What's in a name? Exploring the conceptual structure of emerging organizations

This study describes the conceptual structure of emerging organisations on the basis of research over the past 26years. During this period, terms and theoretical perspectives have proliferated, creating a field that is highly fragmented and dispersed. Using a co-word analysis based on author keywords, we selected the most frequent key-terms to provide a complete overview of current studies. In particular, through cluster analysis, we highlight the labels that entrepreneurship scholars have used to investigate emerging organisations and illustrate how they are arranged in subgroups. Furthermore, we interpret the distances among terms with multidimensional scaling. Using overlay visualization, we anchor the relevance of the keywords over time. Our findings show that five possible conceptualizations of emerging organisations coexist. These range from antecedents of venture creation to innovation mechanisms. We conclude that entrepreneurial nascency is just one of several descriptive components used in academic studies.