Editorial: Special Issue on Transforming Management Research & Education (original) (raw)
International Journal of Management Reviews, 2020
, as a much-needed outlet for literature reviews in the field of management and organisation studies (MOS). In the early days, authors included both early career/doctoral students publishing literature reviews from their PhD theses, and established scholars taking stock of changes in a specific domain of study. The journal's positioning has evolved over the past 20 years, and its journey has been particularly shaped by three key changes in editorial strategy. The first of these relates to Allan McPherson and Oswald (Ossie) Jones's call for reviews to adopt more rigorous approaches (McPherson and Jones, 2010). McPherson and Jones (2010) emphasised the need for review papers to be transparent in the approach taken to review the literatures. Authors were thus encouraged to include a discussion of their 'research methods', so that readers could understand how the review was completed, including decisions around which papers to include in the review (Macpherson and Jones, 2010). Macpherson and Jones (2010) suggested authors refer to Denyer and Tranfield's (2009) principles of transparency, inclusivity, explanation and heuristic. Since then, there has been a greater proportion of papers published in the journal which are based on a systematic literature review (Tranfield et al., 2003). Despite this increase, IJMR remains pluralistic in its approach, and is indeed largely agnostic with regards to the method used to complete the review. Jones and Gatrell (2014) for instance highlight the predominance of the 'traditional narrative review', which is based on informal mechanisms for organizing and analysing the literature (Hammersley, 2001). They also identify and encourage other approaches with origins in other disciplines, such as meta-ethnography, meta-narrative, realist synthesis and meta-analysis. Authors are invited to submit whichever kind of review is most appropriate for their subject, but are expected to justify their approach, and to be transparent about their methods for selection. The second change in the journal's positioning relates to Ossie Jones and Caroline Gatrell's later move away from descriptive reviews, i.e. reviews which largely seek to synthesise a body of work. In this regard, the increasing levels of rigour expected from IJMR reviews does not substitute for the need to make a contribution, by presenting new conceptual insights or leaps forward in knowledge. As a result, there has been a trend over the past 5 years to move away from papers which seek only to review and 'synthesise' an accumulated body of research (Baumeister and Leary, 1997; Webster and Watson, 2002) to papers which explore and develop the 'theoretical foundations' of a domain (Jones and Gatrell, 2014; Webster and Watson 2002). This strategic shift was initiated around the time of MacPherson and Jones' (2010) editorial,