The Evolution Path, Mapping Knowledge and Outlook of Organizational Culture Research

Chen Chunhua, Yin Jun

Foreign Economics & Management Vol. 41, Issue 11, pp. 70 - 85 (2019)  DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20190926.006

Summary

Organizational culture is a popular topic in the field of organizational management, but the existing research has not reached a consensus on the research paradigm. Although the existing reviews of qualitative research can bring us some important enlightenment, the quantitative research reviews based on bibliometric methods can sum up the research paradigm in this field by scientifically drawing the evolution path and mapping knowledge of this field. Complementing prior reviews, we conduct a bibliometric analysis of 518 organizational culture articles in 7 top management journals from 1983 to 2018, and provide a different perspective by investigating the evolution path and mapping knowledge in the field of organizational culture over time via co-citation and co-occurrence analyses. On this basis, we analyze the four elements of the research paradigm in terms of underlying assumptions, research methods, research questions and scientific community, tease out the three types of organizational culture research paradigms of leadership dynamics, environmental dynamics and hybrid dynamics, and then analyze the deficiencies of the existing organizational culture research. Following the research paradigm and mapping knowledge of organizational culture, we discuss the future research directions and research framework in the field of organizational culture. Future researchers can refer to this research framework to put forward research questions, research hypotheses and research mechanisms, and explore more abundant research perspectives when conducting theoretical research on organizational culture. Taking the underlying assumption research of organizational culture proposed by Schein in 1985 as an example, we further investigate the insights of long-term underlying assumptions in the era of Internet.

Keywords

organizational culture; evolution path; mapping knowledge; underlying assumptions; long-term assumption