Source or storer? IB's performance in a knowledge network

Abstract

The absence of systematic assessment of IB's performance as a reference discipline prolongs questioning of the contribution that IB scholarship makes to other business fields: put simply, do IB journals export more ideas to allied disciplines than they import from them? Difficulty in evaluating the merits of, let alone the need for, solutions offered to boost interdisciplinary relevance slows validation of the ontological principles and epistemic standards of IB research. This paper begins to fill this gap. It establishes a knowledge network composed of 39 high-impact journals that represent the domains of management, marketing, finance, economics, operations, IT, accounting, human resources, organizational behavior, and IB. We collected citation exchanges among these 39 journals from 2000 through 2007. A log-multiplicative model evaluated multiple dimensions of association to determine the sources and storers of knowledge within the network. The network from Pathfinder analysis was used to determine each journal's contribution to network entropy. These analyses indicate that IB journals functioned as storers, not sources, of ideas within the sampled knowledge network over the studied period. The results help interpret opposing proposals to fortify IB studies, highlight the tradeoff between exploitation and exploration in knowledge development and dissemination, and elaborate JIBS's boundary-spanning performance within the sampled network.