Identifying the Thematic Structure of Organizational Capabilities in the Project Business

This paper presents a systematic literature review on project business’ organizational capabilities and assesses the identified publications from Web of Science Core Collection from thematic perspective using a temporal aspect. In general, organizational capabilities in business context refer in brief to firm’s ability to do something. This study approaches literature systematically with bibliographic coupling clustering and term analysis. Based on carefully selected set of 93 papers between 1993 and 2019, bibliometric analysis confirms a steady increase in publishing activity in past ten years and bibliographic coupling visualization with VOSviewer software results in eight article clusters. The thematic analysis is conducted based on each clusters’ articles’ titles and abstracts. Term analysis features of ATLAS.ti software is applied in theme identification.
Based on the cluster sizes, three most attention received themes were 1) Capabilities development in innovation and knowledge management, 2) Dynamic capabilities and project management, and 3) Organizational capabilities and IT systems. A temporal analysis demonstrated publishing activity per cluster and visualized the identified themes’ prevalence in timeline, indicating how the number of publications has changed over periods of time in certain themes of organizational capabilities in project business. The paper contributes to literature thematic outlining by presenting methodological approach how to combine bibliometrics and term analysis. In addition, organizational capability research benefits of systematically identified and visualized thematic structure. The study suggests avenues for future research, for instance, how to explore the effects on results by including full article texts to term analysis.