Socially responsible international business: review, synthesis, and directions

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed growing concerns by various stakeholders regarding the social implications of international firms’ activities. This chapter systematically reviews the knowledge contained in 156 articles focusing on socially responsible international business issues, which were published in the top eight international business journals during the period 1995–2017. Our review identifies those scholars and journals that have made the greatest contribution to this line of research, as well as those articles with the greatest impact in the field. Moreover, it shows that this line of research is characterized by increasing maturity, refinement, and advancement as demonstrated by the continuous proliferation of research designs, scope of research, and study methodologies employed. Furthermore, it indicates that research on the subject has taken many diverse courses of thematic areas and topics, which have exhibited different patterns of development over time.