Evolution of sustainable retailing and how it influences consumer behavior: a bibliometric review

ABSTRACT

Over the years, sustainability has garnered much attention owing to evidence of climate change, United Nations (UN) sustainable development goals, pandemics, and the changing behavior of millennials. Retailers are one of the largest consumers of global natural and human resources. They have joined the sustainability bandwagon by pledging resources and communicating the same to their target customers for better business positioning. This study aims to analyze the conceptual structure of sustainability in the context of retail enterprises and its role in shaping consumer behavior. Therefore, it leverages bibliometric techniques to elaborate on the productivity and impact of the existing body of knowledge in this area through performance analysis and discover the knowledge clusters through science mapping. The data used for this study were sourced by querying the Scopus database for the intersection of terms related to ‘sustainability,’ ‘retail,’ and ‘consumer behavior.’ Subsequently, they were processed and illustrated using RStudio and the bibliometrix package for R to drive insights in bibliometric summaries, including tables, maps, and networks. In addition to highlighting temporal and spatial trends and dominant themes, the study suggests future research avenues in sustainable retailing.

KEYWORDS:

• Retail
• sustainability
• consumer behavior
• bibliometric
• science mapping

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support this study are openly available in DRYAD at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.hdr7sqvmz.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amrit Pal Singh

Amrit Pal Singh is a doctoral student specializing in Information Systems & Business Analytics at the Indian Institute of Management, Ranchi, India. He is a sustainability enthusiast and his research interests aim to explore the role of information technology in accelerating sustainable retailing.

Rajat Kumar Behera

Rajat Kumar Behera is an associate professor working with the School of Computer Engineering at the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar, India. His research interests include Data Science, Software Engineering and Blockchain.

Pradip Kumar Bala

Pradip Kumar Bala is a professor in the area of Information Systems & Business Analytics at Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ranchi. He has published more than 100 research papers in reputed international journals, conference proceedings and book chapters. Key research interests include text mining & NLP, recommender systems, data mining applications, data mining and NLP algorithms, social media analytics and marketing analytics.