The SA8000 Social Certification Standard: Literature Review and Research Directions

Social Accountability 8000 (SA8000) is currently considered the most important corporate social responsibility. After about 10 years of research on SA8000, this paper provides the first comprehensive literature review on this topic. We identified and classified 49 papers, highlighting and discussing the main research fields concerning SA8000: advantages of the adoption of the ethical certification, obstacles to adoption and management, comparison with ISO standards, and comparison with other CSR models. Building on these findings, we present various theoretical, methodological, and thematic gaps and propose a research agenda