Sustainability and strategic competitive advantage: an exploratory and bibliometric study

Abstract

This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis to understand the state of the art of academic research that relates to sustainability strategy and competitive advantage. For this, the article seeks to identify what is produced, released and knowledge generated by the scientific community related to the subject, and analyzing key trends, through a quantitative analysis of the evolution of scientific literature on the themes, vehicles publishing, centers research, leading researchers and research networks. Initially we constructed a tree of keywords in order to quest the search engines and publications on the subject and later, do the processing and analysis software with the support of EndNote ®, RefViz ® and Excel ®.Through research, we found that there was a recent increase of publications on the subject of this article, especially since 2000, and the areas of science that most published on the subject are represented by the Triple Bottom Line (environmental, social and economic), pointing out that sustainability is currently having a bias much more proactive instead of reactive. Furthermore, it was also possible to identify countries that have the highest rate of development, like the HDI and GINI index, are the pioneers in publishing this issue.