Strategic Management Practices in Islamic Boarding Schools: A Systematic Literature Review
Abstract
Background: Pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) have evolved from purely religious educational institutions into complex organisations managing business units, cooperatives, and community empowerment programmes, a shift accelerated by Indonesia's Pesantren Law (2019) and the One Pesantren One Product programme. Despite this growth, research on how pesantren strategically manage this dual educational and socio-economic mandate remains fragmented across isolated themes such as leadership, governance, and quality management.
Research Gap: Prior studies remain largely fragmented, examining leadership, digitalisation, governance, financial management, human resource development, or educational quality in isolation rather than as interconnected components of a coherent strategic management system. Few studies have systematically synthesised how various strategic management practices jointly contribute to institutional performance, resilience, and sustainability across the more than 42,000 pesantren operating in Indonesia today.
Novelty: This study conducts a Systematic Literature Review to map research development on strategic management in pesantren, synthesise empirical evidence across six domains, and construct an integrated conceptual framework positioning religious leadership as the foundational legitimising layer from which strategic planning, managerial operationalisation, and institutional performance reciprocally flow.
Method: This study employed a Systematic Literature Review using the Scopus database. An initial search using the keywords "Islamic Boarding School" OR "Pesantren" yielded 1,430 publications, narrowed to 241 management related articles, and screened by title and abstract following PRISMA guidelines to yield 82 peer reviewed journal articles (2012 to 2026) for thematic content analysis, complemented by keyword co occurrence mapping using VOSviewer.
Results: Publication output has grown sharply since 2019, with over half of the studies published in the last three years. The co occurrence map reveals four interlocking clusters: leadership and human capital, educational quality and strategic formulation, an explicit strategic management vocabulary, and financial accountability. Findings show that strategic planning is predominantly emergent, kiai leadership functions as the legitimising precondition for other strategic instruments, and governance is shifting toward hybrid accountability models.
Conclusion: The review synthesises these findings into an integrated conceptual framework offering a theoretical bridge across previously disconnected research streams and a practical reference for strengthening pesantren strategic management capacity. Future research should develop validated survey instruments, conduct longitudinal studies, and extend analysis to pesantren networks and cross country comparisons.
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