Not the ‘from the editors’ 1 : On guarding ‘topness’

Making sense of rejection and resistance

The FTE (Supplemental Appendix 1) argues that much heterodox scholarship challenges and deepens conventional diagnoses of ‘real-world’ problems as a means of advancing emancipatory change. With regard to CMS, the Domain Statement of the CMS Division of the Academy of Management (AoM) explicitly states:

‘Our premise is that structural features of contemporary society, such as the profit imperative, patriarchy, racial inequality, and ecological irresponsibility often turn organizations into instruments of domination and exploitation. Driven by a shared desire to change this situation, we aim in our research, teaching, and practice to develop critical interpretations of management and society and to generate radical alternatives’ (emphases added). ⁸

A core premise of the rejected FTE (Supplemental Appendix 1) is that the world of scholarship is intimately conditioned by, rather than external to, ‘the structural features of contemporary society’; and that the purpose of critical scholarship is to interrogate and change established practices. Such practices include processes of evaluation in organizations which extend to the evaluation of manuscripts submitted to learned journals. More specifically, the remit of CMS encompasses assessment of how evaluation processes may be deployed, more or less intentionally, as ‘instruments of domination’ or, alternatively, operate to facilitate emancipation through an activist promotion and pursuit of ‘radical alternatives’ to established practices.

The rejected FTE, and also this Speaking Out, are examples of an ‘activism’ that ‘engage(s) in changing the terms through which we [e.g. business school faculty] constitute the academy, and ourselves as academics’ (Cabantous et al., 2016: 210). Such activism strives ‘to put ourselves into critique’ (Fournier and Smith, 2012: 467) in a way that ‘starts from the personal’ (Fournier and Smith, 2012: 465). In this regard, it is relevant to acknowledge that the preparation of the FTE was written from a position of privilege (as an established white male professor nearing retirement with only his reputation at stake), as is this Speaking Out. One unwelcome consequence of occupying this privileged position, which puts me ‘into critique’ (Fournier and Smith, 2012: 467) is a vulnerability to the accusation of wanting to have my cake (consenting to becoming an AE at AMR) and eating it (disparaging TOP). My response is that my ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘disloyalty’ (e.g. to AMR and the Academy) is ethically defensible, if not necessarily compelling. I acknowledge that my motives for accepting the AMR AE position were mixed. I was flattered, foolishly enough; and I was also pleased to be invited in recognition of the many years that I had served as a regular AMR reviewer for the journal and then as a member of its editorial board. But I was not quite naïve enough to believe that acceptance of the AE role would be viewed without suspicion, hostility and perhaps a little envy by some members of the Academy, including CMS purists. When accepting the invitation, I was apprehensive about what difference, or contribution, I would be able to make. I hoped, and actually believed, that my appointment would encourage more CMS submissions to AMR that I might shepherd to publication, wrongly as it turned out. I also anticipated that my appointment would likely raise the profile and perhaps also the credibility of CMS -at least in the eyes of some ‘mainstream’ academics who, it seems, regard AMR as a citadel of scholarship. In such ways, I assumed that I might contribute to influencing the development of theory and research in directions consistent with the ambitions of the CMS Division Domain Statement (see above). And finally, I was attracted to the prospect of preparing an FTE in which I would be able to raise some concerns, informed by a CMS viewpoint, relevant to AMR/TOPness editorial processes.

When I encountered resistance to publishing my FTE, and eventually suffered the professional frustration and personal humiliation of its (as far as I know unprecedented) rejection, I was faced with a dilemma: should I take this on the chin or speak out? ⁹ Even if, as I hope, this Speaking Out is not framed or received as a personal vendetta, I am concerned that its publication may damage ‘the organizational arrangements that [CMS academics] are part of’ (Fournier and Smith, 2012: 471) – by, for example, making it even less likely that those identified as CMS scholars will be invited to serve as reviewers, let alone editorial board members or AEs, for TOP. Or that this Speaking Out may make it even more difficult for CMS academics to get their submissions beyond TOP editors’ desks. These reflections made more attractive the option of simply drawing a line under the episode and moving on.

Hesitation in speaking out is not difficult to comprehend when the consequences are unpredictable and/or potentially damaging. In the present case, I encountered threats of legal action. And there is the risk that making public what others would prefer to be kept secret and hidden will be cast as a vindictive effort to settle scores or seek revenge. More prosaically, the commitment required to speak out may provoke questioning of, and self-doubts about, why anyone would devote so much time to the issue of manuscript evaluation in learned journals that hardly anyone reads. Instead of drafting and revising this Speaking Out, I could be undertaking studies and critiques of more established CMS targets – such as the ‘profit imperative, patriarchy, racial inequality, and ecological irresponsibility’ (CMS Division domain statement). Furthermore, it might be asked, and I might ask myself, why am I sitting comfortably in my study agonizing over this text when I could be participating in more existentially important forms of activism, such as XR (Extinction Rebellion) or Black Lives Matter (BLM)?

My brief response to such questions is that it is not an either/or choice. The dissemination, rather than suppression, of critical thinking is, I contend, crucially important for problematizing and transforming diverse forms of domination, exploitation and existential threat to whose elimination XR and BLM are dedicated. ¹⁰ Resisting provocation by remaining silent can be prudent or pragmatic when it is not passive-aggressive. But, on occasion, keeping quiet can be cowardly and complicit. Ultimately, it is for others, including readers of this Speaking Out, to assess the merits as well as the genuineness of my ‘activist’ response, and the wisdom, or idiocy, of ‘speaking out’.

On speaking out and non-disclosure agreement’s (NDAs)

The reflections conveyed here have evolved through an extended process of review and revision at Organization. The original submission to Organization, comprising the rejected FTE and a brief introduction to it, was fully anonymized with regard to my identity and that of AMR, principally in an effort to achieve some shelter from threatened legal action. At the urging of the editors of Organization, who were appraised of the history of the FTE, I removed the admittedly thin disguise of author and journal. This amended, non-anonymized version was then sent out to review, and the present revision is informed by the constructive feedback provided from the reviewers and the editors of Organization who have served during the paper’s quite lengthy gestation.

The anonymization undertaken in the initial submission of this Speaking Out had, I submit, the positive effect of focusing attention on the practices examined (e.g. the culture and ethos of evaluation) rather than on specific actors (e.g. the author and evaluators of the FTE). But when, as in the present case, many readers are familiar with the territory being studied, anonymization becomes procedural rather than substantive so that it becomes an elaborate and ultimately unconvincing charade. ¹¹ Even by inserting some misinformation, it is extremely difficult to conceal the distinctive identity of AMR as an exclusively theory-oriented TOP journal with theory-focused editorials.

While I have abandoned anonymization, I have sought to minimize attributions of specific interventions or contributions either to the editor of AMR or to specific AEs. I have no interest in identifying or criticizing particular individuals. I did, however, want to make the ‘primary data’ – in the form of correspondence relating to the evaluation of the FTE -available to readers so that my interpretation of events could be compared to it. Unfortunately, my request to make a transcript available was declined, accompanied by an assertion of the editorial teams property rights over the primary data and a threat of legal action. I have therefore summarized and paraphrased their words and I have provided no verbatim quotes (Supplemental Appendix 2). No objections were raised publishing the FTE elsewhere, and no request was made to anonymize the journal, so the FTE appears in Supplemental Appendix I. Nonetheless, as my primary interest is in the relationship between orthodox and heterodox scholarship, and not its articulation within any specific editorial team or journal, I refer, wherever possible and appropriate, to TOP and to TOPness. That said, I do find it remarkable and disturbing that ethical principles – of confidentiality and informed consent as well as anonymity – have been invoked to exclude the presentation of primary data, in the knowledge that this would weaken my analysis and damage its prospects of publication. I find it difficult to reconcile the negative response to my request to make the primary date available with established norms of research that encourage its disclosure.

I also found it disappointing that I received no scholarly explanation for declining my request to make the source material available and, instead, the justification was framed in terms of an infringement of property rights (e.g. ownership of the text). Reference was also made to a confidentiality clause contained in an agreement that I had signed as a condition of appointment to the AE role. Insistence that I comply with the equivalent of a Non-Disclosure Agreememt (NDA) took priority over support for a (retrospective) study of the FTE’s editorial evaluation. The difficulties occasioned by efforts to comply with this restriction – notably, the paraphrasing of communications rather than using verbatic quotes – make it necessary to address head-on the possible claim that this Speaking Out breaches (deontological) ethical principles (e.g. of confidentiality). To have responded to the threat of legal action by suppressing, rather than considering, the process of evaluating the FTE would, I believe, have been to bow to pressure to deny examination of how ‘divergent views’ (Smolin, 2006: xxii) are excluded, and would thereby have impeded the progress of science by protecting the epistemic status quo from critical scrutiny.

The basic justification for non-compliance with the terms of the NDA rests on the argument that virtue resides in truth-telling which challenges ‘the imposed silence of “business as usual”’ (Bok, 1989: 214 cited by Weiskopf and Tobias-Miersch, 2016: 1623). In recent years, high profile NDAs (e.g. in the National Health Service (NHS) and in Universities in the UK), as well as their use by individuals (e.g. Larry Nasser and Harvey Weinstein), have drawn attention to the potential (ab)uses of such ‘agreements’ when deployed to circumvent or frustrate accountability. Breaching NDAs, it might be assumed, is unlawful. However, UK whistleblowing law indicates that the disclosure of concerns, otherwise silenced by such agreements, is permitted on condition that, and with regard to those affected by such agreements:

Nonetheless, earlier versions of this Speaking Out took a cautious approach by limiting reference to how the FTE was evaluated. This drew a challenging comment from one reviewer who wrote that ‘consideration of the evaluation process is important to substantiate your claim that the [FTE’s] rejection proved its major points’ (my emphasis). While I rather doubt that the ‘major points’ of my FTE can ever be conclusively ‘proven’, I do anticipate that these ‘points’ will be contested (and properly so). A more likely outcome, I conjecture, is that those who are unsettled or perhaps enraged by this Speaking Out will not wish to draw further attention it.

On reflection, I am inclined to agree with the reviewer’s view that close consideration of the process of evaluating the FTE – which is now provided in detail in Supplemental Appendix 2 – is no less relevant than the analysis contained in the rejected FTE (Supplemental Appendix 1). The reviewer also pointed out that the process of evaluating the FTE is likely to be more salient for readers of Organization, and to be of greater potential significance. Accordingly, I have now devoted additional space to the evaluation process. Since the rejected FTE (Supplemental Appendix 1) contains the rudiments of how, as a heterodox scholar, I make sense of the way heterodox work submitted to TOP is evaluated, limited space is devoted here to extending that analysis. It may be that readers will judge that a number of points made in FTE3 (Supplemental Appendix 1) are demonstrated during the course of its evaluation (Supplemental Appendix 2).

TOPness and heterodox scholarship

How the appropriateness of manuscripts is assessed can be illuminated by examining the inner workings of the ‘black box’ of editorial evaluation processes, as illustrated by the editorial assessment of the FTE. Some sense of what is appropriate with regard to FTEs is conveyed by Byron and Thatcher (2016), two of my fellow AMR AEs, in their ‘Teaching Theory and Theory Building’ FTE where they explicitly and exclusively to ‘colleagues trained in institutions or disciplines’ that fall within what they term the ‘North American management paradigm’ (Byron and Thatcher, 2016: 5, emphasis added) (hereafter NAMP). ¹² The theoretical and methodological boundaries of NAMP are sketched when summarizing the responses to five questions put to experts in the field as Byron and Thatcher were preparing their FTE. Consider their first question – ‘What is (and Isn’t) Theory?’. Byron and Thatcher report that ‘Because many of our experts noted the benefit of representing theories visually, students could present visual models implied by the propositions using boxes and arrows, where appropriate. Going further, students could be asked to generate ideas for ways these propositions could be tested’ (Byron and Thatcher, 2016: 3). This response is resonant with an earlier AMR FTE in which Delbridge and Fiss (2013) characterize the prevalent NAMP conceptualization of theory – in terms of ‘propositions using boxes and arrows’ – as ‘the hegemony of correlational theorizing’, adding that it ‘stifles other forms of theorizing’ (Delbridge and Fiss, 2013: 325, emphasis added). Their point, as I take it, is that exponents and guardians of NAMP conceive of it as uniquely scientific in its methodology and development of theory, with the result that other approaches are identified as pre-scientific or even anti-scientific. That NAMP is based upon ‘scientific ideals of a century long past’ (Van Maanen, 1995b: 687), and which, in the eyes of many social scientists, have been problematized and widely discarded as a consequence of a series of discrediting turns (logical, linguistic, cultural-historical, etc; see Delanty and Srydom, 2003: 9–10), will not detain us here. Instead, I want to highlight the language used by Delbridge and Foss to characterize ‘correlational theorizing’. Describing it ‘stifling’ is, I consider, no less cutting, and is potentially more offensive, than anything contained in my FTE (Supplemental Appendix 1). Yet their scathing comment on NAMP escaped AMR censorship, and rightly so – perhaps because it was not directly related to editorial practice. And yet, of course, it is through processes of review and editorial decision-making that such ‘stifling’ effects are produced.

To be clear, I am not claiming that, within the boundaries of NAMP, responses to the question ‘What is theory?’ necessarily presuppose a ‘neopositivist’ orientation (Byron and Thatcher, 2016: 3), ¹³ although, and as if to confirm this restrictive and unflattering assessment of NAMP, Byron and Thatcher (2016) write that the ‘set of activities’ identified in their FTE are ‘mainly geared toward the development of variance theories that presuppose a neopositivistic conception of theory’ (Byron and Thatcher, 2016: 3). Instead, I conjecture that Byron and Thatcher’s (2016) exclusive reference to, and reliance upon, a neopositivist conception of NAMP is illustrative of how, hegemonically, neopositivistic norms of scholarship pervade and infuse TOP’s sense of substance, style and format. ¹⁴ By prizing a form of rhetoric that denies its rhetorical form, variants of NAMP share a tacit subscription to ‘a logocentric tradition of empirical science with its count-and-classify conventions and taken-for-granted notions of progress’ that reach toward elusive ‘covering laws, causes, operational definitions, testable hypotheses, and so forth’ (Van Maanen, 1995a: 134). To the extent that ‘neopositivist’ NAMP norms are ‘hegemonic’ (Delbridge and Fiss, 2013: 325) and dominate TOP, they become emulated by founders and custodians of wannabe TOP (see also Grey, 2010). NAMP’s ‘hegemony’ and its institutionalization as TOPness is further reinforced as business schools, both within and beyond North America, adopt TOP ‘hits’ as a primary KPI when hiring and promoting faculty, and when submitting staff and/or publications to national research evaluation exercises.

Despite repeated protestations to the contrary by guardians of TOP, heterodox scholars repeatedly find that logocentric exponents of TOPness ‘make sure – as journal editors, reviewers. . .– that the entry costs for moving into a new area are high’ (Alvesson and Sandberg, 2014: 975, emphasis added). The ‘[n]ew area’ may refer to a seldom studied phenomena in TOP (e.g. how capitalist enterprise is organized and managed in ways that systematically exploit employees ¹⁵ ). Or, and of more direct relevance to the present analysis, a ‘new area’ may refer to theoretical traditions and frameworks that deviate from TOP’s norms and values, and so are considered to be ‘ideologically tainted’ or ‘politically motivated’ in ways that, of course, NAMP scholarship axiomatically is not and could never be.

Considerations of this kind are integral to what Delbridge and Fiss (2013), again in their FTE, term the ‘structural and political aspects of the social organization of knowledge that limits the diversity of management theory’ (Delbridge and Fiss, 2013: 325). To escape, or at least loosen, these constraints, these authors commend, as a ‘first step’, ‘greater transparency and attention to the power and politics in the processes and organization of knowledge’ (Delbridge and Fiss, 2013: 330) – a call to which the rejected FTE (Supplemental Appendix 1) and this Speaking Out are responsive. As a ‘second step’, Delbridge and Fiss (2013) urge ‘a willingness to engage across the range of approaches to theorizing, rather than a defensive positioning of the established dominant paradigm’ (Delbridge and Fiss, 2013: 330, emphasis added). Again, this Speaking Out is responsive to Delbridge and Fiss’ call: it aspires to challenge ‘defensive positioning’ by moving analysis of evaluation processes beyond ‘the dominant paradigm’. Finally, Delbridge and Fiss (2013) contend that another ‘key step in opening up the spaces for alternatives’ is the explicit acknowledgment of ‘the [particular] ontological and epistemological assumptions that underpin a given approach’ (Delbridge and Fiss, 2013: 330). Their point, as I undersand it it, is that (the particularity) of such assumptions should be identified and declared, rather than be taken as given or as universal, so that they become more accessible to critical scrutiny. Consistent with such concern, this Speaking Out reflects critically upon the specific and relative assumptions that underpin varieties of NAMP, and alternatives to it.

I am not denying that calls for ‘spaces for alternatives’ are occasionally articulated in TOP’s FTEs in a way that suggests an inclusiveness and openness to diverse forms of scholarship. But such engaging rhetoric is hollow when demonstrations of heterodox scholarship are so infrequently published in TOP, including studies that focus upon ‘power and politics in the processes and organization of knowledge’ (Delbridge and Fiss, 2013: 330, emphasis added), to which my FTE aspired to contribute. Barriers to such studies are encountered when, in the words of another, recent AMR editor who invokes the Kuhnian distinction between ‘normal’ (e.g. orthodox) and ‘revolutionary’ (e.g. heterodox) science, when ‘reviewers are expecting to read the former and, instead, receive the latter, ‘they can sometimes be confused and even enraged’ (Barney, 2018: 345). As any reader who turns to Supplemental Appendix 2 will discover, ‘enraged’ is probably not too strong a sentiment to characterize some of the reactions of my fellow AEs to the contents of my FTE.

I have already intimated that this Speaking Out, like the FTE, will likely displease exponents and guardians of TOPness, even if their manifest reaction is to ignore and decline engagement with it. Ignoring criticism is a standard response by elites, whether at TOP or elsewhere when it is sensed or calculated that little is to be gained from leaving the safety of their echo chambers. Airy disregard and dismissal supplemented, when required, by threats of legal action is a less demanding and risky response than scholarly debate. If a response is elicited, then I anticipate that it will contain reference to examples of how TOP publishes heterodox work – such as Delbridge and Fiss’s (2013) FTE as well as my own contributions! And it will be noted that heterodox scholars have been appointed to TOP editorial teams and boards, and so on. My response to this is that TOPness is hegemonic, not totalizing, and that some (‘insidious’ Denisi, 2010: 199) measure of diversity lends legitimacy to its normalization and reproduction.

What I do not expect critics of this Speaking Out to acknowledge or to address is the claim that TOPs structure and ethos results in editorial processes operating routinely to ‘discipline’ heterodox scholarship by subjecting it to NAMP normalization, or its consignment to the scholarly outpost of special issues and sections. That said, TOP editors are indeed occasionally appointed who are committed to a meaningfully pluralistic vision of scholarship, and who also possess sufficient strength of purpose and capacity to take risks that mitigate pressures upon them to universalize the norms of NAMP. Appointment of the exceptional editor and team is, however, insufficient to remove and reduce the structural impediments and institutional barriers to publishing undoctored heterodox scholarship in TOP. It is to these shortcomings that a number of proposals in my FTE (see Supplemental Appendix 1) are intended to offer a partial and less-than-radical remedy.

To elaborate further on heterodoxy within TOP, and specifically at AMR, it is relevant to acknowledge that my appointment to the editorial team coincided with the simultaneous selection of a significant number of heterodox editorial board members, including other CMS academics. In the broader context of sustained, if modest, growth in heterodox scholarship ¹⁶ and pressures within AoM to be more responsive to the internationalization and diversification of its membership, this welcome development at AMR may be interpreted as sending a pluralizing signal to prospective contributors to the journal. Although plausible, this interpretation is questionable since, according to the AMR editor, the selection of editorial board members was based primarily on the rating of reviewers’ performance by Senior Editors, rather than other criteria, such as subject speciality, suggesting that . heterodox scholars are, unsurprisingly to me, amongst the most responsive, constructive and incisive preparers of reviews.

Appointing heterodox scholars to (TOP) editorial boards and teams is, in principle, positive for attracting heterodox submissions and shepherding them to publication. However, without much stronger signals and institutionally sustained change – such as the routine appointment of heterodox editors or the creation of more balanced (orthodox/heterodox) teams of AEs – there is little prospect of heterodox scholars regarding TOP as particularly receptive to their work. Only if significant numbers of heterodox scholars are sufficiently compelled by a desire to appear in TOP and/or are under strong pressure to deliver TOPness for career or institutional purposes, will the investment of time and effort required to emulate TOP requirements be considered worth the risk of rejection or the bad faith involved. ¹⁷ This balance will begin to shift only if, as I argue in my FTE (Supplemental Appendix 1), diversity is institutionalized within the structure of TOP editorial teams and its associated evaluation processes. Confidence in those process could benefit from greater transparency as exemplified, for example, by the ‘top-tier’ British Medical Journal. ¹⁸ If such a step is deemed too radical, reviewer and editor evaluations could at least be made available at the conclusion of the review process. Increased openness about evaluation processes would also be responsive to a concern voiced by Denisi (2010) when, as editor of AMJ, he posed the question: do we ‘talk’ to each other, and to what extent is the ‘value’ of other scholars’ ‘ideas’ acknowledged or disregarded? Engaging in this ‘talk’ necessitates the development of an ethos that supports, rather than suppresses or obstructs, such communication.

Evaluation: The shroud of secrecy

Research on the operation of learned journals, including their evaluation practices, is critically important because their evaluation processes are at the heart of determining what knowledge is to receive the ‘imprimatur of scientific authenticity’ (Ziman, 1968: 111) – a badge of credibility that then exerts a (performative) influence upon the wider world. In the absence of a positive evaluation by a respected learned journal, knowledge is destined for oblivion – unless it is resurrected as part of a Speaking Out piece, of course! Despite its centrality, there is a dearth of qualitative empirical studies of editorial practice. In one of the more instructive of them, Wellington and Nixon (2005) argue that:

‘. . .it becomes increasingly important that as academic practitioners we take political stock of our little world and adopt a critical stance to the collective game, which to a large extent shapes our field and determines our location within it’ (Wellington and Nixon, 2005: 652–3, emphases added)

The lack of qualitative studies of editorial practice is, it seems, symptomatic of academics’ reluctance, or resistance, to participating in research that investigates editorial activity. ¹⁹ Taking ‘political stock’ (Wellington and Nixon, 2005) of editorial and review processes encompasses critical reflection on the central activity of peer review. On the one hand, well-informed, critically constructive appraisals of knowledge claims are invaluable when these enable authors better to grasp and accomplish their purpose. On the other hand, when blinded, the evaluation process is closed to inspection. Blinding not only denies insights contained within reviews to the wider scientific community; it also removes review(er)s and editors from scrutiny and accountability.

Blinding manifests a disconnect between (i) a professed and defining commitment of science to openness that permits scrutiny; and (ii) the opacity of processes that bestow the imprimatur of scientific authenticity upon particular knowledge claims. This disconnect, I submit, is, or should be!, a source of embarrassment as a ‘dirty little secret’ whose public recognition is strongly discouraged. As a consequence of regarding blinding as a given ‘gold standard’, its questioning is taboo, as is apparent from the silence on its existence, significance and consequences in TOP journals and their editorials.

When ‘political stock’ (Wellington and Nixon, 2005) is taken of blinding, secrecy is justified by invoking its role in protecting the vulnerable: from possible reviewer bias associated with knowledge of the identity or affiliation or the author; and from possible retaliatory attacks by senior authors (e.g. who provide references) on junior reviewers. More darkly, however, could it be that resigned acceptance and accommodation of such possible malpractices is a patronizing rationalization of ‘the power and politics in processes and organization of knowledge’ (Delbridge and Fiss, 2013: 33)? Could it be that blinding is widely normalized and defended because it provides the greatest, unspoken protection for decision-makers – editors and reviewers and publishers – as it shields them from accountability?

If it is accepted that evaluation processes are significant for warranting knowledge claims, then they invite exploration. Accordingly, the ‘activist’ purpose of preparing this Speaking Out, together with its accompanying Appendices is to promote reflection on how heterodox, including critical, scholarship is evaluated by TOP, exemplified by AMR, and thereby to anticipate, and to contribute to, its progressive reform.

Composing the FTE

Preparing the FTE for AMR proved to be considerably more demanding and instructive than I had anticipated. Prior to its submission, FTE1 went through numerous drafts as I wrestled with the challenge of conveying my concerns about the disconnect between editorial policy and practice in a scholarly, well supported way, that would engage a broad AMR readership. The intention was to provide a comparatively ‘tempered’ (Meyerson and Scully, 1995), heterodox illumination of how AMR manages the ‘demand side’ of its editorial evaluation processes – that is, how AMR presents itself to prospective contributors in order to elicit manuscripts directed, ostensibly, to fulfilling the journal’s stated mission, and so minimize the risk of their withdrawal or rejection. When drafting the FTE, I was mindful of advice that a degree of stealth is required when seeking to present heterodox ideas to an orthodox readership: proceed ‘with circumspection and deference to conventions’ if the message is not to ‘frighten’ and ‘alienate. . .editors and reviewers’ (Alvesson and Gabriel, 2013: 248). I therefore endeavoured to ‘finesse’ my analysis and recommendations so that, in my eyes at least, the FTE took on a form that approximated the look-and-feel of orthodox scholarship. ²⁰ In a deliberate effort to bestow credibility and legitimacy upon its contents, I also made reference to other, related AMR FTE’s. Finally, I drew upon Weber’s writings to support my analysis, anticipating that his work would provide a familiar, undemanding bridge to orthodox scholarship.

On the issue of the my efforts to ‘temper’ (Meyerson and Scully, 1995) the FTE with regard to the proposals contained with in it, a comment by a (self-declared heterodox) reviewer of an earlier version of this Speaking Out characterized them as ‘relatively minor and trivial’ – a view that affirmed by own assessment of their ‘tempered’ content. This reviewer might well be sympathetic to the assessment that

‘all you get following the accommodating route is soft support which disappears when the going gets tough; or worse, co-optation, where the purity of your critique loses its integrity and is absorbed into the corruption it is working to replace’ (Pechter, 1992: 176)

The outcome of my efforts to mollify the editor was, the same reviewer suggests, that ‘much of the pivotal substance (e.g. detailed explanation and evidence) of the original case. . .[is] now missing’. ²¹ Much of that substance was a casualty my willingness to comply with the editor’s absolute insistence that the 47 pages of FTE1 was cut to 20 pages. Given the scale of the required cut, much of the ‘crucial nuance’ contained in FTE1 had indeed been removed, with the result that ‘. . . [the FTE] comes off vague and somewhat lofty’, as the reviewer puts it. As an example of this ‘vaguneness’ the reviewer points to the rapidity, in FTE3, of my dismissal of the ostensibly self-evident virtue of ‘clear writing’ urged by the editor (see also Ragins, 2012). My critique, this reviewer notes, lacks adequate explication of ‘what exactly is objectionable about the clarity imperative’. Fair enough.

So, while the Speaking Out space is not perhaps the most appropriate place to respond to this reviewer’s concern, I can provide a briefest elaboration of the critique of clear writing made in the FTE (Supplemental Appendix 1). When communicating with a lay or non-specialist audience, I fully accept that the use of comparatively esoteric terms (e.g. ‘meme’ or ‘trope’) is difficult to justify - except perhaps in the anticipation that, over time, it may contribute to an expansion and enrichment of everyday sensemaking capacities. Prior to being absorbed into everyday vocabulary, such terms are experienced (by non-specialists) as bewildering, and potentially intimidating and disrespectful, ‘noise’. I find criticism of ‘jargon’ in that context to be entirely justifiable. However, it is another matter when communicating with a specialist audience. Every scientific field or sub-field, including MOS, NAMP and CMS, develops and applies short-hand terminology (‘jargon’) that, to outsiders, impairs ‘signal’ – until, that is, time and effort is devoted by outsiders to becoming users, or insiders. This ‘short-hand’ facilitates communication by condensing complex ideas in ways that can also enrich, unsettle or qualify established, hegemonic ways of knowing. In this respect, jargon’s ‘way of helping is more important than its way of hurting’ (Pechter, 1991: 181). But, as Pechter then adds, this claim makes sense only if you assume that the equilibrium of our social practice is dangerously fragile’ (Pechter, 1991). Of course, it was precisely the assumed legitimacy of the ‘equilibrium’ at TOP that the FTE was placing in question.

Jargon, I contend, is not necessarily vacuous or disingenuous bullshit. Indeed, the inverse of jargon, conceived here as a way of ‘helping’ (Pechter, 1991: 181), is the clear, disambiguated language of Orwellian Newspeak that was ‘designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought’ (Orwell, 1949: 242). Appeals to the ostensibly self-evident, common sense virtue of ‘clear writing’ are particularly problematical when deployed by one specialist community to secure or expand its power and privilege by discrediting or devaluing expressions of ‘difference’ (Van Maanen, 1995a). It is necessary to resist ‘the dual temptations of simply dismissing what others are saying by falling back on one of those standard defensive ploys where we condemn it as obscure, woolly, or trivial, or thinking we can always easily translate what is alien into our entrenched vocabularies’ (Bernstein, 1991: 336). A virtue of what, tongue-in-cheek, I will term ‘unclear’ writing resides in its potential to ‘extend the range of thought’ by articulating alternative, heterodox, subterranean forms of sensemaking and associated visions of the future.

When tempering the content of my FTE, I did not assume that the members of the AMR editorial team were necessarily NALP ‘box’ protectors (see Alvesson and Sandberg, 2014), or that they were wholly unfamiliar with, or unequivocally antagonistic towards, heterodox scholarship. My experience as an author, and my reading of many editorial decisions at AMR over several editorial terms, had led me to believe that such ignorance and/or antagonism was not invariably present, even if it could sometimes be well concealed by a veneer of repressive tolerance. ²² I was, of course, aware that my ‘tempered’ heterodox FTE would deviate from what I assessed to be the comparatively orthodox orientation of the editor and other AEs. But I was encouraged, although also possibly (self-)deceived, by the editorial team’s very explicit commitment to the mission of developmental reviewing from which I expected to benefit. ²³

Evidently enough, these optimistic expectations were unfulfilled (Supplemental Appendix 2). There was little appetite for supporting and developing an FTE in which heterodox scholarship was engaged and applied to examine the ‘demand side’ of the editorial process. This experience has led me to conjecture that TOP’s declared mission to ‘challenge conventional wisdom’ and its advocacy of inclusiveness, was, and perhaps remains, well-intentioned but largely ceremonial. In practice, the meaning of the mission would seem to be largely framed and enacted within the narrow and conservative worldview of NAMP.

Given my years of service as a TOP editorial board member (I served on the AMR editorial board, and then as an AE, from 2003 to 2017), I should probably have been better prepared for rejection. On reflection, those years provided a shallow foundation for any expectation that espousal of inclusiveness would extend to supporting a heterodox FTE, even one that was had been deliberately ‘tempered’, or ‘doctored’. It was, it seems, one thing to appoint a (single) heterodox AE; it was another thing to permit the publication of a heterodox FTE. Some wishful thinking had led me to believe that my FTE would be tolerated and accommodated, even if it might not be particularly welcome. Only with the frustration resulting from the treatment of the FTE’s have I been prompted to reflect on how, during my many years of service as an AMR editorial board member, I never participated in any discussion of, or detected any interest in, making structural change(s) that, potentially, could bring about the fulfillment of its espoused mission, or that might move it in the direction of greater openness and inclusivity. ²⁴

I should perhaps respond here to another of the reviewers’ comments on an earlier version of this Speaking Out which took issue with the indicative bibliography included at the end of the FTE. Its inclusion was my attempt to ‘cover off’ the ‘supply side’ pressures emanating from the Editor who repeatedly asked me to incorporate a primer on critical scholarship or, indeed, to devote the FTE to this task. Despite the inclusion of Prasad et al. (2015) in the bibliography, the reviewer (justifiably) takes me to task for failing to reference other examples of feminist, queer and post-colonialist work – a deficit that, I acknowledge and wish now to flag up, reproduces ‘the canonical status of a narrow inner circle of critical authors and scholars’ (Reviewer comment). The reviewer’s point, of course, is that my complaints about patterns of exclusion with regard to the receptiveness of TOP to critical scholarship are paralleled by what is omitted from my indicative bibliography of CMS. This was a timely reprimand to which, shamefully, I plead as charged (see also note 6).

More paranoid-depressive reflections

My auto-examination of a single example of a TOP editorial evaluation of heterodox scholarship, taking the form of a FTE, may be regarded and brushed aside as an analysis of a submission that is unrepresentative and abnormal. ²⁵ In response, I contend that single case studies are, at the very least, important for stimulating debate – in this case, reflecting upon the restrictiveness or inclusiveness of the norms of scholarly practice. In-depth and comparative studies of editorial evaluation practices are likely to remain a rarity so long as ‘ethical’ barriers of confidentiality, anonymity and informed consent are invoked to impede their pursuit. In the present case, denial of inspection of the source data on which this Speaking Out and Supplemental Appendix 2 is based – that is, the transcript of the correspondence that comprised the evaluation process of the FTE – will, I fear, not improve the chance of concerns raised here being taken up, which is perhaps the undeclared purpose of the denial.

It is also relevant to address my fear that resurrection of the rejected FTE (Supplemental Appendix 1) and account of its evaluation (Supplemental Appendix 2) will be construed as a pitiful and possibly delusional tale ‘sour grapes’, or spiteful retaliation. I anticipate that one widespread response will be the observation that review processes are inherently imperfect and that every academic has their fair share of rejections and that it is useless or even counterproductive (e.g. for reputation and career advancement) to turn a ‘private trouble’ into a ‘public issue’ (Mills, 1959). Put it down to experience. Do not share it, or ‘call it out’. Just move on. To understand why I have been unreceptive to such advice, it is relevant to underscore that I accepted the invitation to become an AE at TOP in recognition of the presence and growing importance of heterodox scholarship in MOS. Taking on this time-demanding role, I anticipated, would enable me to develop the journal by attracting and publishing more heterodox scholarship; and the opportunity to publish an FTE would, I expected, be important for pursuing that objective. The FTE would be one of the most visible and enduring of my contributions to TOP, so I devoted considerable time and thought to its preparation and revision. The rejection of the FTE was, for me, a ‘critical situation’ as it ‘radically disrupt[ed]’ (Giddens, 1979: 124) that expectation. I had believed that nothing other than a heterodox FTE would be expected from a heterodox AE, and that its publication would be proceed with minimal editorial intervention. The decision not to publish the FTE placed in doubt my judgment in accepting the AE role. By preparing this Speaking Out, my decision and experience of rejection has not been in vain, and it has provided an instructive demonstration of how orthodox scholarship is silenced. The FTE’s fate was, of course, also ironic as this silencing was one of its central themes.

When confronting the brute fact of the FTE’s rejection, I was obliged to consider my position. I imagined that my resignation, involving the self-removal of a heterodox thorn from the orthodox flesh, would be quietly welcomed. I also worried that, in the absence of any other explanation, my departure might be widely construed as a fit of pique, rather than a more principled response. Resigning, I calculated, would probably do little to support or advance heterodox scholarship, and so I decided to continue handling the many manuscripts allocated to me, amongst which were a tiny but highly valued number of heterodox papers that might otherwise not have been submitted, or may otherwise not have received an informed and constructive process of evaluation. At the same time, I resolved to curtail involvement in other editorial activities. The one exception was my continuing effort to press, against indifference and resistance, for a radical overhaul of TOP keywords as they largely excluded many of the topics and approaches favoured by heterodox scholars, and so had knock-on effects for attracting manuscripts, ‘boxing in’ authors and matching their manuscripts with genuinely peer reviewers.

When reflecting on the rejection of the FTE, I have come to believe that it resulted less from the existence of my heterodox allegiance to CMS than from acting out this allegiance in the FTE. Being appointed, and being ‘seen’, as a member of the editorial team of TOP was tolerable and indeed somewhat expedient in a context where heterodox scholarship was growing in other, rival journals (within the FT50). At the very least, my appointment served as a badge of scholarly inclusivity. But being ‘heard’ was clearly unwelcome. In an effort to square this circle, the editor repeatedly urged me to provide a descriptive account of CMS, instead of my application of it. Ultimately, compliance with this demand was a condition of a publishable FTE. An abstracted account of CMS heterodoxy that included little or no reference to TOP editorial evaluation processes could be accommodated. But a concrete articulation of CMS to analyse those processes was evidently insupportable.

This exclusionary judgement, I conjecture, stems from a disinclination, or perhaps an incapacity, to recognize that, in the critical genre of heterodox scholarship, at least as I conceive of it, scholarship is intimately related to living in, and radically changing, the world; and that this ‘activist’ commitment extends to the organization and management of academic/ scientific institutions and editorial structures. Other members of the editorial team, I believe, subscribed to an orthodox, scholastic conception of academic practice whose ambition is to generate and test accounts of how the world, based upon their partially interrogated beliefs about it, with the objective of determining which account most accurately ‘captures’ or ‘reflects’ its reality. The coherence of this conception of scholarship is directly challenged in Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach in which he famously concludes that ‘philosophers have only interpreted the word in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx, 1848/1975: 423). However, if all eleven theses are to be taken seriously, then this injunction requires some qualification. In Marx’s own terms, it is impossible ‘merely’ to interpret the world because, to use some contemporary jargon, every interpretation is active and performative. Even if an interpretation only (further) naturalizes or normalizes the world, and even if it is intended, or (mis)perceived, simply to interpret it, every interpretation has some impact and, in this sense, contributes to the incessant changing of the world. The self-understanding of specific interpretations might be that they are simply a philosophical ‘contemplation’ that, to be ‘practical’, require at least a nod towards policy . But, for Marx, they are, inescapably, expressions of ‘practical, human-sensuous activity’ (Marx, 1848/1975: 422). Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, for example, offers a materialist debunking of ‘religious self-alienation’ (Marx, 1848/1975: 422) but, in doing so, it also contributes to, and serves to develop and reconstruct, a secular bourgeois worldview that is conceived as comprising ‘single individuals’ and ‘civil society’ (without reference to the ‘practical-critical’ activity that is constitutive of the precarious – because internally contradictory – ‘ensemble of social relations’ (Marx, 1848/1975: 423) through which this worldview is constructed and sustained).

In orthodox scholarship, the politics of practical-critical activity is ostensibly evacuated (or concealed) from the determination of what, ‘scientifically’, is reported to be the reality of management and organization, including the reality of CMS which the TOP editor urged me to ‘capture’ and convey in the FTE. Critical scholarship, in contrast, problematizes the ostensible, value-free objectivity of (contemplative) reports of reality, with the intent of transforming the world in a progressive, emancipatory direction. Rather than bestowing ‘scientific’ solidity and legitimacy upon the world, the commitment of critical scholarship is to challenging and radically changing what has become hegemonic. The instruction to confine my FTE to a primer on CMS articulated, I suggest, an orthodox, contemplative conception of scholarship in which CMS would be presented, abstractly, as another possible ‘lens’ of observation and analysis. To proceed in this way would, in my view, have conveyed a misleading, vitiated sense of CMS requiring an act of bad faith. The ‘good faith’ alternative was to decline the editor’s ultimatum in the almost certain knowledge that defiance would result in rejection (see Bedeian, 2003, 2004; Frey, 2003). ²⁶

Further reflections on the ‘critical situation’ occasioned by the FTE’s rejection led me to wonder if I, and perhaps also my fellow editorial team members, were, in Giddens’ words, engaged in ‘regressive modes of object-affiliation’ (Giddens, 1979: 127) – the affiliations being to orthodox and heterodox scholarship, respectively. My investment in CMS scholarship is well known, and this may, in some measure, account for my determination to ‘stand my ground’, rather than risk publicly ‘disaffiliating’ from CMS by complying with the editor’s directive. Whether this determination was regressive is for others to judge. It felt self-confident and assertive. For members of the editorial team, my FTE was held to breach unwritten (and fantasmatic?) TOP guidelines with which they seem to have become strongly identified.

Editorial feedback on the FTE (see Supplemental Appendix 2) appears, to me, to express ‘anxiety or fear’ (Giddens, 1979: 127), as betrayed by reluctance to engage with its substantive content and propositions. ‘Anxiety and fear’ were also, I acknowledge, my reactions to the mostly hostile and even abusive feedback provided by the editorial team (see Supplemental Appendix 2). I feared that I had either completely misinterpreted the journal’s mission statement and/or had badly misjudged the commitment of the editorial team to it. I was anxious as I struggled to figure out how I could speak out about a disconnect – of espoused policy and editorial evaluative practice – that had precipitated the drafting of the FTE (see Supplemental Appendix 1). The feelings were intensified when I could obtain no response to my repeated requests for clarification and substantiation of the criticisms contained in the feedback I received (see Supplemental Appendix 2).

Conclusion

This Speaking Out has sought to interrogate the fate of the rejected FTE (Supplemental Appendix 1) in ways that may stimulate debate about how to increase TOP’s capacity to attract and develop heterodox work, supposing that this is not a purely ceremonial ambition. The ‘development’ of MOS is not just a matter of extending the domain of what is studied (e.g. more work on inequality, greed, corruption, fraud, climate change etc.). It is also an issue of how ‘grand challenges’ are framed and examined from a range of heterodox perspectives.

As the development of scientific fields depends upon processes of evaluating knowledge claims, their openness to scrutiny is an important ‘public issue’. If heterodox work addressing issues of inequality, etc. is to be published in TOP journals, then it is timely to take a close look at the structure and operation of editorial and review practices – practices that are currently safeguarded from critical scrutiny by secrecy. Too often, this secrecy is preserved by disparaging studies of scholarly knowledge production as introverted, ‘navel-gazing’ endeavours that displace investigations of ‘real’ phenomena (e.g. organizations and management practices). An undeclared comfort of such opinions is their sparing of scholars from the potentially unsettling disclosure of ‘structural and political aspects of the social organization of knowledge’ (Delbridge and Fiss, 2013: 325, emphasis added). Permitting the study of those ‘aspects’ requires a preparedness to renounce the secrecy and defensiveness surrounding how knowledge claims are evaluated.

This Speaking Out has sought to contribute to broader efforts to mitigate the risk of TOP journals, including AMR, becoming progressively introverted and moribund. That risk is illustrated, I suggest, in the process of evaluating the FTE, summarized in Supplemental Appendix 2, which shows how heterodox (e.g. CMS) scholarship is received from an orthodox position; and it also sheds light on how this reception is interpreted and challenged from a heterodox (critical) perspective. Accordingly, this Speaking Out is plausibly apprehended as an instance of ‘act(ing) on the schemes of intelligibility that govern who will be a speaking being, subjecting them to rupture and revision, consolidating their norms or contesting their hegemony’ (Butler, 2005: 132 quoted in Contu, 2020: 740, emphasis added). Specifically, it has reflected on the interaction, or collision, of two – orthodox and heterodox – ‘schemes of intelligibility’, showing how each ‘ruptures’ the other. An account has been offered of how, through the process of evaluating the FTE (Supplemental Appendix 2), the orthodox ‘scheme’ came to silence, at least temporarily, the heterodox ‘scheme’. By contesting the process of evaluation that resulted in the (hegemonic) suppression of the FTE, that silence has now been broken. The rejection decision unobtrusively consolidated the power of the norms of the orthodox ‘scheme’. But, inadvertently, it provoked this Speaking Out. It is to be hoped that attending to this ‘critical situation’, rather brushing it aside, may contribute to reforming and refreshing TOPness in ways that will valorize, rather than marginalize and suppress, heterodox MOS scholarship.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material