Mapping the themes and intellectual structure of corporate university: co-citation and cluster analyses

Corporate university is a unique form of educational arrangement to accomplish an organization’s goals by building the intellectual capital of its employees. In the academia, it is a relatively new concept that gained foothold during the 1990s. While it is a fertile area of research with several works unravelling its diverse aspects, only a few studies have delved into building the knowledge blocks of the concept of corporate university. Therefore, this study aims at investigating the major clusters of corporate universities obtained from the extant literature. In this study, 207 pertinent articles were retrieved from Scopus, an online electronic database. Post this, co-citation and citation analysis was performed on the 207 articles and a co-citation matrix was formulated to enlist the clusters of corporate universities. Subsequently, multi-dimensional scaling and cluster analysis techniques were used to extract the essential clusters of corporate university. Finally, five major clusters emerged: (1) corporate university as a source of competitive advantage, (2) corporate university as a layered concept, (3) reimagining corporate university through technology, (4) corporate universities: paradigms and models and (5) corporate university: performance metrics. Results of this study can act as leading insights for future studies and practitioners.