Small businesses’ social responsibility and political activity survey studies: a review, synthesis, and research agenda

Abstract

This systematic review assesses the development of survey-based small business social responsibility (SBSR) and political activity (SBPA) research over the last 30 years. Survey research designs are a widely adopted approach to studying SBSR and SBPA, making a significant contribution to the small business nonmarket strategy (SBNS) research agenda. Survey research has been used in a quarter of the 203 SBNS research publications identified, 60% of all quantitative SBSR studies and 100% of all quantitative SBPA publications. This review identified a total of 53 survey-based studies of SBSR and SBPA in a multidisciplinary selection of 40 top journals. The SBSR articles reviewed primarily focused on environmental themes, CSR strategies, and CSR performance at the macro level and micro concerns around entrepreneurial commitment/attitudes to CSR. The SBPA articles had no clear focal phenomena. The theoretical positioning of the articles used primarily organizational and organizational field level theoretical foundations, in SBSR studies the main theory used was stakeholder approaches/theory, resource-based approaches and (meso/micro) institutional theory, while the SBPA research was clearly oriented toward resource-based approaches. The SBSR studies in contrast to the SBPA research had a far clearer set of established predictor, outcome, moderating/mediating, and control variables. In terms of survey research design the results show a consistent and ongoing improvement of the research designs, but many norms of good survey design are not yet consistently adopted in SBSR and SBPA research. Critically the literature lacks replication of results. Future studies should pursue replication studies and adopt methodological best practice.