Firms with benefits: A systematic review of responsible entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility literature

Abstract

The scholarly literature has so far paid limited attention to responsibility by commercial entrepreneurs. This paper compares responsible entrepreneurship (RE) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) scholarship in order to identify future fields of research. For this purpose, we assess the strengths and weaknesses of extant RE scholarship through the lens of CSR. We have reviewed 11,260 papers via latent Dirichlet allocation for our work. We find that existing RE literature places disproportionate emphasis on how firms can benefit society instead of on how contributions to sustainable development can benefit a firm. Furthermore, the RE literature pays limited attention to employee well-being, customer preference, and civil society as a stakeholder. Also, environmental issues and their balancing with financial and social issues remain relatively under-researched. Overall, we hope that scholarly works inspired by this study may ultimately help to ensure responsible behaviour of start-ups.