Abstract
This paper presents a systematic literature review on the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), one of the most important corporate social responsibility initiatives. Through a keyword search in the major electronic databases, we identified 96 scientific papers on UNGC. Borrowing from Narayanan et al.’s (2011) input-process-output framework, we frame the scientific debate, highlighting five main streams of studies: motivations for adopting the standard, critiques to the initiative, impacts on performance, contextual factors affecting adoption, and contextual factors affecting impacts. Based on such analyses, we identify some research gaps and develop a theory-based research agenda.