Smart City Research as an Interdisciplinary Crossroads: a Challenge for Management and Organization Studies

This paper seeks to define the boundaries of Smart City research and to draw a map of the interdisciplinary community focusing on this emerging issue. To do so, we analysed the texts included in the websites of two major international Conferences on Smart Cities, and we used the Social Network Analysis (SNA) approach to examine a representative sample of 114 publications on Smart Cities. We found that Smart City research was hosted in Architecture and Social Sciences journals in the first place, but since 2007–2008 the interest in this issue boomed among Engineering and Computer Science scholars. Whilst there is a growing number of publications describing many ICT-enabled solutions for enhancing the competitiveness, sustainability and livability of cities, only few studies have addressed the organizational issues implied in such innovations so far. On the other side, our graph describing the interdisciplinary links within the 118 analysed publications shows that management studies occupy a strategic position within the interdisciplinary network of Smart City research. Then, Management and Information Systems scholars are given the opportunity to fill an important gap in an emerging stream of studies.