Structuring Literature Reviews

Abstract

Management decisions are often the result of a chronological sequence of small incremental decisions. As a result, it is often difficult to provide a general model of current organisational arrangements as their justifications are found in a long stream of apparently independent decisions. When these management decisions are the topic of academic research, the resulting literature mirrors the apparent lack of structure of the real world: building a synthesis of studies conducted at different points in time and in different contexts is difficult. Too often, differing contexts are used as an excluding mechanism in management research, which is not surprisingly described as being too “fragmented”. The objective of this paper is to show how a systematic procedure of reviewing research papers and structuring their findings with influence diagrams can be used for synthesis. The paper shows how the procedure aptly deals with apparent conflicts and differences in contexts.