Abstract
Recent crises, including pandemics, geopolitical conflicts, regulatory shocks, and rapid technological change, have exposed systematic blind spots in how firms conceptualize competition. While competitive dynamics research has traditionally focused on rival dyads, many of today’s most consequential attacks originate from actors that firms do not categorize as competitors and often fail to anticipate (Abrahamson & Baumard, 2008; Ocasio, 2011; Markman et al., 2016).The purpose of this article is a systematic literature review and identification the state of knowledge in multi-environment competitive dynamics field and to explore and to integrate competitive dynamics with a broader set of stakeholders, both market and nonmarket players and firms, by incorporating stakeholder theory, nonmarket rivalry and strategy. In terms of research methods, a systematic literature review, based on the 75 publications located in reputable scientific databases (Scopus and Web of Science) and published in top academic journals between the years 1980 and 2026 and Rapid Automatic Keyword Extraction (RAKE), was applied. During bibliometric analysis of 3539 references we presented keywords co-authorship relations with clusters network and density visualization and keywords co-occurrence network with colored clusters. For the effective review, papers were divided based on the form of their interaction within three of a focal company’s value creation contexts: market, social/political and technological, so based on the form of their interaction in both market and nonmarket environments. We theorize that, while competitive dynamics filed has greatly advanced our understanding on competitive strategy, the focus of analysis has been limited to dyads of competitors. Results largely support our theory that there are many actors other than rivals, who are critical to competitive outcomes and pose threats to target firms. The main findings provide information on the concept and specifically on different research perspectives and areas of analysis with division of the bibliometric data. The results on the topic have indicated that this issue is in a mature phase but with an upward trend of research development.