Epistemological evolution of corporate social responsibility in marketing

The main aim of this research is to determine if marketing-salient literature focused on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has evolved from its origins to 2006, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and to learn which of three competitive epistemological evolutional views better fits to CSR evolution. A content analysis-based empirical examination of 1,082 papers focused on CSR was conducted. First, all selected papers were judged and discriminated attending their original discipline; then, the 153 documents identified as marketing's belonging were judged by their epistemological orientation. Results show that the epistemological evolution of CSR within marketing literature fits to a progressive view. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.