The Evolution of Intellectual Structure in Organization Studies between 1990 and 2010: A Research Based on Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to reveal the evolution of intellectual structure in the field of organization studies between 1990 and 2010, during which the complicated and diversified developing trends puzzled most researchers. 20386 academic articles from the top 41 journals are selected as the data source. With these data, terms co-occurrence analysis and clustering analysis are conducted with the software of CiteSpace. On the basis of bibliometric analysis, the paper identifies dominating research topics and changes of research focus in organization studies during the past two decades. Results show that the evolution path of organization studies can be traced out by the organizational elements of environment, strategy, institution and personnel, spanning different research levels. Finally the paper discusses the front research in future study.