OB Research Seminar - Tyler Kleinbauer, HEC Lausanne

From 437 published scientific articles between the years 1940-1942, to 11’071 between the years 2018-2020, there is no doubt the field of management has grown at a stunning rate. Today our field is vast and covers many important subjects. The problem, however, is that it is difficult to keep track of the historical and current research programs of the field, and how these evolved. One, curious to obtain a birds eye view of the field, could then ask: what is the field of management constituted of?

In this research, I provide an answer to this question by conducting a co-citation analysis of the field of management from 1940 to the present. In this analysis, I identify clusters of highly co-cited articles which constitute active research programs in specific domains. I then identify these domains, and trace the evolution of these research programs through time. The result is a birds eye view of the most influential research areas in management, and the evolution of the field over nearly a century.