Sustainability in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SME): Integrated Research Framework and Future Research Agenda

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the concept of sustainability in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) has gained significant attention within both business practice and academic research. This has resulted in a rapid and multidisciplinary proliferation of scholarly literature, which has led to an increasing fragmentation of the research field, calling for an integrative overview. Against this background, this paper aims to identify the main thematic clusters of the literature on sustainability in SMEs, using two science mapping techniques (co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling), and a cluster-wise review identifying major determinants and antecedents of SME's sustainability, SME's sustainability efforts, and their outcomes, as well as contextual factors, applied theories, and research methods. Additionally, it seeks to reveal nascent subfields and research gaps. This research contributes to the literature by complementing and extending existing literature reviews in a quantitative approach and proposing an integrative overview. Moreover, implications for SMEs and future research directions are suggested.