When method outgrows theory: a bibliometric map of forward-looking strategic management research, 2015–2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26740/bisma.v19n1.p54-80Keywords:
bibliometric analysis, emerging economies, open access, research agenda, strategic managementAbstract
Strategic management scholarship has produced a growing body of forward-looking writing: reviews, research agendas, and trend analyses that describe where the field is heading. Because such writing shapes what scholars choose to study next, this study asks what that literature actually contains and whether its structure resembles the field it claims to describe. This study analysed 310 open-access documents indexed in Scopus between 2015 and 2025, retrieved using a Boolean string that paired strategic management terms with future-oriented terms, and processed through performance analysis and co-word science mapping. Publication volume grew at a compound annual rate of 26.9%, and 57.7% of the corpus appeared in the final three years. Authorship is unusually dispersed: 1,013 of 1,029 authors contributed a single document and none contributed more than three. Citation impact runs the opposite way, with a median of 7 against a mean of 39.8 and one article holding 19.3% of all citations received. Co-word analysis of 68 keywords produced seven communities. The motor quadrant is occupied by bibliometric method terms and cross-sector applications, while dynamic capabilities and strategic management accounting fall into the low-centrality, low-density quadrant. This study concluded that this literature is organised around the practice of reviewing rather than around the theory being reviewed, which leaves the field's canonical constructs peripheral to the network its own forward-looking writing generates. Five testable propositions follow, together with implications for scholars in under-represented research systems, including Indonesia, and a reproducibility package accompanies the paper.
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