Abstract
Indoor air quality (IAQ) is increasingly recognized as a material organisational concern with implications for employee health, productivity, resilience, regulatory exposure, and sustainable value creation. While air pollution scholarship has traditionally emphasized outdoor emissions and atmospheric processes, emerging research highlights the strategic importance of indoor environmental conditions within firms. This study analyses approximately 20,000 peer-reviewed air quality publications using two complementary computational techniques, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and BERTopic, to identify dominant thematic structures and emerging research trajectories. The findings reveal a fragmented but converging knowledge landscape spanning health risk, ventilation systems, filtration technologies, occupational exposure, monitoring technologies, machine learning, combustion emissions, and environmental policy. Building on these results, the paper conceptualizes IAQ as strategic infrastructure embedded within organizational systems rather than a narrow facilities management issue. By synthesizing interdisciplinary research at scale, the study provides a foundation for integrating IAQ into sustainability governance, risk management, and human capital strategy.
Keywords: Indoor air quality; strategic infrastructure; sustainability governance; human capital; topic modelling; LDA; BERTopic; environmental risk; occupational health; ESG.
Sustainable Developmental Goals: Good Health and Well-being (Goal 3), Decent Work and Economic Growth (Goal 8), Sustainable Cities and Communities (Goal 11), Climate Action (Goal 13)