Business and the Natural Environment

2 Contours of an emerging field

Historical development of B&NE research

An obvious way to study the scientific discourse within a field is to examine what has been published. Based on a sample of 874 major articles in B&NE between 1975 and 2010,¹ this chapter maps key features of the field in terms of number of publications, types of outlets, citation patterns. As we can see in figure 2.1 (Hoffman, 2011a), the historical trajectory of the number of these scientific B&NE articles published per year shows that B&NE research dates back to before the early 1970s, but did not fully begin to develop as a substantial body of literature until the early 1990s. It has grown at a steady rate until around 2010 (Hoffman, 2011c), where it appears to have plateaued. ...