Latest evolution of academic research in
corporate social responsibility: an empirical
analysis
Enrique Bigne
´
Alcan
˜
iz, Alejandro Alvarado Herrera, Rafael Curra
´
sPe
´
rez and
Jose
´
Javier Rivera Alcami
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to determine whether management- and marketing-salient
literature focused on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and related issues has evolved from 2003 to
2006, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and to learn which of three competitive epistemological
evolutional views (progressive, variegational, normativist) best fits CSR evolution in both disciplines.
Design/methodology/approach – Following an ex professo methodology developed by de Bakker,
Groenewegen and Den Hond, a content analysis (CA)-based empirical examination of 570 papers
focused on CSR and corporate social performance (CSP) published in indexed management and
marketing journals between 2003 and 2006 was conducted. The selected temporal scope is equivalent,
in terms of CSR published papers, to the period 1972-2002 analyzed by de Bakker et al. Three coders
judged each paper by their epistemological orientation and discipline pertinence, achieving larger
enough reliability coefficients.
Findings – The epistemological evolution of CSR within the management and marketing literatures fits a
progressive view, and both alternative evolutional perspectives, variegational and normativist, were
rejected. This finding means that theoretical-oriented papers (conceptual, exploratory or predictive)
prevailed over prescriptive (instrumental and normative) and descriptive articles. This qualitative
evolution has been accompanied by a significant growth in the total number of CSR papers published in
the broad management field from 2003 to 2006.
Research limitations/implications – Judgments were mainly based on papers’ abstracts, titles and
keywords. Full text analyses were only done on those cases where coders had doubts.
Originality/value – The research contributes to a better understanding of the role of CSR within the
management and marketing disciplines, as it is the first to analyse the epistemological evolution of CSR
in the academic research. The findings serve to refute the ideas that CSR research has an intrinsic
normative character, is still too embryonic or has a disoriented evolution.
Keywords Social responsibility, Company performance
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a widely studied and debated concept in both
management and marketing disciplines (Carroll, 1999; Garriga and Mele
´
, 2004; Maignan
and Ferrell, 2004). Academics and practitioners have been constantly reviewing and
redefining it because of its ‘‘inherently controversial’’ (Carrigan and Attalla, 2001, p. 560)
nature. This has propitiated a plethora of theories, perspectives and terminology (Garriga
and Mele
´
, 2004) causing confusion (Lantos, 2001) when attempting to deeply understand
the CSR construct.
Striving to clarify the direction of CSR epistemological evolution, de Bakker et al. (2005)
developed an ex professo methodology founded in content analysis (CA), and applied it
within a bibliometric analysis of a 30-year period (1972-2002) of research on CSR. While their
findings allowed them to discard the idea that the evolution had a normativist sense, they
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SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY JOURNAL
j
VOL. 6 NO. 3 2010, pp. 332-344, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1747-1117 DOI 10.1108/17471111011064726
Enrique Bigne
´
Alcan
˜
iz is a
Professor in the Department
of Marketing, Faculty of
Economics, University of
Valencia, Valencia, Spain.
Alejandro Alvarado Herrera
is an Associate Professor,
Divisio
´
n de Desarrollo
Sustentable, University of
Quintana Roo, Cozumel,
Mexico. Rafael Curra
´
s
Pe
´
rez and Jose
´
Javier
Rivera Alcami are both
Assistant Professors in the
Department of Marketing,
Faculty of Economics,
University of Valencia,
Valencia, Spain.