Tajammal Hussain ^a,b*, Rick Edgeman ^a,c,d and Jacob Kjær Eskildsen ^e 

^a Department of Business Development and Technology, Aarhus University, Herning, Denmark; ^b Department of Statistics, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Lahore, Pakistan; ^c Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, Shingo Institute and Management Department, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA; ^d Division of Quality Science, Uppsala University, Visby, Sweden; ^e Department of Management, Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

This quantitative study is meant to explore the intellectual structure paradigm of organisational business excellence (OBE) as an emerging field of research. Advanced bibliometric analysis of co-citations is performed through synchronising the relationships between the research articles published within the OBE domain. The primary objective was to develop an understanding of the field’s fundamental

composition, current inward integration, outward expansion, and future research directions. The Elsevier Scopus database of journal articles was retrieved for the 1995–2015 period. Initially, descriptive analysis explored interesting findings about OBE as a distinct research domain: (1) most influential authors both in terms of the number of publications and citations; (2) most productive years for publications; (3) most productive journals. Furthermore, principal component analysis and multidimensional scaling revealed 10 main research dimensions of OBE, for example, (1) the ways of achieving OBE; (2) adoption of OBE philosophy across the organisations; (3) measuring the implementation and performance of OBE, and so on. This research identified an emerging trend of applying OBE concepts across multidisciplinary fields. As the findings of this study suggest the vitality and future progression of the business excellence as a research field, therefore, this study could be of great utility and of interest for all concerned stakeholders of OBE research.

Keywords: Organisational business excellence; bibliometric analysis; co-citations; multidimensional scaling; Bibexcel; quality management

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14783363.2018.1468752