Do organizational network studies constitute a cohesive communicative field? Mapping the citation context of organizational network research

The metaphor of “network” is one of the key memes in the social sciences and an important concept to understand contemporary business and society. The growing influence of information technology on everyday- and business life, the turn of innovation and economic policy towards collaborative activities as a catalyst of economic development, and the interest in the “ecosystem” approach to the economy are attracting organization researchers from various fields toward the same set of network concepts. Do these studies of inter- and intra-organizational network formations have a substantial knowledge base for sharing ideas? The present article is concerned with the question whether organization research with a focus on relationships and relationship structures among agents of different levels constitutes a cohesive interdisciplinary field. By utilizing bibliometric data of 80 000 articles (social science research articles of the past three years) and network analytic techniques on a subset of 4000 related articles in this research we show that the network metaphor provides a substantial basis for a common discursive platform.

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This post was written by Zoltán Elekes