Literature Review on Corporate Social Responsibility

This literature review provides a narrative analysis of scholarly papers on corporate social responsibility (CSR), including current knowledge and essential findings. It explores different theoretical and methodological contributions to CSR, as well as various benefits an organization can achieve by adopting CSR. The report also discusses the definitions of CSR provided by renowned authors.

Study Skills for
Higher Education
(Second part) report

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
What is literature review and what does it achieve.....................................................................3
Write a literature review on the topic "Corporate Social Responsibility"..................................5
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
REFRENCES ..................................................................................................................................8

INTRODUCTION
Literature review is a description and summary of the existing material which is related to
a particular topic or a particular area of study. This report will enlighten the meaning, purpose
and role of literature review (Aveyard, 2014). This report will also provide literature review on
corporate social responsibility. CSR is an business approach that contribute to sustainable
development which can be achieved by delivering economic, social and environmental benefit to
all the stakeholders of the business. It will also enlighten the importance of CSR activities in the
organisation.
What is literature review and what does it achieve
A literature review deals with reviewing published information in a particular subject
area and it also deals with information of a particular subject area for a specific period of time. It
usually has an organisational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis, with other
specific conceptual categories(Cocchia, 2014). A summary is review of the valuable information
of different sources where as synthesis is reorganization or reshuffling of that information in
such a way that will tell how a research problem can be investigated. The main aim of literature
review is to highlight what has been done so far and how current findings can be related to
earlier research. Review of literature also reveals techniques and statistical procedure that have
not been adopted by other researcher so far (Galvagno and Dalli, 2014). For the purpose of
reviewing one needs to locate, read and evaluate research documents, and other academic
materials. Through this an overview is being obtained which is based on previous research work
done during the research period. It also traces the general pattern of the findings so that
conclusions can be concluded on the basis of findings. There are different type of literature
reviews such as argumentative, integrative, historical, methodological, systematic and theoretic
review. Researcher will choose one of the type of literature review in accordance to the subject
matter they are reviewing.
Conducting a literature review is a means of demonstrating the author's knowledge about
a particular field of study which includes theories, methods and history (Slater, Mohr and
Sengupta, 2014). The purpose of literature review is to give an accurate and complete accounting
of the current state of knowledge for whichever research problem the review is being taken some
other purposes of literature review can be elaborated below:

 Identify the areas where prior scholars have worked to avoid the duplication of work and
also to give credit to their work in that particular areas.
 Identifying inconstancies such as conflicts in the previous research and open questions
left in the study by other researcher.
 Identifying the relationship of works in context of its contribution to the topic and to
other works.
 It helps in locating own research within the context of current literature.
 It places each work in the context of its contribution with understanding and solving
problem which is being studied.
 It describes the relationship of each work in relation with others.
 Helps to identify new ways of interpretation of research.
 Resolves conflicts among previous contradictory studies.
 It points a way forward for further investigation.
 It helps to develop research investigation tools and improve research methodologies.
Literature review is a search and evaluation of the available literature in a given or chosen
subject area (Govindan and et. al., 2015). It depicts the state of the art with respect to the subject
or topic. It has several main objectives such as it demonstrates a familiarity with body of
knowledge while establishing creditability of work. It also summarises prior research and
establish a link with the chosen project along with it integrates and summarises the familiarities
with the subject. It demonstrate that that have been learned from other individuals work and how
the research can be starting point for new ideas.
Literature review play different roles such as:
 It demonstrate that how well an individual is informed with other scholar work which
they have done in the same field By giving an overview of the current state of the
literature (Hamari, Koivisto and Sarsa, 2014).
 It helps in finding gap in literature, or addressing a business issue. It depend upon the
doctoral study programme. It will review how research can contribute to scholarly
conversation.
 Provides a synthesis of the issues, trends and concepts that are surrounding the research.

Write a literature review on the topic "Corporate Social Responsibility"
Corporate social responsibility is a business model that helps a company to be socially
accountable towards its stakeholder, and other individuals (Hart, 2018). By adopting corporate
social responsibility practices organisations can be conscious of the impact they are having on
the society which includes economic, social and environmental. The way it is implies from one
organisation to another greatly depend upon the size of the organisations. It is much wider
concept which comprises of various topics such as human rights, health and safety and
environmental effects (Jula, Sundararajan and Othman, 2014). It is simply a way of companies to
take responsibility for the social and environmental impact of their business operations. It
provides an opportunities to companies to showcase their good citizenship while protecting the
company from outside risk by fulfilling their duties towards society as well as towards
environment. Corporate social responsibility serves various benefit to the organisation such as:
 It helps in improving organisation image: As the organisation is fulfilling its social
responsibilities it can help them to create an stronger brand image in the market and also
in the minds of customers.
 Increase brand awareness: If an organisation is adopting ethical practices and this news
get leaked in the market (Machi and McEvoy, 2016).It will help the organisation to gain
more media attention and will increase overall brand awareness as more people will be
able to hear about companies practices.
 Cost saving: By adopting different practices such as use of less packaging will help
organisations to save overall cost of production.
 Increasing customer engagement: Organisation using CSR practices are promoting it
on different channels such as social media which have helped them to attract a larger
number of audience and also to gain more media coverage.
 Greater employee engagement: Employees will get to know about different CSR
practices adopted by organisation it will help to increase their motivational level as they
will feel that they are working for a company with strong public image (Shaikh and
Karjaluoto, 2015). By showing that organisation is committed to things such as human
rights they will be able to attract and retain larger number of candidates.
Corporate social responsibility literature review:

According to Nigel Sarbutts (2003) the paper defined different patterns by which CSR is
being performed by different small and medium size companies. His research depicted that there
is a structures approach used by these companies in order to mange their corporate reputation
while maximising their profits. Small companies struggle for increasing their reputation and CSR
stands as a ray of hope for these companies (Corporate Social Responsibility, 2017). According
to Davis Vogel(2005) Corporate social responsibility is a very important dimension of corporate
strategy. An organisation should be able to choose an course of action which is both ethically
and socially correct and it should also examine its economic profitability before adopting it
which will help the organisation to create better image of business in the mind of employee as
well as customers.
According to Samuel O. Idowu(2007) With their study of 20 UK companies that have
now become ethical in relation to social responsibility. Companies are adopted CSR because
twenty first century are better educated than past and they also adopt it with a view of providing
public benefit and on governments request. As the organisations have to work according to
government set norms in order to avoid any legal complications. According to Vaaland, heide
(2008) paper which was based on a case study which served as a best example to handle CSR
critical incident and utilising its experience in order to create new CSR policies. His study
concluded that CSR should be handled by reducing the gap between different stakeholders of the
organisation and their expectations regarding company performance and maintaining relationship
with society through interplay between its resources and activities.
According to Mikael Holmquist in (2009) He argued that the over few last decades
corporations are paying special attention towards their social responsibility in relation to workers
health and their well being (Corporate Social Responsibility, 2017). The strategy has helped
organisation in different areas such as ensuring better health and well-being of employees at
work place and keeping the organisation sustainable in the socio- competitive environment. He
viewed corporate social responsibility as corporate social control. According to Schwartz (2011)
all definition of CSR include the notion that business firms have obligation towards the society.
Which are different from their obligation towards their shareholders and organisations needs to
look and tare care of these in order to satisfy customer, organisation members and society.
According to Horrigan (2010) there is no widespread definition of CSR due to high level of
ambiguity and it also involve various controversy along with it. As it is an growing concept and

organisation's are slowly trying to understand it and implement the same in the business, It's
implementation is also a complex process as for implementing it organisation needs to analyse
market and after adopting it also has to face certain controversies arsing in the market.
According to Mallen (2012) Depicted that how the trends of CSR have been changing in
the past few years . He has explained the changes in form of three basic trend change firstly, in
term of relationship between business and society that has changed due to different social and
environmental problems around the globe that have forced businesses and society come closer.
Secondly, the different businessman's strategy of business have effected society which has
happened due to development of new business ideas that have come up with CSR management
reflecting in the product and services. Thirdly, other parties such as outside agencies interfering
with their own activities. All these changes have forced different organisation to adopt different
CSR activities in order to survive and grow in the market. According to Simpson and Taylor
(2013) CSR is Additional responsibility of businesses to local and wider communities apart
from its core responsibility of profit maximisation. Organisations are adopting CSR activities
along with their other activities in order to increase the profit as there compliance is important
factor in the global and growing world.
CONCLUSION
From the above report it can be concluded that literature review is narrative review of
scholarly papers which includes the current knowledge and it also includes essential findings. It
deals with analysing different theoretical and methodological contribution which are already
being made to a particular topic. The second half of the report deals with the corporate social
responsibility which is an blanket statement which shows the relationship between businesses
practices and society and it also analyse different benefit which an organisation can achieve by
adoption of corporate social responsibility. It also enlighten different definition of corporate
social responsibility provided by renowned authors.

REFRENCES
Books and Journals
Aveyard, H., 2014. Doing a literature review in health and social care: A practical guide.
McGraw-Hill Education (UK).
Cocchia, A., 2014. Smart and digital city: A systematic literature review. In Smart city (pp. 13-
43). Springer, Cham.
Galvagno, M. and Dalli, D., 2014. Theory of value co-creation: a systematic literature
review. Managing Service Quality, 24(6), pp.643-683.
Govindan and et. al., 2015. Multi criteria decision making approaches for green supplier
evaluation and selection: a literature review. Journal of Cleaner Production, 98, pp.66-
83.
Hamari, J., Koivisto, J. and Sarsa, H., 2014, January. Does gamification work?--a literature
review of empirical studies on gamification. In 2014 47th Hawaii international
conference on system sciences (HICSS) (pp. 3025-3034). IEEE.
Hart, C., 2018. Doing a literature review: Releasing the research imagination. Sage.
Jula, A., Sundararajan, E. and Othman, Z., 2014. Cloud computing service composition: A
systematic literature review. Expert systems with applications.41(8). pp.3809-3824.
Machi, L.A. and McEvoy, B.T., 2016. The literature review: Six steps to success. Corwin Press.
Shaikh, A.A. and Karjaluoto, H., 2015. Mobile banking adoption: A literature review. Telematics
and informatics.32(1). pp.129-142.
Slater, S.F., Mohr, J.J. and Sengupta, S., 2014. Radical product innovation capability: Literature
review, synthesis, and illustrative research propositions. Journal of Product Innovation
Management.31(3). pp.552-566.
Online
Corporate Social Responsibility. 2017. [Online] Available Through:
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319036439_Corporate_Social_Responsibility_A_Lite
rature_Review>