A Bibliometric Analysis of the Intellectual Structure of Studies on Slavery in the 21st Century

Slavery is usually regarded as the dark side of business practices. However, and maybe, because of that, research on the slavery’s residues and its contemporary forms is fundamental. Therefore, we aimed to answer the following questions: What is the intellectual structure of recent publications on slavery in the business research area? How is the past of slavery remembered (or forgotten) in this century’s researches on business research area? To answer these questions, we extracted publications from the Scopus database, and then, we grouped the references using the bibliometric software Bibexcel. Finally, to identify the subgroups and to create the visualization map, we used VOSviewer. Results indicate that the intellectual structure of slavery-related studies can be grouped into nine pillars that cover diverse topics, such as heritage tourism, critical accounting and management history, and the perpetuation of the legacy of slavery in the globalized world.