N-Gram Analysis of Historic Development of Fundamental Terms Regarding Corporate Sustainability1

Abstract

Sustainability is a rising concept. It is important to set forth the developmentprocess of the term and to reveal the topics which are stressed by the specialists in order to understand the concept correctly. With this study, all the books written in English and saved in 'Google Books' database starting from the 1900s to the recent years have been scanned with N-gram analysis and the evolution of corporate sustainability concept has been investigated. From 19 experts 15 key words about corporate sustainability were asked. Total 236 entries have been categorized in 62 themes and among them 17 keywords which have the highest frequencies were identified and used in N-gram analysis. This study is especially important to show which term is started to flourish on literature on which time period. It is meaningful that some terms show co-changes. This may be helpful to show the relations between these terms.