Governments’ role in the business & society debate: a bibliometric study

Well functioning governments are seen as a basic requirement for societies to prosper. However, the role of governments in the business and society debate is conceptually challenging endeavor. The very conception or CSR as business activity beyond the rule of law (e.g. Carroll, 1979) challenges the proposition of governments' role in the debate. Moreover, cultural background does also explain why the debate on governments' role in business and society is not fueled. From a North-American perspective, some colleagues would confess, government regulation and prescription on businesses social responsibility is troublesome. While from European perspective, the European Commission and member state governments are actively fueling the debate on CSR, but government officials maintain the voluntarism principle as of today, presumably in order not to offend managers.
Following the recent literature, where diverging stances of governments are discussed (e.g. Albareda et al. 2007, 2008) and in some cases governments' intervention is advocated (e.g. Aaronson 2005, Lepoutre et al. 2007), we started a research project to systematically study the literature on business and society and identify existing knowledge on governments' role. Such a bibliometric study contributes with a systematic analysis in the field, presentation of knowledge on "why" or "why not" governments should take an explicit stance in the debate, and identifying both challenges and best practices when governments enter the business and society arena.

Journals
Five journals in the business and society field were selected for our study: "Journal of Business Ethics" (JBE), "Business Ethics Quarterly" (BEQ), "Business & Society"(B&S), "Business Ethics: A European Review"(BE:ER), and "Business Strategy and the Environment" (BSE). These journals have been chosen because they cover the higher tiers of the scholarly field (e.g. Serenko & Bontis 2009; Paul 2004), and together include both American and European discourse. In addition, these journals cover well the different approaches to business and society debate, i.e. descriptive-normative-instrumental, while also covering the conceptual breadth in the field, i.e. CSR-business ethics-corporate sustainability. The quality of the selected journals is indicated by their listing in the social science citation index. BSE has not yet received an impact factor due to its recent inclusion in the index per 2011. Moreover, the founding date of these journals makes it possible to develop longitudinal insights. Several details of the journals are specified in Table 1.

Table 1: Journal details
Name Since Yearly Issues Impact factor
JBE 1982 28 1.13
BEQ 1991 4 3.26
B&S 1960 4 1.22
BE:ER 1992 4 1.06
BSE 1992 8 *

Keywords, search and selection
Within these journals we aimed to retrieve articles which refer to the role of government in the business and society debate. For this we developed a list of keywords which was discussed during two conference sessions (Bath 2011 and Brussels 2011). These discussions resulted in omitting and including several keywords, and lead us to the final list as mentioned in table 2. The keywords were searched for (singular and plural) in both title and abstract with the EBSCOhost search engine (academic search elite, business source premier). The search was performed in the beginning of September 2011.

Table 2: Retrieved articles
Keyword JBE BEQ B&S BE:E BSE TOTAL
government 262 39 34 27 4 366
law 236 56 8 18 6 324
legislation 58 5 1 9 5 78
partnership 39 1 3 6 14 63
policy 411 38 51 49 46 595
politic 44 16 10 4 5 79
public 476 48 45 55 11 635
regulation 155 31 17 17 23 243
rule 198 45 9 18 0 270
Total 1879 279 178 203 114 2653
Unique 1392 194 135 150 105 1976
Selected 377 91 66 53 50 637

Table 1 shows the amount of articles which responded to each individual keyword, and the line total aggregates all articles found per key word. By using a comprehensive search query, articles that responded to two keywords were included only once, hence the difference between lines total and unique. Finally, we identified a total amount of 1976 unique articles.

Both title and abstract were read by two of the co-authors. Each decided individually whether or not the article should be included in the selection. An article was included if the title or abstract indicated that the role of government(s) in the business and society debate would be discussed. In the case of disagreement the authors discussed the article until consensus was reached. The initial selection gave 637 articles with an inter-rater reliability of 92%.
As of today, 3 co-authors are individually reading and analyzing these 637 articles. In addition, 6 master thesis students participate in the analysis, looking at the literature of a specific journal (2 for ca. 50 % of JBE articles). All of us are using the same encoding table, with the intention to improve both validity and reliability of our results.