit shareholders and society with goods standing much beyond monetary profit or required by law. In combination with environmental and economic concerns, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become an option to leverage businesses with good reputation and to attract sustainability-aware market segments. In line with such a demand, this paper presents a systematic literature review of conceptual modeling studies referring explicitly to certifications, laws or norms of CSR. The more specific research goal of this work is to discover ontologies for representing CSR best practices, design patterns or policies. In total, 921 peer-reviewed papers were analyzed, from which only 17 were considered relevant for data extraction. The main result of this work is the identification of a research gap in explicit knowledge representation of CSR practices for Information Systems design, which ought to be filled to complement the (dominant) economic perspective on sustainability.