Let Me Show You the World in My Eyes: Reviewing Corporate Social Responsibility Literature Reviews

Low-paradigm interdisciplinary research fields such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) are characterized by a lack of consensus about their boundaries and content, which makes the capture of their evolution challenging. Building on social studies of science, this paper conceptualizes literature reviews as re-presentations—i.e. deliberate attempts at defining research priorities, building relevant categorizations to organize fields, and shaping their development—that can help tracking long-time shifts in fields. To study the evolution of CSR re-presentations, we conduct a systematic review of 48 CSR literature reviews from 1975 until 2019. Our results show that: (a) the CSR field purposes have shifted from ambitious searches for paradigmatic integration with broad constructs to the specification of CSR subfields; (b) a few recurrent field categorizations imposed themselves as taken-for-granted ways of classifying CSR studies, but also created blind-spots in light of the fast-paced epistemological diversification of CSR studies; and (c) most early field calls for new orientations (e.g. search for a unique paradigm) have failed to shape the field, whereas a few recent ones have quickly delivered (e.g. micro-CSR shift).