Characterization of CSR, ESG, and Corporate Citizenship through a Text Mining-Based Review of Literature

Abstract

As the social and environmental roles of companies have been emphasized by various stakeholders, the concepts of CSR (corporate social responsibility), ESG (environmental, social, governance), and corporate citizenship have received a great deal of attention in academia and industry. To understand and distinguish corporate responsibility approaches in the literature, this study employs text mining techniques to comprehensively analyze the summary information of 1235 articles (i.e., title, abstract, and keywords) on CSR, ESG, and corporate citizenship. First, frequently occurring terms in text datasets related to CSR, ESG, and corporate citizenship are analyzed to extract conceptual commonalities and differences. Then, correlated topic modeling is applied to the collected text datasets to identify underlying topics widely discussed in CSR, ESG, and corporate citizenship related studies. The results of this study show that corporate citizenship is not only a high-level concept that encompasses ESG and CSR, but also a broad concept with missions that are associated with various societal areas. The findings from this study also reveal that employees, as the principal agents of corporate citizenship practice, are more critical than other stakeholders of corporate citizenship practice.