A Bibliometric Analysis of the Creating Shared Value Literature (2011–2025): From Foundational Debate Toward Applied Specialization and Theoretical Consolidation Challenges

Abstract

This study presents the first comprehensive bibliometric review of the Creating Shared Value (CSV) literature, examining 378 peer‐reviewed documents retrieved from the Scopus database over the period 2011–2025. Employing an integrated methodological framework that combines co‐citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, keyword co‐occurrence networks, and thematic mapping, the study systematically maps the intellectual structure, geographic distribution, and thematic evolution of CSV scholarship across three distinct developmental phases. The findings reveal a structural triple geographic gap encompassing knowledge production, international collaboration, and publication venues, which systematically marginalizes emerging economies—particularly in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America—from the field's knowledge production. This absence is not incidental: it reflects institutional and infrastructural barriers to knowledge circulation that undermine the generalizability of CSV frameworks to the very socioeconomic contexts they were designed to address. Co‐citation analysis identifies three converging intellectual traditions—competitive strategy, corporate social responsibility, and stakeholder governance—whose inherited theoretical tensions explain the persistence of conceptual disagreement more than a decade after the framework's introduction. Bibliographic coupling reveals nine contemporary research streams, while the thematic map positions the CSV–CSR–SDGs nexus in a zone of high centrality and low density, signaling that the field has achieved quantitative maturity without its qualitative counterpart—a condition this study terms “conceptual inflation.” Five prioritized research directions are proposed, targeting the field's most critical structural gaps and providing researchers, policymakers, and practitioners with a clear knowledge map to guide the field's transition from quantitative expansion toward theoretical consolidation.