Abstract
The present research work shows the results of an analysis about the existing literature on one of the ‘topics’ which is currently raising greater interest among scholars and researchers in the fields of strategic management and organization science, namely: organizational ambidexterity. More precisely, and seeking to identify and visualize the intellectual structure or knowledge base of the research developed in relation to this construct, a decision was made to analyze a total of 283 research papers which appeared after the publication in the journal California Management Review in the summer of 1996 of the seminal work by Tushman and O’Reilly III entitled ‘Ambidextrous Organizations: Managing Evolutionary and Revolutionary Change,’ where these authors suggested that organizations need to explore and exploit simultaneously if they want to be ambidextrous. As for the methodology applied, it was based on the utilization of bibliometric techniques—particularly citation analyses and author co-citation analyses and social networks analysis.
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Notes
On the whole, what the literature actually suggests is that no methodological guide or way of acting has been established in this respect, which is why the choice usually results from a series of tests so that the possibility exists to obtain a co-citation matrix with a suitable size for its statistical treatment or its graphic representation. This same view is shared by authors such as Schildt et al. (2006, p. 401) in connection with the field of Entrepreneurship.
More precisely, such values can be treated in two ways. The first one (White and Griffith 1981) consists in taking the sum of the three highest values or absolute frequencies on the corresponding row or column—note that it is a symmetrical matrix—and dividing that sum by two, which provides a value that, according to the aforesaid authors, could illustrate the importance of a given paper in the field under study; the other option (McCain 1990) simply starts from regarding such values as missing data or values and applying the pairwise deletion criterion when carrying out the calculations to be developed; that is, from ignoring the main diagonal values when calculating the correlation coefficients between each pair of documents, for example.
Authors such as Tripsas and Gavetti (2000) stress in their paper how difficult it is for the top managers of these companies to adapt their mental schemes or models—essentially based on their own previous experience and on their system of beliefs and cases associated with the reality and the world that surround them—to the new environmental conditions, thus favoring inertia and giving as a result a poor organizational performance insofar as no new capabilities are being developed.
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García-Lillo, F., Úbeda-García, M. & Marco-Lajara, B. Organizational ambidexterity: exploring the knowledge base. Scientometrics 107, 1021–1040 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1897-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1897-2