Antifragility Capabilities for Service Firms: A Bibliometric Analysis

Antifragility is an emergent concept established in 2012 as an alternative to resilience and robustness. Since then, researchers have developed an interest in the concept that describes how firms can withstand disorders and attain higher performance when exposed to randomness. Service firms are significant to the economic growth of a society. However, these firms are susceptible to environmental turbulence due to service complexity and the inability to adapt to strong market fluctuations. The purpose of the study was to determine the research contributions, key research themes, and requisite capabilities of antifragility in service firms. A bibliometric analysis was conducted on antifragility documents published in the Scopus database in the period between 2012 and 2024. Co-citation and keyword analyses were conducted to reveal possible co-relationships and research contributions. Vosviewer and R-Studio tools were used to analyze and interpret the bibliographic data. The study highlights the possible capabilities for antifragility, strategies and factors that influence the development of antifragile systems in service firms. The review revealed three key findings. First, firms build antifragility through collaborations, scenario planning and risk management strategies. Second, the key influential antifragility capabilities include the use of slack resources, capacity, adaptability and creativity. Third, factors that drive firms to adopt antifragility principles include digital technologies, innovation and sustainability. The study provides new insights into the emerging themes of antifragility in the literature. One of the limitations is that the study focused only on the Scopus database for data extraction. There could be a few publications that were not captured, hence future studies could focus on using multiple data sources. Future research could pursue the key research themes to build the possible theory on antifragility capabilities.