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What’s in a name? Exploring the conceptual structure of emerging organizations

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Abstract

This study describes the conceptual structure of emerging organisations on the basis of research over the past 26 years. During this period, terms and theoretical perspectives have proliferated, creating a field that is highly fragmented and dispersed. Using a co-word analysis based on author keywords, we selected the most frequent key-terms to provide a complete overview of current studies. In particular, through cluster analysis, we highlight the labels that entrepreneurship scholars have used to investigate emerging organisations and illustrate how they are arranged in subgroups. Furthermore, we interpret the distances among terms with multidimensional scaling. Using overlay visualization, we anchor the relevance of the keywords over time. Our findings show that five possible conceptualizations of emerging organisations coexist. These range from antecedents of venture creation to innovation mechanisms. We conclude that entrepreneurial nascency is just one of several descriptive components used in academic studies.

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Notes

  1. Unknown author.

  2. Further, the choice of setting our search on 1991 as the initial year was driven by the limitation of WoS, which permits searches within titles, keywords, and abstracts only since 1991.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Business, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

    Manuel Castriotta, Michela Loi, Elona Marku & Luca Naitana

Authors
  1. Manuel Castriotta
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  2. Michela Loi
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  3. Elona Marku
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  4. Luca Naitana
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Manuel Castriotta.

Appendices

Appendix I

See Table 6.

Table 6 Overview of the selected literature reviews and theoretical frameworks on the topic of emerging organizations
Full size table

Appendix II

See Table 7.

Table 7 Workflow protocol for conducting science mapping with bibliometric methods (Zupic and Čater 2015; McCain 1990; Tranfield et al. 2003)
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Appendix III

See Table 8.

Table 8 Overview of the main terms identifying the emerging organizations’ research field
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Appendix IV

See Table 9.

Table 9 WoS database search query
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Appendix V

See Fig. 3.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Flowchart illustrating the process of data collection

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Castriotta, M., Loi, M., Marku, E. et al. What’s in a name? Exploring the conceptual structure of emerging organizations. Scientometrics 118, 407–437 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2977-2

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