Revisiting James March (1991): Whither exploration and exploitation?

Abstract

James G. March has published his seminal work 'Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning' in 1991. We revisit March's article and analyze the impact it has had on scholarly thinking, providing a comprehensive and structured review of the extensive and diverse research inspired by this publication. Unlike previous reviews on the topic, we combine bibliometric analysis and machine-based text mining to portray a picture of the evolving landscape of this article's influence. We show that although this influence has changed significantly over the years, there are still unexplored opportunities left by this seminal work. Our approach enables us to identify promising directions for future research that reinforce the themes anchored in March's (1991) article. In particular, we call for reconnecting current research to the behavioral roots of this article and uncovering the microfoundations of exploration and exploitation. Our analysis further identifies opportunities for integrating this framework with resource-based theories, and considering how exploration and exploitation can be sourced and integrated within and across organizational boundaries. Finally, our analysis reveals prospects for extending the notions of exploration and exploitation to new domains, but we caution that such domains should be clearly delineated. We conclude with a call for more research on the antecedents of exploration and exploitation and for studying their underexplored dimensions.

Open Service Innovation: The Role of Intermediary Capabilities

“…Not only did this process assist in improving reliability of initial coding, but importantly it provided a basis for the researchers to then delve deeper into data to uncover deeper meaning and relationships through the researchers’ own interpretation to derive the theoretical constructs. For a detailed description of Leximancer and its use in (service) research see (Wilden et al, ; Wilden, Hohberger, Devinney, and Lavie, ). The interim results were also presented to Nexus interviewees, we solicited feedback after every data analysis period, and Nexus’s managers concurred with our final findings.…”

Knowledge capabilities in supply chain networks: a taxonomy

“…Exploitation (March, 1991) Use of existing (mostly codified) knowledge and standard organisational processes to provide efficiency/efficacy to the SCN Focus on codifying knowledge and business processes Hansen et al (1999), Bolisani and Bratianu (2017), Gupta et al (2006), Pillai and Min (2010), Wilden et al (2018) Efficiency-focused KM strategy Choi and Lee (2002), Bhosale and Kant (2016), Garcia-Morales (2006), Zhang, He, and Lee (2008) High emphasis on KM infrastructure capabilities Singh and Dalcher (2011) Top-down transmission of managerial knowledge supports exploitation activities Mom et al (2007) Intensive use of IT (system-oriented KM strategy)…”

60 Years of March and Simon’s Organizations: An Empirical Examination of its Impact and Influence on Subsequent Research

“…We then used the proximity scores to create a network representation of the publications citing M&S . The network approach to analysing publications or references has become increasingly popular within bibliometric studies (e.g., Randhawa et al, ; Vogel and Güttel, ; Wilden et al, ). It possesses several advantages compared to classical clustering methods (e.g., clustering or multi‐dimensional scaling), including allowing for the direct visualization of the relationships between publications (Randhawa et al, ), being more precise and effective (Zupic and Čater, ), and offering improved visual depictions for a larger numbers of publications (Vogel and Güttel, ).…”