**1. Introduction**

Recently, the concept of corporate citizenship that discusses corporate responsibilities and roles has received increasing attention from academia and corporate leaders. Corporate citizenship has been conceptualized with various definitions in the literature. For example, corporate citizenship was addressed as the fulfillment of responsibilities for four faces (i.e., economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic faces) [1], the extent to which companies satisfy economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary responsibilities associated with stakeholders [2], understanding and managing an organization to minimize negative and maximize positive societal impacts [3], and connecting corporate activities to social accountability for mutual benefits [4].

Although the concepts of corporate citizenship in the literature have subtle differences across the definitions, they are generally related to concepts such as *social responsiveness*, *social contribution*, *sustainability*, and *relationship* [5–7]. However, these concepts require further clarification for companies and amplify the abstract conceptualization of corporate citizenship. This hampers companies to successfully implement the role of corporate citizenship for various stakeholders. Moreover, other corporate values closely associated with corporate citizenship such as CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), sustainable management, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), social value [8] make understanding corporate citizenship more difficult in companies.

**Citation:** Park, J.G.; Park, K.; Noh, H.; Kim, Y.G. Characterization of CSR, ESG, and Corporate Citizenship through a Text Mining-Based Review of Literature. *Sustainability* **2023**, *15*, 3892. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su15053892

Academic Editors: Akrum Helfaya and Ahmed Aboud

Received: 29 January 2023 Revised: 17 February 2023 Accepted: 17 February 2023 Published: 21 February 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Nowadays corporate citizenship has become an integral part of doing business that can be seen as a broad spectrum of business roles in societies beyond existing approaches such as sustainability, CSR, and ESG [9]. Despite the importance of corporate citizenship, research for the conceptualization and characterization of corporate citizenship from an academic point of view is still insufficient due to conceptual abstraction and various proximity concepts regarding corporate citizenship. This is not irrelevant to the fact that the use of the corporate citizenship term was mainly initiated by business practitioners [10]. In addition, the main contexts and keywords using various terms referring to corporate citizenship were defined differently by each research field and scholar [8]. This is because scholars in various fields conceptualized corporate citizenship in various ways according to changes in social structures and business environments from their viewpoints in business.

In order to expand and develop corporate citizenship to a higher level, it is necessary to scrutinize latent contexts and concepts accumulated in existing corporate citizenship research. To facilitate this process, this study aims to characterize corporate citizenship and its two close concepts (i.e., CSR and ESG) through the text mining of relevant research articles; this research contributes to expand the scope of academic research on corporate citizenship by extracting underlying meanings and topics addressed in an abundant collection of relevant research articles. For this, each text dataset (i.e., title, keywords, and abstract) of research articles for CSR, ESG, and corporate citizenship is respectively modeled to extract frequently occurring terms and latent topics. Then, differences and commonalities among CSR, ESG, and corporate citizenship are investigated based on text mining results to propose more general and comprehensive concepts and characteristics of corporate citizenship for future uses in practice.
