Sustainability and Retail: Analysis of Global Research

Abstract

In recent years, the topic of sustainability has gained prominence in many retail sectors. Sustainability is a key element for retailers, who have seen that sustainable development could become an important source of competitive advantage. The purpose of this work is to highlight state of the art sustainability in retailing, for which a bibliometric analysis has been carried out using Web of Science online and Scopus database. Our findings show the most influential countries, journals, authors, and areas of knowledge interested in the topic. By using a fractional counting method to analyze co-occurrence of the author’s keywords, this paper identifies the most frequent terms and seven clusters. This article represents a contribution by identifying the main trends in sustainability and retail research and proposes future research initiatives, such as: analyze under which conditions the sustainability initiatives give better results to retailers; selection of suppliers and supply chain management; evaluate different types of sustainable products; store sustainable management; sustainability actions and retailers image; how to communicate the sustainability actions of retailers; how sustainability actions influence different types of brands; and international and cross-cultural analysis.