Service, network, systems and complexity theories in banking management research: bibliometric study

Purpose – This paper aims at examining the state of the art of the adoption of Service-Dominant logic, Service Science, Network Theory, Systems and Complexity Theories in the research field of banking management. Design/Methodology/approach – The work is based on the methodological approach of literature review through the application of the bibliometric analysis method. Bibliometric methods are suggested when analyzing the evolution of heterogeneous, multidimensional and multidisciplinary research fields, as they ensure greater rigor and objectivity to the study compared to qualitative methods (Vogel, Güttel, 2013; Zupic, Čater, 2015). Bibliographical data were gathered from ISI Web of Science database and examined using a web-based social network analysis (SNA) on the citation data to detect the main relationships between the publications collected (Knutas et al., 2015) and the evolution of the scientific literature on the subject matter study (Veerbek et al., 2002; Nerur et al., 2008; Conforto et al., 2012). Findings – The results show a poor adoption of Service Research and Systems theories in the studies on banking management. Network theory is instead more considered, showing a growing presence in the publications of last six years and an increasing number of citations. However, the greatest interest of the scientific community is on the complexity theory that was adopted as theoretical background in 129 works on banking management, which were cited 1848 times with an exponential growth in the last decade. Theoretical/pratical implications - The study provides significant implications for both scholars and professionals as a systematic mapping of existing works offers a clear and easily understanding of the links and the complementarity between the scientific approaches taken into consideration and of the emerging trends and future lines of research. From a managerial point of view, this paper highlights the major contributions of current scientific frameworks for the complexity management and the activation of value co-creation paths necessary to deal with complex and dynamic sectors like the banking one. Originality/value – No papers analyzing the application of the latest service, systems and network theories to the banking sector have been detected in the literature. The originality of this work derives by the use of a bibliometric method to study the evolution and the links between these different frameworks in the specific field of banks.