Evolutionary Pathways of Ecosystem Literature in Organization and Management Studies

Abstract

Abstract Literature shows manifold concepts of the ecosystem. A critical issue in social studies of science is that these concepts include different construct’s core elements. Recent reviews have set out to clarify the conceptual boundaries between ecosystem concepts. However, there are many inconsistencies to clarify the interaction of different concepts that have supported their scientific evolution to help scholars in scientific investigations and firms to achieve and sustain competitive advantage and other goals. This study endeavors to advance the understanding of the evolutionary pathways of different concepts of the ecosystem. In particular, here, we explore the scientific dynamics of the concept of ecosystem, using author co-citation analysis to clarify the interaction between different concepts in social communities of science. The findings show systematical differences in the ecosystem types considering their conceptual basis and goals. Especially, findings suggest that the current concept of ecosystem is being socially constructed based on different domains of knowledge of scholars and evolves from a master community started with the work by Moore in 2003, generating four evolutionary pathways with specific characteristics directed to: Entrepreneurial ecosystem, Innovation ecosystem, Service ecosystem, and the Platform ecosystem. Results seem to suggest fragmented and contradictory views of the concept of ecosystem, because of different evolution based on social and scientific interactions of scholars and their communities in shaping the dynamics of science in these fields of research. The splitting and merging of different social and scientific communities in an international collaboration network do not converge towards a consistent and unique perspective of the concept of ecosystem for a general analysis because of initial origins based on conceptual differences, different approaches of analysis and purposes of research and consequential various evolutionary pathways in complex scientific interactions between communities. Hence, these results clarify the science dynamics of the concepts of ecosystem to explain different applications in theoretical and practical contexts of organization and management studies.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.