Application of Word Co-Occurrence Analysis in Exploring the Shared Semantic Territory between Two Theoretical Views: A Study of Dynamic Capabilities and Ambidexterity

Word co-occurrence analysis is one of the text-mining methods that has various applications in the information management area. One of these applications, which has been less noticeable, is exploring the shared semantic territory between different theoretical views. The importance of this application is due to the formation of recent scientific trends of various research areas based on different theories and concepts. Accordingly, the current study attempts to reveal the applicability of word co-occurrence analysis in exploring the shared semantic territory between two theoretical views. To this end, the dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity views were chosen as the case of this study. Dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity have had a notable co-occurrence in recent strategic management studies to the extent that researchers considered them as two integrable views. Accordingly, this study aims at exploring the structure of shared semantic territory between dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity. To this end, all scientific documents related to both theories, indexed in the Web of Science or Scopus databases, and dated to 2018 were retrieved. Then, the authors analysed the corpus composed of titles, abstracts, and keywords of collected documents by using the word co-occurrence analysis. By doing so, they introduced 14 main conceptual categories in the shared territory of these two views: 1) dynamic capabilities and their components, 2) ambidexterity and its components, 3) performance, 4) innovation, 5) organizational capabilities and resources, 6) sustainable competitive advantage, 7) organizational knowledge and learning, 8) environmental and organizational change, 9) technology and information technology, 10) leadership, 11) entrepreneurship, 12) collaboration networks, 13) business model, and 14) operations and supply chain. Also, according to the word temporal analysis, research trends among the conceptual categories were revealed. Based on these trends, it is expected that further studies in the shared semantic territory between dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity will probably tend to subjects in the fields of business model, operations and supply chain, or entrepreneurship.