Ethics and Social Responsibility in Family Firms. Research Domain and Future Research Trends from a Bibliometric Perspective

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethics have been studied in a wide variety of business contexts, but the field of family business has mainly devoted attention to Corporate Social Responsibility, with less attention paid to the field of ethics. Being two closely related fields, they should be analyzed jointly in order to study the evolution of the field. To achieve this objective, we use two different bibliometric techniques, a co-word and a document coupling, as they are complementary and allow us to identify research topics and, therefore, to establish future research lines. Results show that the differences that exist between CSR in family businesses and CSR in non-family businesses continue to be a central focus, and that ethics should be found in the roots of that question. However, the underpinning factors and the linkage of the different CSR policies and ethical values to performance still require more attention. To be more precise, topics such as socio-emotional wealth, financial performance, ethics, firm, and management remain at the core of the field.

A Systematic Literature Review on Ownership and Corporate Social Responsibility in Family Firms

“…Following the best practice [22] and procedures in other published review articles [4,9,23,24], we searched the Web of Science (WOS) database and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) for relevant peer-reviewed articles that were published in journals with a social-science citation index, a science citation index, an engineering index, and a Chinese social-science citation index. Web of Science (WOS) was widely used in previous academic research [9,[25][26][27] and it is regarded as the most comprehensive source of articles in social science [9,28,29].…”

“…First, keywords were identified and searched in the title, keywords, and abstracts of published articles in the selected databases. The CSR-related keywords that were used for our literature search included "corporate social responsibility", "social responsibility", and "CSR" [9,24]. The family-firm-related keywords were "family business", "family firm", "family company", "family enterprise", and "family owned" [9,24].…”

“…The CSR-related keywords that were used for our literature search included "corporate social responsibility", "social responsibility", and "CSR" [9,24]. The family-firm-related keywords were "family business", "family firm", "family company", "family enterprise", and "family owned" [9,24]. The ownership-related keywords were "ownership" and "share" [4,24].…”

“…The family-firm-related keywords were "family business", "family firm", "family company", "family enterprise", and "family owned" [9,24]. The ownership-related keywords were "ownership" and "share" [4,24]. The search in WOS yielded 1,475 studies, while the search in CNKI yielded 150 outputs, resulting in 1,625 articles in total.…”

“…We also excluded non-English articles that were published in the WOS database and non-Chinese articles in the CNKI database. Furthermore, we did not include book chapters and dissertations, as they were unlikely to be peer-reviewed [4,9,23,24]. After this step, 497 articles were retained.…”