A Structured Literature Review on Networks and Organizations

In the last two decades, scholarly attention has been largely devoted to networks and organizations, and the field has grown rapidly and, to a certain extent, sparsely. Rooted in graph theory, network research met organizations initially through the sociological approaches, but lately incorporating contributions from biology and evolutionary theories, psychology, mathematics, information systems, and more traditional management and organization research. These developments contributed to the exploration of new organizational phenomena, but at the same time, they challenged the coherence of the overall research tradition. The goal of the present chapter is to explore how the study of networks and organizations evolved in the past two decades, understanding how the field benefited from the contributions coming from very different disciplines in terms of methodologies and types of issues explored.