Mapping Ethics Research in the Hospitality Scholarship

This paper examines the role of ethics-related research in shaping the intellectual structure of hospitality-literature through a two-step method. The intellectual structure of the most-cited ethics-related references was revealed by co-citation analysis. Content analysis was made to reveal each cluster’s main themes. A database comprising 9664 references from seven hospitality journals, spanning 60 years, was analyzed. The analysis uncovered four thematic clusters, indicating that organizational citizenship behaviors and environmental-ethics are the predominant topics in the hospitality-ethics literature. The previous studies heavily focused on examining relationships and their practical implications. The study adopted a novel approach to bibliometric analysis that has never been used in hospitality ethics-reviews. The results of the concept-discipline-focused hybrid-review provide a comprehensive understanding of the knowledge domain and indicate research directions.