Corporate Citizenship: Structuring the Research Field

Alexander Kruggel,Manuela Fabro,Victor Tiberius

doi:10.3390/su12135289

Alexander Kruggel, Manuela Fabro + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12135289

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Abstract

Corporate citizenship, which is firms’ societal engagement beyond customer and shareholder interests, is a prominent topic in management practice and has led to extensive research. This increased interest resulted in a complex and fragmented scholarly literature. In order to structure and map the field quantitatively, we conducted a temporal analysis of publications and citations, an analysis of the productivity of involved disciplines, an analysis of the productivity of publication forms including journal impact factors, an author productivity and citation analysis, a co-author analysis, an article citation analysis, an article co-citation analysis, and a keyword co-occurrence analysis. Results of these bibliometric analyses show that corporate citizenship research seems to have been in a phase of stagnation since 2014 and shows a rather low degree of interdisciplinarity. Papers are predominantly published in high impact journals. Authors show little collaboration with other researchers. Current research relates to other business ethics topics, addresses philosophical foundations, and starts to relate to human resource management and organization studies.

Highlights

First coined in 1969 [1] and gaining momentum around 2004 [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], corporate citizenship (CC) describes the civic behavior of companies
The paper is structured as follows: starting with the methodology section, we describe in detail the employed bibliometric methods, their function and applicability for the corporate citizenship research field
Analysis of the productivity of publications involves using the proportion of different publication forms and, for journals, their impact factors to discover if the impact of single publications is related to the overall journal impact factors

Summary

Introduction

First coined in 1969 [1] and gaining momentum around 2004 [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], corporate citizenship (CC) describes the civic behavior of companies. The creation of the Ron Brown Corporate Citizenship Award by US President Bill Clinton increased public awareness of the concept [12,13]. With increasing importance in practice, science has become more concerned with the topic and has produced a large number of publications over the past 50 years, creating a confusing research landscape. In order to structure such a topic, literature reviews are used [14]. In contrast to this qualitative approach, with today’s technical possibilities, bibliometric analyses are available as a quantitative and objective method. The number of publications and, in particular, citations is considered to provide information about the impact of research [15]

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