PERFORMANCE AND CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN SMEs

Abstract

To date, most business management research has focused on large companies and has not taken into account the factor related to the size of companies. Much research in recent decades has studied the causal relationships with implications and antecedents of CSR application, debated definitions, and considered their scope and content. This study wants to analyze, in the contexts of SMEs, the theoretical frame of reference, the consequences as well as the antecedents of CSR in order to provide future empirical studies, a starting point. The results highlight aspects related to the possible impact in the context of SMEs of CSR, barriers, language, terminology, background and the recommended theoretical framework. The analysis of the scientific output that is indexed in the international Scopus database on the topic of “corporate social performance and corporate social responsibility” in SMEs is the main objective of this study. Social responsibility actions represent, within large corporations, a natural practice, which is obvious, observed in the literature. Given this aspect, there is a totally different reality in the case of small and medium enterprises, primarily due to their high heterogeneity. Starting from this objective, we identified a number of 324 articles on this topic, following a bibliometric analysis. The majority of studies being qualitative studies, there is a certain concentration of scientific production in the last 18 years (2002-2020).