1. Introduction
Over the last years, studies in various scientific disciplines have examined research topics related to sustainability and socially responsible behavior. This statement is based on the fact that, little by little, awareness has grown that sustainable development must go hand in hand with social sustainability [
1]. The depletion of resources, climate change, and global warming, beyond the challenge they pose in themselves, are results of the behaviors of those of us who inhabit the planet, in our different roles.
Business and management researchers have not been alien to this dynamic and have addressed the issue of sustainability from different perspectives: Corporate social responsibility [
2,
3,
4], socially responsible consumption [
5,
6,
7,
8], socially responsible investments [
9,
10], the impact of sustainable production/products [
11,
12,
13,
14,
15], and even from the consumerism viewpoint [
14,
15,
16,
17,
18], to name some examples. Ten years ago, Eckhardt et al. [
19] stated that, although there was great expectation around the concept of responsible or ethical consumption, real consumer behavior was discouraging.
The present study investigates how socially responsible consumer behavior (SRCB) research has advanced, focusing on the key issues it has addressed, given the importance it has as a market driver, in the paradigm of our current consumer society. The objective is to contribute to the work of the SRCB research community by providing more information, and the keys to furnish a better understanding of the main study topics, so that socially responsible consumer behavior can be better understood and, consequently, to consolidate the concept. This can help identify the “tipping point” that will favor the development of socially responsible, sustainable, and ethical behaviors by all agents in the market. Social responsibility and sustainability are multi-dimensional phenomena [
20,
21], so they must be approached from different perspectives. For example, in research into companies, Vitell [
22] argued that successful corporate social responsibility would be difficult without the help of consumers.
The literature review showed that few studies have addressed the issue, which creates opportunities for the development of new research lines, and for developing those that have emerged. Furthermore, to date, no study has examined the conceptual evolution of SRCB based on an exhaustive compilation of all previous academic research. Following the methodology proposed by Cobo et al. [
23,
24], the authors in the present study undertook a bibliometric analysis of research into SRCB, including studies carried out from the perspectives of sustainability and ethics.
The structure of the paper is as follows.
Section 2 includes a literature review and research questions on SRCB,
Section 3 introduces the methodology and the focus of the paper, and
Section 4 outlines the main findings, including the most frequently appearing sources, authors, and themes. This includes an examination of the relationships between the themes identified, with maps and diagrams, which assess the development and future trends of SRCB research. The paper ends with conclusions and limitations and provides suggestions for future research.
2. Literature Review and Research Questions
Corporate social responsibility has long been examined in business management, given the harmful impact that some company activities can have on their immediate environments and consumer environmental awareness [
25,
26,
27,
28,
29]. Mohr et al. [
30] defined CSR as a company’s commitment to minimize or eliminate harmful effects and maximize the impact of long-term benefits in society. According to Carroll [
20,
31], CSR is a multidimensional construct with four dimensions: Economic responsibility, legal responsibility, ethical responsibility, and philanthropic responsibility, and all companies are positioned in one of these dimensions.
From this point, an interesting line of research emerged that has tried to explain the relationship between CSR, the consumer, and consumption. Thus, we find research focused on ethical consumption [
32,
33,
34,
35,
36,
37,
38], green consumption [
39,
40,
41,
42,
43], responsible consumption, for example fair trade product consumption [
44,
45,
46], reduction in product consumption based on environmental impact [
47,
48,
49], and the establishment of profiles of consumers with a greater predisposition to pay for “environmentally friendly” products [
43,
50,
51,
52]. Despite the above, the focus has always followed a certain pattern: First, CSR, then consumption-related aspects, and, finally, socially responsible consumer behaviors. This gives rise to our first research question (RQ1):
RQ1: Has academic research been more focused on CSR and sustainability than on the role of consumers and their socially responsible behavior?
Vitell [
22] is among the researchers who have most clearly demonstrated the relationship between CSR and “consumer social responsibility” (CnSR), stating that “the best way to influence socially responsible corporate decision-making may be to influence consumers to demand products and services that are, in fact, socially responsible”. However, the first general approach to the meaning of CnSR was Webster’s [
53] seminal work, which defined the “socially conscious consumer” as “a consumer who takes into account the public consequences of his or her private consumption or who attempts to use his or her purchasing power to bring about social change”. Nonetheless, Devinney et al. [
36] were among the first to refer to CnSR, which they defined “as the conscious and deliberate choice to make certain consumption choices based on personal and moral beliefs”. On the other hand, Mohr et al. [
30] proposed a new concept in reference to socially responsible consumer behavior (SRCB), which they defined as “a person basing his or her acquisition, usage, and disposition of products on a desire to minimize or eliminate any harmful effects and maximize the long-run beneficial impact on society”. While subsequent research has focused on the socially responsible consumer, there is still no consensus on CnSR [
54] or SRCB [
55,
56,
57]. Ingenbleek et al. [
28] used the concept of “buyer social responsibility” (BSR), with a meaning similar to that proposed for CnSR and SRCB. Although Ha-Brookshire and Hodges [
54] argued that a socially responsible consumer behavior research stream has developed, most SRCB studies have focused on the purchasing environment of the consumer experience. On the other hand, according to the available academic literature, two opposing approaches developed in the middle of the last decade. On the one hand, it can be seen that the literature has given considerable attention, although fragmented, to socially responsible consumption behaviors [
28]. At the same time, another approach suggests that there are many articles in the literature that emphasize the importance of corporate social responsibility. However, few of these articles discuss the role of the consumer in achieving corporate social responsibility [
22]. This last line of argument was also followed by Caruana and Chatzidakis [
58], who proposed that “To date, the scope of CnSR remains narrowly conceived and its inter-linkages with CSR remain under-theorized, constrained by the micro-level legacy in consumer, marketing, and management research”.
This revision of the literature raises the following research question:
RQ2: To what extent is SRCB a developed or fragmented theme in the academic literature?
As this concept is important, it is worth asking from which perspectives it has been analyzed and to which other concepts it is related. SRCB research is quite fragmented, but there are obvious connections. This is the case for what has been called “ethical consumer behavior” that, according to Harrison et al. [
59], describes consumers who “have political, religious, spiritual, environmental, social or other motives for choosing one product over another” and, as they added later, that “care whether a corporation promotes employees from minority ethnicities, plan their consumption to avoid harm to other animals, worry about product transportation distances and probably a plethora of other concerns”. This is a broad concept that encompasses SRCB. Research into ethical consumer behavior “seeks answers about consumers’ buying behaviors based on their attitudes [
60,
61], their ethical constraints [
11,
62,
63,
64,
65] and socio-cultural aspects” [
38,
66]. Another important concept with logical connections to socially responsible consumer behavior is “willingness to pay”, or variants, such as the concept of “vote with the wallet”. Becchetti and Salustri [
67] defined “vote with the wallet as the propensity of consumers to consider social and environmental sellers’ responsibility into consumption and saving choices”, that is, consumers might use their spending power to influence companies’ behaviors. In addition, other important concepts linked to SRCB are citizen consumption, healthy consumption, and social commitment. These points give rise to a further research question:
RQ3: What other themes are linked to SRCB research?
According to the Web of Science (WoS) bibliographic database, the first article in this research field was published in 1991. In it, Singhapkdi and Latour [
68] examined the public policy issues of an anti-littering campaign. In pursuit of various objectives, they determined, in particular, the relationship between socially responsible consumption (SRC) orientation and voting intentions with respect to a litter-related issue. Since then, several hundred related works have been published in prestigious journals; it will be of interest now for academia to consider the state of the art and the current status of the different themes that have evolved. It is worth asking whether these issues have evolved in parallel, or whether they are connected to developments in political and social positioning. Therefore:
RQ4: How have these themes evolved since 1991?
RQ5: What are the most important themes and subject areas in terms of academic output?
The fragmentation of SRCB research, the dynamic nature of this and related concepts, together with the global crisis that is being suffered in 2020, make it necessary to redefine the concept. To address these research questions, we conducted a descriptive bibliometric study of SRCB articles published in the Web of Science (WoS)-listed international journals, as described in the methodology section.
3. Methodology
3.1. Bibliometrics and Co-Word Analysis Procedure
The first definition of bibliometrics was “the application of mathematics and statistical methods to books and other media of communication” [
69]. Bibliometric analysis has been used in disciplines as diverse as management information systems [
70], financial marketing [
71], integrated marketing communications [
72], hospitality [
73], and key account management [
74], among others.
Bibliometrics employs a wide range of techniques, author and document co-citation analysis, co-word and textual analysis [
60], using multivariate methods. In document co-citation analyses, the documents with the most impact within a research field are identified, and assessments are made of the matrix of co-citation frequencies between document pairs [
75]. Callon, Courtial, and Penan [
76] identified two main groups of bibliometric measures, productivity measures and relatedness measures. Productivity measures analyze scientific activity based on statistics and document characteristics, such as author(s), citation(s), and sources, regardless of whether there is a relationship between them. However, relatedness measures do take into account similarities between documents.
Keywords are the terms that characterize a study’s main ideas, and provide indications of the research trend that its authors are following [
77]. ‘Co-word analysis’ is relational [
76], as it measures the co-occurrence or joint occurrence of keywords extracted from each document, from which matrices of co-occurrences are constructed and similarity measures calculated.
Co-word analysis is one of the most suitable methods for discovering trends and emerging issues in scientific fields; the present study is the first to use co-word analysis in a literature review of SRCB. Specifically, co-word analysis is based on the analytical method proposed by Cobo et al. [
78] (Yang et al. [
79] took a similar approach), and goes through the following stages: (a) Bibliometric data recovery, (b) data processing and extraction, (c) normalization and calculation of bibliometric indicators, (d) mapping, (e) analysis, and finally, (f) visualization of science maps and thematic networks.
The co-word analysis in the present study was conducted using SciMAT ([
24]; Sci
2s, 2011). SciMAT is an open source (GPLv3) software program designed by the Sci
2s research group at the University of Granada [
24]. Science maps, based on an analysis of the co-occurrence of the keywords that characterize each article, can be created using SciMAT. These maps enable us to monitor scientific fields by defining the relevant research areas, which allows us to understand their intellectual, social, conceptual, and cognitive frameworks, and to analyze their structural evolution [
24]. Each cluster (research topic or thematic subnetwork) can be characterized using two parameters [
80]:
Centrality: This measures the degree of interaction among clusters (or themes, topics); that is, the strength of the external links that exist among clusters. This value can be understood as a measure of the importance of a theme in the development of the entire field of research under analysis.
Density: This measures the internal strength of a cluster; that is, the strength of the internal links between the keywords that describe this research topic. This value can be considered as a measure of the degree to which the topic under study has been developed.
Applying these parameters, two types of network are identified. Principal themes have high centrality and density values, while isolated themes have low centrality values (see Callon et al. [
80]).
Figure 1 provides an example of a strategic diagram. In this way, a research field can be divided into a set of themes, represented two-dimensionally, and classified into four groups [
75,
76,
78,
80], as follows:
Themes in the upper right-hand quadrant (I) can be considered well-developed and important for the structuring of the research field in question. These are known as the “motor themes” of the specialist topic, as they have strong centrality and high density. In everyday parlance, we might call these mainstream themes.
Themes in the upper left-hand quadrant (II) present highly developed internal links, but their external links are irrelevant, hence they are considered of only marginal importance for the research area. These themes are extremely specialized and peripheral in nature.
Themes in the lower left-hand quadrant (III) are marginal and underdeveloped. They present low levels of density and centrality, and mainly pertain to emerging or declining themes.
Themes in the lower right-hand quadrant (IV) are stable. That is, they are important to the research field in question, but they are not developed. They can be classified as transversal, basic (general) themes.
These themes and their interconnections with other keywords can be drawn in one network graph. A particular “thematic network” can be labelled with the name of the most significant keyword in the associated theme (usually the most central node or keyword of its associated thematic network). The volume of the spheres is proportional to the number of documents related to each keyword and number of citations, and the density of the link between the two spheres i and j is proportional to the co-occurrence of both. In addition, in evolution maps, a measure of overlap between themes can be used, such as, for example, in the Jaccard index (c
ij/(e
i + e
− c
ij))) [
24].
3.2. Data Collection
Journal articles were chosen as assessment units, as the academic community acknowledges them as the most advanced and up-to-date knowledge sources, widely used in literature reviews in the marketing (and, more generally, management) field (e.g., [
81]). In addition, the descriptions of SRCB and the evolution of SCRB research enabled us to specify keywords that could function as queries in bibliometric databases.
Hence, by using terms such as ‘socially responsible consumer(s) behavior’, ‘socially responsible consumer(s)’, ‘consumer(s) social responsibility’, ‘socially responsible purchasing behavior’, ‘ethical consumer(s)’, ‘consumer(s) ethical behavior’, ‘consumer(s) ethical consumption’, ‘consumer(s) ethical value(s)’, ‘responsible consumer attitude(s)’, ‘responsible consumer(s) decision-making’, ‘consumer(s) moral responsibility’, ‘consumer(s) sustainable behavior’, and ‘consumer(s) sustainable consumption’, we ensured that we covered the entire spectrum of SRBC articles. In particular, the following query was used in the WoS bibliographic base:
#Query: TS= (“Socially responsible consumer behavio*” OR “Socially responsible consumers behavio*” OR “Socially responsible consumption behavio*” OR “Socially responsible consumer*” OR “Socially-responsible consumption” OR “Consumer* social responsibility” OR “Socially responsible purchasing behaviour*” OR “Ethical consumer*” OR “Consumer* ethical behavio*” OR “Consumers ethical consumption” OR “Consumer* ethical value*” OR “Responsible consumer attitude*” OR “Responsible consumer decision-making” OR “Consumer* moral responsibility” OR “Consumer* sustainable behaviour*” OR “Consumer* sustainable consumption”)
where the field TS refers to a search based on the “topic” (‘topic’ = ‘title’ + ‘keyword’ + ‘abstract’), refined by document type (paper, proceedings, review, or other).
Based on this query, a total of 441 references to documents were downloaded from the WoS Core Collection, including author keywords, Keywords Plus, abstracts, and citation measures. Of this total, 92 were available in open access format, and the remainder (350) in restricted access. In bibliometric studies such as this, a large percentage of documents relate to other disciplines, either because of the polysemic nature of the terms used or, occasionally, because they are given as examples in the abstracts. Thus, in our review of the content, some documents were removed; among others, these related to geography (10), nutrition and dietetics (4), biotechnology and applied microbiology (3), computer science and cybernetics (2), information science and library science (2), and language and linguistics (2). At this stage of the data processing some duplicate records were also detected and removed.
The timeframe for our study was from 1991 (first paper), and we returned a total of 340 valid articles, 69 of which were open access.
Figure 2 shows the number of articles examined on the topic of ‘SRCB’ for the period 1991–2019. One can observe a quite pronounced increase since 2013 (25 papers), and a significant drop in 2017 (26 papers), with a historical maximum in the year 2018.
Prior to conducting the co-word analysis, we performed a normalization process to merge plural and singular forms (e.g., ‘consumer’/consumers, ‘brand’/’brands’) and to convert acronyms into their full forms. We also undertook a semantic search to group together words written in different ways (keeping the meanings unchanged). Principally, these affected words spelled differently in American and British English, such as ‘behavior’ and ‘behaviour’, and those that can be hyphenated or unhyphenated (e.g., ‘socially-responsible’/’socially responsible’). The total number of keywords processed was 1464, an average of 4 keywords per manuscript.
Our analysis of specific periods identified future trends (emerging/declining themes) and relationships that might have seemed insignificant within the context of an overall timeframe covering topics extensively studied in the past, but less so today [
82]. As to the length of the periods, as is normal in longitudinal co-word analyses, we made the first period the longest, to achieve a sufficient number of published manuscripts; we divided the second and third periods into blocks of 3 years or so to give us a significant volume of documents and also to take into account major milestones in the development of the discipline. Thus, the present study examines three sets of data, for the periods 1991–2012, 2013–2016, and 2017–2019, the first covering 22 years, the second and third, 3 years.
Our criteria for generating the networks and reducing the data were that the keywords had to have appeared more than 2 times in the different periods, with minimum co-occurrence values of 2. Ss bibliometric quality indicators, we used the h-index of the keyword and the average and the sum of citations received up to the date when the data were downloaded. The number of articles for each period is shown in
Figure 3.
5. Discussion of Results
The analysis of the study period, which examined in particular motor themes and the words most linked to the SRCB research carried out, yielded as a first result a conceptualization proposal. Thus, the SRCB consumer can be defined as one who exhibits a favorable attitude towards organic and fair-trade products and, in general, towards products associated with socially responsible practices. (S)he understands that consumption is a means of exercising socially responsible citizenship.
An important conclusion that can be drawn from the last period of research analyzed (2017–2019) is that researchers focused on a new consumer type, the ‘ethical consumer’. While this ethical consumer is complex and multi-dimensional, (s)he seems to share certain characteristics with the SRCB consumer. In this sense, those studies that will, in the future, closely examine important aspects, such as the way in which personal and sociocultural factors configure different profiles, or levels, of SRCB, might establish whether for some profiles, or some levels (assuming they exist), that the SRCB and ethical consumer concepts overlap.
Having interpreted the co-word analysis, we are able to answer the research questions posed at the beginning of the present study.
“Has academic research been more focused on CSR and sustainability than on the role of consumers and their socially responsible behavior?”
(RQ1)
The academic research has, over time, been more focused on CSR, with the topic being a motor theme in the second period. Sustainability, as an emerging topic, and SRCB, as a basic topic, attracted a similar level of attention in the literature analyzed in the third period, although if all three periods are taken into account, they remain far behind CSR in volume terms.
“To what extent is SRCB a developed or fragmented theme in the academic literature?”
(RQ2)
In particular, and responding to the title of the present study, it can be concluded that the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century was the turning point (
Figure 2). It can be seen that from the beginning of that decade, greater interest began to be shown in SRCB, and this trend accelerated from its mid-point. It is clearly an emerging theme.
It can be said that SRCB research has hitherto been very fragmented, but that it has developed into a freestanding entity during the last three years; in the previous years it was basically approached from the perspective of CSR. The analysis suggests that during the next years it will maintain a high degree of interaction with other themes, and thus develop a high degree of importance in this knowledge field.
“What other themes are linked to SRCB research?”
(RQ3)
The results of the co-word analysis show that the themes linked to general research into SRCB have derived from CSR research. This is very clear in the second period analyzed. In the third period, when SRCB emerged as a freestanding subject, the research revolved around personality traits and citizen consumption.
“How have these themes evolved since 1991?”
(RQ4)
In general, the evolution map shows strong fragmentation among the SRCB works since its inception and identifies some underlying thematic areas. In this evolutionary structuring of the scientific field, as we have previously noted, works linked to consumer attitude and CSR stand out. In the last period, certain specific themes appear to be addressed to a greater extent (with more than 10 papers). This is the case with knowledge and information in general, ethical consumer, organic products, sociocultural variables, ethical consumption, consumer studies, and specific references to the methodology followed, including the analysis of applied multivariate data.
“What are the most important themes and subject areas in terms of academic output?”
(RQ5)
If we consider at a global level the production of the thematic areas, measured by number of documents published (see
Table A4 in the
Appendix A), three main areas should be highlighted: (a) Research on attitude (themes: “attitude”, “fair trade”,“ organic product”, and “ethical consumer”), (b) research on CSR (“ CSR”, “knowledge and information”, behavior”, “business”, and “SRCB”), and (c) research on social and sustainable consumption behavior (“socially responsible consumption behavior”, “sustainable consumption behavior”, “country and areas”, “consumer decision-making”, and “methodology”).
If this measurement criterion is used again for different themes (see
Table A5 in the
Appendix A), concepts linked to some of the earlier thematic areas are repeated, such as “attitude”, “ethical consumer”, and “fair trade”, linked to the thematic area of research into attitude, and “behavior”, and “CSR”, linked to the thematic area of CSR.
As a final reflection, it is good to remember that all transactions have a profound impact on society, which gives the exchanges a social dimension. Their results, therefore, must be evaluated in terms of “fairness” or “justice” for all parts of the market; this is the domain of normative marketing ethics [
86]. Thus, through the evaluation of the social impact of consumption, marketing practice and ethics are closely connected.
Environmental and health problems, linked to the production and consumption systems of the most developed economies [
87,
88], and the effects of potential pandemics (such as the Coronavirus respiratory syndrome, the Zika virus, and the COVID-19 virus declared a pandemic by the WHO in March 2020), are evidence of irresponsible behaviors. These irresponsible behaviors may be transitory, such as an excessive demand for medical (e.g., masks and gloves) and other necessary products (toilet paper and disinfectant), or more structural, and require a change to a more rational and sustainable consumption model.
Identifying the factors and circumstances that determine the behavior of the social and economic agents in the exchange, and ways to raise awareness of the importance of consumers’ (who are also voters) behavior, will be essential for the promotion of responsible management and growth. This is the way to achieve the sustainable development goals established by the 2030 Agenda. The Agenda aims to move towards societies with inclusive economic growth, greater social cohesion and justice, living in peace, and with sustainable environmental horizons. This paper aims to contribute to these aims, through the review and analysis of the academic research on socially responsible consumer behavior (SRCB) and related themes, identifying its evolution, trends, and applied perspectives.
6. Limitations and Future Research
In the present study, we identify key areas in socially responsible consumer behavior research (SRCB), identify the structure of the thematic networks of the research themes in the academic literature, and provide important insights that can shape future research. However, we encountered several difficulties due to the biases inherent in analyses of this type.
First, a particular limitation is that the accuracy of the applied method depends on the thresholds defined as restrictions in the course of data homogenization and extraction of the structure of the sub-domains. The analysis conducted enables discussion about general trends, widely accepted by the scientific community, to be legitimized, as the procedure applied inevitably excludes themes of marginal importance and clarifies interpretation of the findings. Although the authors varied the criteria (upper and lower limits), no significant changes were noted in the conceptual structures; the final solutions to the threshold issues are partially dependent on the technical decisions they took.
The authors suggest that future research, for a more exhaustive study, might extend the analysis by including conference proceedings, trade and professional journals, and by extracting data from other bibliographic databases. In addition, it would be interesting to determine how papers from prestigious research centers and pre-published manuscripts (available online) might stimulate additional SRCB research. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the existing research is not comprehensive, thus indicating that further work is required in each of the identified sub-domains, or streams of research, to gain more insight into crucial aspects of SRCB. This result is not surprising, and it supports the authors’ calls for more research aimed at clarifying the theoretical background of this topic, which may still be considered under development.
An interesting future line of research would be to relate the emerging issues in the scientific research identified in the field (such as SRCB) with the key issues in the political and social debate, to examine to what extent there is a harmony and alignment of scientific concerns with social and political concerns.
It is hoped that the ideas put forward in this summary, and the future lines of research suggested, will contribute to advancing the current knowledge and understanding of the academic literature on SRCB.