Thematic convergence in digital transformation research? A bibliographic coupling analysis

Purpose: This study maps the thematic structure of empirical research on digital transformation (DT) and organizational performance, examining whether the field’s apparent diversity reflects genuinely distinct theoretical orientations or thematic convergence around shared optimization assumptions. Design/methodology/approach: A structuring bibliometric review combines bibliographic coupling, principal component analysis (PCA), and network analysis. The corpus comprises 346 empirical articles indexed in Web of Science and Scopus, published through December 2024. From this corpus, 60 articles with salient component loadings form the core analytical set. Findings – Three thematic components emerge: (1) Strategic and Organizational Dimensions of Digital Transformation, (2) Organizational Capabilities, Leadership, and Strategies, and (3) Business Model Innovation. Despite surface-level diversity, the components converge around a shared orientation that treats digitalization as an organizational imperative and frames performance through optimization logics. The three components appear to operate as a mutually reinforcing cycle, advanced here as an interpretive proposition, in which negative outcomes tend to be absorbed as implementation deficits rather than prompting alternative explanations. Three underexplored domains remain largely unaddressed: the politics of DT, a theory of failure beyond implementation deficiency, and the distributional consequences of transformation. Originality/value: While prior reviews diagnose fragmentation as the field’s main limitation, this study argues the opposite: DT performance research exhibits thematic convergence around optimization logics that constrains theoretical development. The proposed framework maps both the relational structure among thematic components and the boundaries this convergence imposes. A theory-driven research agenda organized around four entry points (the politics of digital transformation, a theory of failure beyond implementation, the distributional consequences of transformation, and institutional and critical-theory perspectives) offers pathways beyond the field’s current optimization-oriented boundaries. Practical implications: The dominant literature equips practitioners with tools for sequential DT implementation but leaves critical governance challenges unaddressed: managing power redistribution, designing for reversibility, and tracking the distributional consequences of transformation alongside firm-level performance metrics.