Visual Analysis Of The Evolution And Research Fronts Of Business Management

Information visualization provides new ways for scientometrics and knowmetrics. This study maps and analyzes the knowledge domain of business management discipline using the CiteSpace software based on analytic techniques such as citation analysis, graph theory, information visualization, and cluster analysis. It identifies the evolution of intellectual basis, the research fronts and focus of business management.The paper conducts the co-citation network analysis of business management on the data downloaded from the Web of Science at Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), including SCI, SSCI and A&HCI, using high-impact international journals as the data source. It maps document co-citation networks of the main theories of business management, reveals the topic changes of knowledge structure in different stages of its development, identifies critical paths of the business management evolution using the PathFinder algorithm. Psychology, organization theory, economics and management are theoretical foundations of the evolution and development of business management. Organization theory evolved in terms of organization decision, behavior decision, organization planning, organization innovation, virtual organization successively. Strategy management evolved in terms of organization transformation, strategy planning, competition strategy, strategic ecology and marginal competitive strategy, dynamic capacity and core capacity, strategic resources, and strategic information management. Operating management evolved in terms of production operating management, customer satisfaction evaluation system, supplying chain management, and knowledge management.This study defines the concepts of research fronts and research focus of business management, summarizes the key research fronts through analyzing the clustering network map of burst articles and associated citing articles based on additional data retrieved for a follow-up document co-citation analysis and keyword co-appearance network. It analyzes the research focus in terms of the most cited articles in the document co-citation network associated with keyword co-appearance network. Taking the organization behavior domain as an example, it detects the key articles and their importance in the evolution of organization behavior, analyzes the research fronts and focus, including positive psychology, emotional intelligence, response generalization and quantitative statistics applied in organization behavior.At last, this study analyzes the current situation and problems of business management research in China. It identifies seven research fields which include fifteen research fronts using the visual analysis of Chinese business management journals from CSSCI, constructs Chinese business management discipline system, compares the research fronts and focus between western and Chinese business management, summarizes the differences of them and the reason, predicts the trend of Chinese business management discipline.