Ecosystem of knowledge or knowledge contamination? An exploratory analysis at the boundaries of scientific domains

The knowledge ecosystem is a fascinating metaphor, which allows us to effectively depict the exchange of information and ideas between the knots of a more or less defined network of entities having similar aims and operating in the same environmental context. The ecosystem metaphor has been variously argued to be fitting with the interplay that happens between different academic domains, which reciprocally share conceptual frameworks, empirical tools, and theoretical insights to push forward our knowledge about timely scientific issues. However, there is the risk that far from bringing toward the establishment of a knowledge ecosystem the exchange of information and ideas between different scientific disciplines triggers a process of knowledge contamination, which may produce unexpected drawbacks. In fact, knowledge contamination implies a sort of alteration of scientific domains which are more likely to draw research tools and approaches from other disciplines. Adopting an exploratory slant, this paper tries to investigate the interplay between management and two scientific domains which show an increasing influence on management studies, namely philosophy and neuroscience. A descriptive bibliometric approach was designed to shed light on the exchange of knowledge between management and these two disciplines. On the whole, the analysis concerned 199 scientific articles, 152 about the management-philosophy interplay and 47 about the neuroscience-management interplay. In this preliminary step of the research, the attention was focussed on the references made and the citations get by these items. Sticking to the exploratory nature of this research, we did not have research hypothesis guiding our excursion in the fields of knowledge ecosystem and knowledge contamination. Rather, we developed two assumptions, which steered our study. Specifically, it was thought that if the number of referenced articles belonging to the philosophy and neuroscience fields was equal or lower than the number of citing articles belonging to these two areas, then a knowledge ecosystem could be supposed to exist; alternatively, if the number of referenced articles belonging to the fields of philosophy and neuroscience was higher than the number of citing articles ascribable to these two areas, a knowledge contamination was expected to occur. The research findings supported the latter assumption, suggesting that management studies may be at risk of contamination from other disciplines. Further conceptual and empirical developments are required to fully disentangle the knowledge contamination issue in management studies and to identify the missing steps to the establishment of a knowledge ecosystem between management and related scientific disciplines.