Philanthropy and the Contribution of Andrew Carnegie to Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

The idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has attracted the interests of both practitioners and scientists, particularly since 1953, when H. R. Bowen published The Social Responsibilities of the Businessman. Over the years, the CSR concept evolved and became a managerial phenomenon; it was applied to different sectors with supposedly excellent effects. Unfortunately, there was discourse around the meaning of CSR. In the world of science, there is no agreement as to the semantic area of CSR. Academics face absolute, undisturbed freedom in the formulation of its elements and definitions. That abovementioned ambiguity determined the situation the recent CSR literature is vague and biased, and an extensive analysis of the latest contributions are lacking. To address this gap, there has been proposed a systematic literature review and bibliometrics of 119 articles published in 45 peer-reviewed, high-quality academic journals and 19 books, from January 1950 to July 2020. There are three objectives of this paper: to analyze the recent CSR definitions in the context of Carnegie’s principles, to identify trends in that field and evaluate the utility of the scientific efforts in the abovementioned context, and to indicate the future research paths in the context of corporate social responsibility.