Here we use co-word analysis on extant literature to map the intellectual structure of research addressing the impact of economic transition on Central and Eastern European enterprises during the 1989–2013 period. We collected and analyzed 2053 scholarly papers from the most comprehensive management databases, which were then used to develop. This paper contributes to the economic transition literature by providing an empirically derived framework based on the extant literature. This framework describes the main factors affecting enterprises during the transition process, the relationships among these factors and their evolution