Value Creation and CSR: A Systematic Literature Review

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a burgeoning field of study, as well as the accepted business practice for well over half a century. Mandated by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the companies across nations have aligned their strategies and operations, tapping into new markets, investors, stakeholders, and partnering with other actors to amplify their impact and scale in meeting these goals. However, accounting for non-financial performance, let alone steering a company towards achieving these wider-ranging goals, has provided unresolved challenges for practitioners and academics alike. The SDGs are necessarily vague when it comes to metrics that might apply across the range of business sectors and activities towards long-term value creation, leaving organisations and scholars to find and test out a variety of measures and approaches. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a growing field of study and accepted business practice for more than 30 years. The SDGs are related to companies since they can help countries achieve the goals by aligning their strategies and operations, tapping into new markets, investors, stakeholders, and opportunities can bring several benefits, and companies can collaborate with the SDGs. This chapter examines how long-term value creation is measured in order to determine criteria for Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) performance through a systematic literature review, with the aim to identify the definitions and metrics of value creation adopted in prior research, and to understand how various theories and methodologies have been used in relation to this field of interest. It uses bibliometric analysis to form the basis for recommendations for further research that moves us towards a more holistic view of (long-term) value creation. The findings document a variety of themes on CSR and value creation, and shift in research focus with significant growth in research on CSR and shared values. However, even though there is extensive research on CSR practices and ESG parameters and value creation, and this field of research is growing, there are still opposing results. It is possible to notice a lot of studies with positive, negative, or neutral results. These inconsistent findings are mainly due to the different econometric methods used, sample composition (e.g. lack of focus on industry sector), and geographical area. Our findings offer a way forward for research on value creation and some of the trickier drivers of performance such as organisational culture.