Bibliometric analysis of entrepreneurial orientation

Pages45-69
Published date21 February 2019
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/WJEMSD-08-2017-0048
Date21 February 2019
AuthorNelson A. Andrade-Valbuena,Jose M. Merigo-Lindahl,Sergio Olavarrieta S.
Subject MatterStrategy,Business ethics,Sustainability
Bibliometric analysis of
entrepreneurial orientation
Nelson A. Andrade-Valbuena
School of Economics and Business, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile
Jose M. Merigo-Lindahl
Department of Management Control and Information Systems,
School of Economics and Business, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile, and
Sergio Olavarrieta S.
School of Economics and Business, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile
Abstract
Purpose The remarkable concept of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has attracted scholarsattention for its
relevancetoafirms performance. Based on bibliometric and distance-based visualization of similarities (VOS)
analysis, the purpose of this paper is to outline a broad-spectrum perspective of the structure of research in EO
across more than 20 years of publications, identifying the mostprominent journals, authors and articles in this field.
Design/methodology/approach ThepaperusestheWebofScienceCoreCollectionandtheVOSviewer
software. The analysis searches for all the documents connected to EO available in the database from 1976 to 2017.
The graphical visualization maps the bibliographic data using both bibliographic coupling and co-citation data.
Findings Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice Journal,Journal of Business Venturing and Family
Business Review are the most relevant journals in the field. Among the many important authors in the EO
literature, key contributors are Lumpkin, Payne, Short, Covin, Dess and Wiklund. Three different streams of
research are linked to the EO concept; strategy and entrepreneurship, family business and miscellaneous
work in psychometrics, methods, marketing and knowledge/capability-based approaches to organizations.
Originality/value This paper contributes to EO research by providing a global perspective on the
concepts investigation, using bibliometric data and graphical networks.
Keywords Bibliometrics, Web of Science, Entrepreneurial orientation, Analytics, VOS network analysis
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is one of the most important concepts in the field of
entrepreneurship (Wales et al., 2011), and entrepreneurship is linked to healthy economic
development of countries. Researchers in this field have identified it as an cultural
orientation or strategic logic that permits the search for and exploitation of new business
prospects, even those that do not include the launch of new initiatives (Lumpkin and Dess,
1996; Covin and Miles, 1999; Zahra et al., 1999; Rauch et al., 2009).
The organizational phenomena of EO can be understood as a dominant logic that permeates
the organization at all levels (see Prahalad and Bettis, 1986), as manifestedinattitudesand
behaviors and a strategic position (George and Marino, 2011) that captures patterns and
processes in three specific dimensions: innovativeness, proactiveness and risk taking (Wiklund
and Shepherd, 2005). These concepts were defined by Lumpkin and Dess (1996) as follows:
innovativeness is the will to introduce a new entry (new products, new services and new
processes) through practices of experimentation and creative methods (Lumpkin and Dess,
1996); proactiveness refers to the independent action of an individual or team whose goal is to
give birth to a business concept or vision and to carry it out until its end (Lumpkin and Dess,
1996); and risk taking means adopting measures based on a decision-making process without
full knowledge about possible outcomes (Lumpkin and Dess, 1996).
Given its importance and proximity to innovation, organizational theory and strategy,
research on EO has been continuously expanding for more than two decades (Covin and
Lumpkin, 2011). Research on EO has largely considered its positive relationship with
World Journal of
Entrepreneurship, Management
and Sustainable Development
Vol. 15 No. 1, 2019
pp. 45-69
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2042-5961
DOI10.1108/WJEMSD-08-2017-0048
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2042-5961.htm
45
Bibliometric
analysis of EO
performance, as highlighted in different meta-analyses (i.e. Rauch et al., 2009; Saeed et al., 2014).
These studies note that some contingent variables moderate the relationship at two different
levels. First, at a macroeconomic level, variables such as national culture, the regulatory
environment, market size, the economic development and political stability of a country affect
the relationship between EO and performance (Saeed et al.,2014).Second,otherfeaturesofthe
firm have also been explored as variables, such as the structure and size of the organization
and its processes and resources (Rauch et al., 2009). Nonetheless, this information does not give
a complete overview of the structure of research on EO, and the influence and relevance of
journals,authors, papersor institutions in thedevelopment of this subfield in entrepreneurship.
Analysis using bibliometric techniques can consider different levels of relevance for
research in any field, incorporating the most important papers and journals in the
investigation by combining useful information such as citations, the number of publications
and other data that allow categorization according to the relevance to the discipline, making
it possible to construct an overview.
To categorize all of the information coming from different studies, scholars in different
disciplines have provided a general bibliometric perspective of fields related to EO,
including innovation, management and entrepreneurship. In the innovation case,
bibliometric analysis has been conducted from a general perspective (Fagerberg et al.,
2012) and from more specific perspectives, such as an overview of the most relevant papers
(Shafique, 2013), journals (Durisin et al., 2010; Thongpapanl, 2012), institutions (Fagerberg
and Verspagen, 2009; Fagerberg et al., 2012), countries (Must, 2006; Teixeira, 2014; Merigó
et al., 2015), continents (Toivanen and Ponomariov, 2011) and other related subjects (Watts
et al., 1998; Zhu and Guan, 2013; Sakata et al., 2013).
Bibliometric procedures have also been applied to the management discipline in subjects
such as strategy (Moed, 2000; Ramos-Rodríguez and Ruíz-Navarro, 2004; Nerur et al., 2008;
Vogel and Güttel, 2013), knowledge management (Ponzi, 2002; Gu, 2004; Zhang and Xu,
2008; Akhavan et al., 2016), information management (Hanqing, 2009), technology
management (Pilkington and Teichert, 2006), sales management ( Johnson, 2006), operation
and production management (Chang and Hsieh, 2008; Hsieh and Chang, 2009), program
management (Artto et al., 2009), supply chain management (Charvet et al., 2008; Fahimnia
et al., 2015), HHRR (Fernandez-Alles and Ramos-Rodríguez, 2009), corporate sustainability
(Schaltegger et al., 2013), customer relationship management (Tsai, 2011) and even sports
management (Shilbury, 2011). As in the case of innovation, bibliometric procedures have
identified the most relevant researchers (Podsakoff et al., 2008), institutions (Vogel, 2012),
journals (Shilbury, 2011) and countries (Courtault et al., 2010) in the field of management.
Entrepreneurship has been explored through bibliometrics at a general level (Luor et al.,
2014; Ferreira et al., 2015) and at the knowledge structure level (Landström et al., 2012, 2015),
identifying the most important articles (Volery and Mazzarol, 2015), authors (Shane, 1997),
journals (McElwee and Atherton, 2005; Wan et al., 2009; Dos Santos et al., 2011), institutions
(Schildt et al., 2006; Grimaldi et al., 2011; Teixeira, 2011) and countries (Zhai et al., 2014) to the
field. In the same manner, bibliometric procedures have been utilized to explore more
specific fields of entrepreneurship, such as technological entrepreneurship (Ferreira et al.,
2016), social entrepreneurship (Etemad and Lee, 2003; Sassmannshausen and Volkmann,
2013; Kraus et al., 2014; Rey-Martí et al., 2016), entrepreneurship in family business
(López-Fernández et al., 2016), international entrepreneurship (Kraus, 2011; Servantie et al.,
2016), national systems of entrepreneurship (Ács et al., 2014) and the scales and indicators
utilized to measure entrepreneurship (Kuskova et al., 2011; Álvarez et al., 2014).
Even when all of the aforementioned studies are related to the concept of EO, their focus
does not allow for an independent perspective about our domain of interest. Moreover,
because this subject includes a great variety of contributions and contributors to the
entrepreneurship domains, no single published article provides a global vision on research
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