Title: Social responsibility in pandemic and its financial impacts: insights from COVID-19 literature

Authors: Mohit Saini; Shallu Batra; Ishu; Kapil Gora; Mahender Yadav

Addresses: Department of Commerce, Maharshi Dayanand University, Haryana, India ' Department of Commerce, Maharshi Dayanand University, Haryana, India ' Institute of Management Studies and Research, Maharshi Dayanand University, Haryana, India ' Department of Commerce, Maharshi Dayanand University, Haryana, India ' Department of Commerce, Maharshi Dayanand University, Haryana, India

Abstract: Business corporations have emerged as good Samaritans by pulling society from the dusk of the pandemic. A major strand of researchers examined the impact of such socially responsible activities on a corporate firm's performance (CFP) and risk. The pandemic has raised the CSR types and levels in society; hence, there is a need for a study that presents the state of the scholarly work on CSR-CFP. Therefore, this study adopted the structured review methodology and keywords analysis to explore the publications. After a thorough review of articles, we found that initially, companies have undertaken the majority of the CSR activities for internal stakeholders such as employees, and after that, for the community. Overall, most of the studies have depicted a positive impact of CSR on firm performance in the short term. CSR firms were more resilient to COVID-19 risk. The study concludes with future gaps and findings.

Keywords: corporate social responsibility; CSR; firm performance; COVID-19; pandemic.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSOC.2025.148596

International Journal of Sustainable Society, 2025 Vol.17 No.3, pp.230 - 256

Received: 05 May 2022
Accepted: 31 Jan 2023
Published online: 15 Sep 2025 *

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