Two decades of management research on emerging economies: a citation and co-citation review

Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented increase in scholars’ interest in emerging economies, with an increasing number of articles published. This study investigates the knowledge base that has formed the foundation for research on emerging economies. Using bibliometric techniques of citations and co-citations, we reviewed the extant management/business research on emerging economies to identify the intellectual structure and the main research concentrations of the field over the past two decades, from 1992 to 2013. The findings reveal that an institutional perspective has been foundational to the research on emerging economies multinationals. Yet, there is a growing emphasis on firms’ strategic choices and the use of resource, and dynamic capabilities-based views – entering and exiting emerging economies. Institutional perspectives complement a greater emphasis on the global strategies of firms in and out of emerging economies as scholars delve into the emerging countries multinationals’ dynamic capabilities as sources of competitive advantage. This study extends the current comprehension of the theories and themes researched, how the research agenda has progressed, and the conceptual idiosyncrasies of emerging economies studies. We provide scholars and practitioners with a global rear view of the field, organize, classify and systematize the stock of accumulated knowledge and the trends of theorizing, as a foundation to spawn future research endeavors.