Managing a Relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The paper is devoted to building up a comprehensive model of the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability practices based on the analysis of their main predictors to ease the process of managing CSR and sustainability activities and provide practical recommendations for businesses regarding successful realization of their business, social and sustainable development goals. Currently, businesses integrate corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability practices into their strategies to enable the fulfillment of sustainability goals and gain competitive advantages. Therefore, to achieve the aim of the study, a systematic review methodology was used in six stages: (1) defining the benchmarks; (2) extraction of papers from the two most cited databases: Web of Science and Scopus; (3) Manual content analysis of all extracted papers; (4) Identification of the dominant categories of this research topic; (5) The development of a comprehensive model of the relationship between CSR and sustainability, and(6) Discussion and control of obtained results and provision of recommendations for future studies. The model suggested is seen as a roadmap for organizations in different sectors of the economy and includes a variety of determinants that were divided into two groups depending on their relevance to an organization: the components of human and social capital, the technical characteristics of an organization and financial dimensions, and the outside business environment, which is determined by the political system and the level of corruption.