Organizational Failure and Decline - A Bibliometric Study of the Scientific Frontend

Abstract

In today’s difficult economic times, the number of failing firms remains high. Theories of why companies fail have mainly been developed in a research field traditionally summarized as “Organizational Failure and Decline”. Unfortunately, this research field suffers from strong fragmentation and an unclear research agenda. The aim of this study is to structure existing research with the help of bibliometric methods and present developments in research between 1982 and 2014. Concretely, we perform a co-citation analysis and visualize existing sub-clusters of organizational failure research. We also highlight the most frequently cited publications based on a citation analysis and analyze citation patterns in equally sized periods. Seven sub- clusters define the intellectual foundation of organizational failure and decline research. While an organizational ecology and industrial organization perspective dominates before 2000, the strategic choice literature gains relative attention after 2000. In recent years...