Research on Corporate Social Responsibility in Public Relations: A Hybrid Review Through Topic Modeling Analysis and Way Forward

Abstract

Despite the growing significance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in corporate public relations (PR) strategies, there has been a paucity of comprehensive reviews of the extant CSR literature within the PR discipline. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between the concept of CSR and the discipline of PR through a hybrid concept-discipline-focused review. We employed latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) via topic modeling as a novel approach for intellectual structure analysis. The dataset for this review comprised 246 peer-reviewed articles on CSR published between 1975 and 2022. Based on the LDA results, five topics were identified and discussed: the political CSR stream, social media-oriented CSR, consumer-oriented CSR, CSR reporting, and business-oriented CSR. Additionally, implications for both academic and practical applications were drawn, along with recommendations for future research. This study is pioneering in its contribution to the literature and practice of CSR-related PR research, offering insights into the intellectual structures and trends within this field.