In today’s challenging economic times, the number of failing firms remains high. Theories of why corporations fail and consequences for organizations and individuals those affected by failure have mainly been examined in a research field traditionally summarized as “organizational failure and decline.” Unfortunately, this research field suffers from strong fragmentation and various separate streams of scholarly interest. The aim of this study is to structure existing research with the help of bibliometric methods and present developments in research between 1982 and 2016. This can essentially contribute to a better understanding of the ongoing maturation of this specific research field. Concretely, we perform a co-citation analysis and visualize existing sub-clusters of organizational failure research. We also present the most frequently cited publications based on a citation analysis and highlight shifting citation patterns in different research periods. The main clusters are finally summarized in an integrated framework.

Introduction

Research on corporate failure and decline already has quite a long research tradition (e.g. Altman, 1968; Argenti, 1976; Beaver, 1966). However, compared with business management studies in general, it only receives limited scholarly attention, which is criticized as “much of the […] empirical literature has […] a distinct survivor bias” (Miner, Kim, Holzinger, & Haunschild, 1996, p. 239). In times of recent crisis and vague economic development, interest in findings from failure and decline research is again rising. Generally, corporate failure research can be broadly divided into three major themes, which all have specific fields of interest. These are “Prediction models,” “Finance and law,” and “Organizational failure” (Kuecher, Feldbauer-Durstmueller, & Duller, 2015). Organizational failure research has traditionally been dominated by two key issues. The first is related to the examination of the causes and processes of failing organizations to find appropriate strategies for preventing further failures. The second stream deals with understanding barriers to learning from failure and identifying strategies to overcome them (Carmeli, 2007).