**4. Results**

#### *4.1. Term Freqency Analysis*

The word clouds in Figure 1 represent visualized term membership in each CSR, ESG, and corporate citizenship research group. In each word cloud, larger terms represent more frequently occurring terms in the associated article group. When comparing frequent terms in CSR, ESG, and corporate citizenship articles, the most noticeable difference is that ESG research contains many financial or accounting terms: terms stemmed from "investment", "report", "disclosure", and "risk". In addition, the frequent terms associated with ESG are significantly different from the frequent terms in corporate citizenship and CSR. The corporate citizenship and CSR related literature sets seem to share common terms stemmed from "sustainability" and "firm", but a significant difference is observed in the frequency of major terms. For example, the most frequent stemmed terms in the corporate citizenship literature are in the order of "sustain (e.g., sustainability)", "CSR", "ethic", "firm", "compani (e.g., company)", and "global". However, the CSR literature has the most frequent terms in the order of "CSR", "firm", "perform (e.g., performance)", and "environment". Figure 2 shows a Venn diagram created for the top 20 most frequent terms in each article set to further examine the commonalities and differences between the literature groups. "CSR", "industri (industry)", and "report" are terms that are commonly observed across the CSR, ESG, and corporate citizenship groups. Specific keywords for each topic are also observed in Figure 2. For example, corporate citizenship literature stands out for ethics, political/politics, and employees; CSR is for business, supply chain, consumer; and ESG is for investment, risk, fund, and social responsibility investment. The frequent terms in the overlapped areas show that studies in CSR, ESG, and Corporate Citizenship share similar research themes and foci. At the same time, each research stream has specific aspects that can be inferred from the frequent terms only appearing in each domain. The term frequency of each term in Figure 2 is shown in Table 1.

**Figure 1.** Word cloud of top 50 frequent stemmed terms in CSR, ESG, and corporate citizenship literatures: (**a**) CSR; (**b**) ESG; and (**c**) Corporate citizenship.

**Figure 2.** Venn diagram of top 20 frequent terms in CSR, ESG, corporate citizenship literature sets.


**Table 1.** Frequency of top 20 most frequent stemmed terms in CSR, ESG, corporate citizenship literature sets.

#### *4.2. Correlated Topic Modeling*

Tables 2–4 show the CTM results that provide clues to understand what themes and topics have been studied in the three article groups. Five topics generated from CTM for each literature group were labelled based on frequent terms and articles associated with each topic.

In the CSR literature, the first topic (i.e., CSR-1 in Table 2) is associated with the largest number of the CSR articles (i.e., 31.7% of all the CSR related papers). The key frequent terms associated with this topic are *sustainability*, *business, review, framework, integration,* and *field,* etc. Various papers within this topic mainly attempt to review existing works and thereby to conceptualize a framework for CSR. For instance, the article of Carroll (2015), which is highly correlated with this topic, summarized a history of the concept of CSR and its framework for business-in-society relationships. He also introduced future scenarios of CSR and its parallel notions. This shows that efforts to conceptualize CSR have been widely discussed in the literature. The second topic (i.e., CSR-2) includes keywords such as *performance, environment, financial, governance, market, industries,* and *strategic,* etc. The literature on this topic shows a positive relationship between CSR and firm financial performance. Other topics are related to the various prerequisites such as governance, disclosure, and the role of the board of directors for successfully implementing CSR (i.e., CSR-3), CSR and various stakeholders, especially the relationship with and influence of employees and customers (i.e., CSR-4), and effects of CSR disclosure on corporate performance (i.e., CSR-5).

**Table 2.** Interpreted topics to characterize CSR based on CTM.


Table 3 presents the resultant five latent topics extracted from the ESG literature. The number of ESG-related studies has rapidly increased in recent years especially since 2018. Overall, the ESG literature is closely associated with topics for the financial performance of corporate activities to achieve social and environmental benefits. The first topic in the ESG literature (i.e., ESG-1) is interpreted from its associated 68 papers. This topic is associated with the largest number of all the considered ESG related articles; 68 out of 295 ESG related papers (=23.1%) are identified as handling this topic. Most of the associated articles handle main criteria for SRI (social responsible investing) as ESG elements. These elements include not only financial performance of companies but also non-financial ESG elements, which show ESG investment foci for organizations' sustainability. The second topic (i.e., ESG-2) is related to the role of managers and board of directors in ESG investment with highprobability terms such as *disclosure*, *board*, *nonfinancial*, *CSR*, *director*, *independent*, and *direct*, etc. For example, the literature in this topic examines the relationships between corporate governance and sustainability by focusing on role of directors and officers in corporations (e.g., Crifo et al. [44]). The articles in the third topic (i.e., ESG-3) discusses the relationship between ESG and corporate performance. The topic is related to frequent words such as report, risk, indicator, model, strategic, cost, and equities, etc. The literature shows how ESG disclosure impacts firm performance and proposes a nomological network of the antecedents, boundary conditions, and various outcomes of ESG disclosure. Moreover, various internal and external environmental factors of companies affecting ESG (i.e., ESG-4) and the relationship between ESG and corporate financial performance (i.e., ESG-5) form representative research topics in the ESG-related studies.


**Table 3.** Interpreted topics to characterize ESG based on CTM.

Finally, the results in Table 4 show the main topics of the corporate citizenship literature. The first topic (i.e., CC-1) represents research about executives and employees' perceptions, attitudes, and roles of corporate citizenship, which can be inferred from its associated terms such as *organization*, *employees*, *behavior*, *performance*, *intention*, *commitment*, *consumer*, and *ethics*, etc. Many studies in this topic applies a previously proposed concept of corporate citizenship based on a political theory perspective [5]. For example, Rego et al. [21] suggested extended dimensions of corporate citizenship that includes employees' perceptions of corporate responsibilities of their organizations. The second topic is the role of corporate citizenship of employee relations (i.e., CC-2), which can be inferred from its associated terms such as *reputation*, *relations*, *employees*, *moral*, *individual*, *engage*, *right*, and *human*, etc. This topic has the highest percentage of the membership (=29.8%) in the corporate citizenship related articles. The main theme of the above two topics indicates the importance of executives and employees who play active role in corporate citizenship practice.

The third topic is related to corporate citizenship definition from a global and local perspective (i.e., CC-3), consisting of studies dealing with the practices and approaches of corporate citizenship by global companies. The literature in this topic shows that corporate citizenship approaches have flourished not only in local companies and but also in multinational companies. Indeed, the term corporate citizenship is getting more widely used nowadays due to its voluntary nature in society. The fourth topic is related to maintaining and exercising social influence, which form main keywords in corporate citizenship research (i.e., CC-4). The topic is related to the importance of active roles and commitment in a company as a citizen in society. The fifth topic represents the role of corporate citizenship as a strategic act of a company (i.e., CC-5). For example, research in this topic combines a framework of corporate citizenship with corporate strategies and business models (e.g., Googins [49]). The articles in this group include key terms such as *firm*, *stakeholder*, *model*, *ethics*, *performance*, *product*, and *strategy*, etc.


**Table 4.** Interpreted topics to characterize corporate citizenship (CC) based on CTM.

In summary, the CTM results reveal that the overall trend ESG studies are significantly different from CSR and corporate citizenship. ESG related studies mainly handles topics related to sustainable corporate activities that affect the performance of stakeholders. Although CSR and corporate citizenship studies commonly include various topics under the big themes of sustainability and responsibility, the main focus of the related works is different between the two research streams. CSR studies more emphasize corporate mandatory responsibility and promotion of CSR activities for corporate performance than corporate citizenship studies. However, corporate citizenship research focuses more on corporate ethicality itself and corporate's social influence in a political way.
