Although numerous books and articles provide toolkit approaches to explain how to conduct literature reviews, these prescriptions regard literature reviewing as the production of representations of academic fields. Such representationalism is rarely questioned. Building on insights from social studies of science, we conceptualize literature reviewing as a performative endeavor that co-constitutes the literature it is supposed to “neutrally” describe, through a dual movement of re-presenting—constructing an account different from the literature, and intervening—adding to and potentially shaping this literature. We discuss four problems inherent to this movement of performativity—description, explicitness, provocation, and simulacrum—and then explore them through a systematic review of 48 reviews of the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) for the period 1975 to 2019. We provide evidence for the performative role of literature reviewing in the CSR field through both re-presenting and intervening. We find that reviews performed the CSR literature and, accordingly, the field’s boundaries, categories, and priorities in a self-sustaining manner. By reflexively subjecting our own systematic review to the four performative problems we discuss, we also derive implications of performative analysis for the practice of literature reviewing.

尽管许多书籍和文章提供了解释如何进行文献综述的工具包方法，但这些规定将文献综述视为学术领域代表的产物。这种代表主义很少受到质疑。基于社会科学研究的见解，我们将文学评论概念化为一种表演性工作，通过重新呈现的双重运动（构成与文学不同的账户）共同构成了应该“中立”描述的文学。干预-增加并可能影响该文献。我们讨论了这种表现运动所固有的四个问题：描述，明确，挑衅以及模拟），然后通过对1975年至2019年间有关企业社会责任（CSR）文献的48篇文献进行系统的综述来探讨它们。介绍和干预。我们发现，评论以自我维持的方式执行了CSR文献，并因此执行了该领域的边界，类别和优先级。通过对我们讨论的四个表演性问题进行自我系统的反思，我们还得出了表演性分析对于文献评论实践的意义。