Has the Attention-Based View Changed Research on Attention in Organizations? A Systematic Review

Abstract

In 1997, Ocasio attempted to highlight and revive research on attention in organizations by introducing the attention-based view of the firm (ABV), which specifically emphasizes the central role of social structures in the attention allocation of decision-makers. This has resulted in an increased interest among researchers for using an attention lens to study decision-making in organizations. We identified 94 articles studying attention in organizations in 43 journals through a systematic search in ISI Web of Science. Our review of these articles allows us to map what research has been done on attention and to investigate how the introduction of ABV has influenced the direction of research on attention in organizations. We conclude, however, that Ocasio’s attempt to revive an interest in social structures has only partly succeeded. We discover some notable additions to attention research, in particular the concept of quality of attention and the focus on bottom-up attentional processing, but very few researchers have actually done full justice to ABV. Most importantly, there is a lack of problematization of the concept of social structures: only a handful of articles conceptually challenge it and collect relevant data for it. The result is that we risk losing sight of ABV, particularly of its core concept of social structures, and fail to develop novel insights on attention in organizations. We point out that future research can catch up and enable theoretical development of ABV through problematizing its core concept and designing more innovative empirical studies that allow proper testing of its assumptions and propositions. Doing so will allow us to contribute to a better understanding of how decision- making is done in organizations.