The evolution of CSR’s research in tourism context: a review from 1992 to 2012

Abstract

Considering that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a recurrent research topic in the marketing literature, this study aimed to analyse the epistemological orientation evolution of CSR research at tourism context during the last 20 years (1992–2012). The abstracts of 101 CSR papers published on the most-impacting journal of tourism were classified by their epistemological orientation throughout the application of a content analysis technique. The results show a significant increment of CSR’s literature in tourism during the time period analysed. In addition, the theoretical contributions prevail over the prescriptive and descriptive ones. A differentiation in terms used to refer to CSR topic is also evidenced, as “CSR” and “social responsibility” are keywords used in enterprises papers, while “responsible tourism” is preferred at destinations/industry studies. This paper conclusion suggests that the research on CSR in tourism is following a progressive evolution. Besides, its increment is continuing due to the proliferation of exploratory studies and, lesser extent, to the predictive studies. Attending to the limited number of journals analysed in this study, an extension of the review to lower impact journals of tourism is suggested.

Keywords:

• Corporate social responsibility
• responsible tourism
• epistemological evolution
• tourism literature
• content analysis
• bibliometric

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.