Global Evolution of Social Responsibility in Smart‐Service Industries: Insights From a Cross‐Sector Hybrid Large Language Models Approach
Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management
Published online on March 12, 2026
Abstract
["Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 1815-1831, March 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThe rapid development of smart services has driven the evolution of social responsibility among global enterprises, while also presenting new challenges to their operational management. In the continuous iterations of smart services, the emerging digital ecosystem has demonstrated multidimensional characteristics, virtual‐real integration, and multi‐stakeholder interactions in management practices. This study introduces smart service social responsibility (SSSR), a comprehensive framework that extends traditional CSR and ESG models by integrating multidimensional, cross‐space, and multi‐stakeholder panoramic analyses to address the unique ethical and operational challenges of the digital ecosystem. Using a hybrid text‐analysis methodology (TF‐IDF scoring and LLM‐based evaluation), we analyze 7858 sustainability reports across five major sectors (consumer goods, technology, financial, healthcare, and services) to reveal how firms prioritize sustainability issues and identify sector‐specific patterns in smart‐service industries. Our analysis reveals that environmental topics dominate, accounting for an average of 49.0% of dimension‐level mentions and leading in four of the five sectors studied, whereas legal and ethical themes receive 42.25% fewer mentions on average. Meanwhile, physical space topics constitute nearly three‐quarters (76.5%) of the total, in contrast to virtual space themes, which represent approximately one‐quarter (23.5%). Furthermore, analysis of stakeholder attention reveals a strong focus on platforms (42.4%) and communities (23.8%), which together account for over 66.2% of the discourse, while emerging agents, such as algorithm engineers and smart bots, remain significantly underrepresented. The novelty of our research is demonstrated through uncovering how firms prioritize topics of social responsibility in sustainability reporting and revealing sector‐specific patterns that highlight prominently featured content. These insights offer important guidance for regulators, businesses, and investors seeking to align smart‐service frontiers with responsible practices.\n"]