A Global Research Trend on Franchisee in Franchising Literature: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Franchising has become a worldwide international business activity. Companies have tried to move from conventional business models to multinational ones since the beginning of the twenty-first century in order to leverage their profitable performance and improve their competitive edge, and franchising is the best method for businesses to broaden into new areas. Franchisees play an important role in supporting franchise companies in expanding into new markets by providing valuable resources. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of academic research on franchisees in the franchise literature. An extensive bibliometric analysis, including a bibliometric performance analysis and a graphic mapping of the references in this area, was carried out to achieve this. Journals, documents, authors, organizations/ institutions, and countries are the subject of this research investigation. The research employs a variety of bibliometric metrics, such as the number of publications and citations to conduct the franchisee research. In addition, the VOS viewer is used to graphically map the bibliographic content. The graphical analysis use of co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and keyword co-occurrence. The findings of both analyses are consistent, indicating that the United States is the most influential country in franchisee research, as it is home to the most influential authors and institutions in the field. Furthermore, the field's global growth has been observed and is expected to continue. Prior to comprehensive research on franchisee personalities and entrepreneurship, the early foundations of this research field were anchored in the adjacent body of franchisee literature from other disciplines such as marketing and management, which focused on franchisor-franchisee interaction. Apart from influential conceptual papers and literature reviews that helped to integrate the field's knowledge base, the majority of foundational papers examined the consequences, relationships, transaction costs, and effect of franchise management strategies on franchisee efficiency, as well as franchisee success or failure. The analysis implication adds to the understanding of franchisees and their relations to various topics, allowing researchers to do new studies on the franchisee topic.