15 Years of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure Research Under Scrutiny, a Systematic Review of Methodological Research Approaches

Resumo

Corporate Social Responsibility disclosure have been studied for the last 15 years, with more than one thousand published papers about it. We aim to gather relevant names from previous CSR literature and more than that, we hope to help students and researchers to understand how the studies were taken from the beginning until now. We proceeded a systematic review of the methodological approach of research, focusing on the study of 10 dimensions:  year, geographic, type of research, time horizon, data collection, data analysis methodology, theory, objectives, contributions and suggestions. To portray the behavior of these dimensions, we made a frequency analysis and found that 33% of publications were made in 2018, 15% studied Spanish environment, 78% were empirical ones, 51% cross-sectional, 76% secondary data, 56% used statistics, stakeholder, legitimacy and agency theories represents 54%, 41% studied investigative correlations, 43% aimed theoretical contributions, and 35% offered theoretical suggestions. We sought to deeper understand the applied methodology, so we proceed some variance analysis and factorial analysis. The result of variance analysis showed that we can not reject the null hypothesis of equal variance for theory, type, contributions and suggestions. Finally, the factorial analysis resulted in 6 factors explaining almost 70% of the data. An important contribution of this paper is to highlight that there is a gap in studies about corporate social responsibility disclosure in Latin America, Africa and Oceania. This finding can be of guidance to future researchers who aims to contribute to the existent literature about corporate social responsibility disclosure