Drilling down the viable system theories in business, management and accounting: A bibliometric review

The aim of this paper is to trace the scientific landscape (authors, scientific papers, topics most frequently dealt with, relationships between them) of the studies concerning the viable system model (VSM) and the viable system approach (vSa), carried out in the period 1990–2018 within the scientific framework of systems thinking by scholars in business, management and accounting (BMA). The methodology adopted herein is based on a scientometric approach, bibliographic mapping and clustering. The analysis was carried out following a three‐step procedure: bibliographic coupling of scientific contributions (153 articles recorded in Scopus in the considered period), co‐occurrence of the main author keywords and analysis of co‐citations. This paper examines for the first time the entire scientific body of knowledge about viable system theories (VSTs) in BMA areas using recent joint mapping and clustering tools.