Firms with benefits: A systematic review of responsible entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility literature

Sarah Tiba,Marko P Hekkert,Frank J Van Rijnsoever

doi:10.1002/csr.1682

Abstract

AbstractThe scholarly literature has so far paid limited attention to responsibility by commercial entrepreneurs. This paper compares responsible entrepreneurship (RE) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) scholarship in order to identify future fields of research. For this purpose, we assess the strengths and weaknesses of extant RE scholarship through the lens of CSR. We have reviewed 11,260 papers via latent Dirichlet allocation for our work. We find that existing RE literature places disproportionate emphasis on how firms can benefit society instead of on how contributions to sustainable development can benefit a firm. Furthermore, the RE literature pays limited attention to employee well‐being, customer preference, and civil society as a stakeholder. Also, environmental issues and their balancing with financial and social issues remain relatively under‐researched. Overall, we hope that scholarly works inspired by this study may ultimately help to ensure responsible behaviour of start‐ups.

Highlights

Responsibility, once a mere sideshow of doing business, has in recent years moved centre stage
This section is structured as follows: First, we present in Section 4.1 (Table 4) the 15 topics that have the greatest likelihood of appearing in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature in comparison with the responsible entrepreneurship (RE) literature
We focus on the weaknesses rather than the strengths of current RE scholarship when viewed through the lens of CSR research

Summary

Introduction

Responsibility, once a mere sideshow of doing business, has in recent years moved centre stage. With companies as diverse as Nestlé, Shell, and recently even PornHub championing corporate responsibility, the issue really seems to transgress all boundaries. Three out of four CEOs believe that in the future business, success will be defined by more than financial profit (PWC, 2016). This trend is fostered by governments and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) alike. In 2014, the European Union passed its corporate social responsibility (CSR) guideline, requiring large listed companies to report on their finances and on their social and environmental performance, and NGOs like AccountAbility, the International Organization for Standardization, and the United Nations all have initiatives geared towards increasing the responsibility of businesses (Godfrey & Hatch, 2007)

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