مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Broadly, the term corporate social responsibility (CSR) refers to business practices that address an organization’s various economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic responsibilities as they pertain to a wide range of stakeholders (Carroll, 1979, 1999; Maignan & Ferrell, 2004). The core idea behind CSR is that businesses are now increasingly expected to fulfill social expectations that go above and beyond whatis required under the law or the customary expectations of profit-making (Falck & Heblich, 2007).

Cone Communications’ (۲۰۱۵) recent survey of consumers’ perceptions of CSR indicates that consumers now understand the concept of CSR very well and that they are more willing than ever before to reward or punish companies based on evaluations of CSR initiatives. Consumers’ more sophisticated understanding of CSR strengthens the significance of CSR communication in the context of successful CSR implementation (Cone Communications, 2015). Thus, Bortree (2014) argues that more refined CSR communication has become an increasingly significant agenda for both research and practice in the public relations arena.

In line with the significance of CSR communication in practice, academia has also paid increasing attention to CSR, as evidenced by various publications on the subject of CSR, including the recent publication of a comprehensive handbook about CSR communication (Ihlen, Bartlett, & May, 2011) and special issues of CSR articles in Public Relations Journal in 2014 and in Corporate Communication: An International Journal in 2013. Although the number of research studies that investigate CSR in public relations has increased substantially in recent years, systematic literature reviews of academic articles pertaining to this subject have been scarce (cf. Golob et al., 2013; Goodwin & Bartlett, 2008). Thus, it remains unclear how public relations research into CSR has developed over time in terms of research topics, theories, methods, and samples. To address this deficit in the literature, this study aims to investigate all the public relations articles on CSR in eleven scholarly journals that have been major venues for public relations CSR research in order to understand the current status of CSR research and identify directions for future research.