Reflections on the distinctiveness of European management scholarship Robert Chia * Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom article info Article history: Available online 20 June 2014 Handling Editor: Michael Haenlein Keywords: Artistic rigour Democracy of vision Scholarship of common-sense Intellectual entrepreneurship Empirical sensitivity Relevation/revelation abstract Management scholarship and the journal publication process has been increasingly criticised for being overly elitist and largely irrelevant to the needs of business. There is some justification for such criticisms. Yet, paradoxically, university business schools must resist the urge to be superficially relevant in order to be genuinely useful. I argue here that the very best of management research scholarship relies on a ‘schol- arship of common sense’ that actively mirrors the very best of business and management practices. Artis- tic rigour, much more than technical rigour is needed. Openness, empirical sensitivity and the capacity for achieving ‘flying leaps’ of imagination, are to be preferred to procedural adherence in the research process. This alternative understanding of academic rigour and the intellectual richness and diversity of perspectives associated with it is clearly more evident in the British and European intellectual tradi- tions. Such a European-styled management scholarship can help in actively reshaping the intellectual landscape, priorities and parameters of management research by encouraging the kind of scholarly con- tributions that is not simply technically rigorous, but imaginatively interesting and often counterintuitive. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction In a much-publicised announcement reported in The Guardian (2013) on 9 December 2013, the 2013 joint Nobel Prize winner for Physiology and Medicine, Randy Schekman revealed in his acceptance speech that he would no longer send research papers to the top-tier academic journals, Nature, Cell and Science. He claims that although these ‘luxury’ journals are supposed to be the epitome of quality, they have, in fact, inadvertently distorted research priorities and constitute a ‘tyranny’ in the research publi- cation process that must be broken. Schekman maintains that these journals are more preoccupied with aggressively curating their own brands to increase subscriptions than to stimulating important research. Thus, like ‘‘fashion designers who create lim- ited-edition handbags or suits’’ they artificially restrict the number of papers they accept and then market their journals through the notion of ‘impact factor’; a score now widely accepted within the academic world as an accurate measure of a journal’s quality. For Schekman, however, this way of measuring and justifying what are supposed to be better journals is as damaging as the bonus cul- ture is to banking. One major consequence is that the pressure to publish in these journals has encouraged younger researchers especially to conform to these norms of expectations in publication terms rather than to do more important and often peripheral pieces of work that actually lead to genuine scientific progress. Reacting to these comments, the January 18, 2014 editorial of the medical journal Lancet (Klienert & Horton, 2014) proceeded to reflexively ask how its own journal publication process within the field of medical science research ought to change in response to this criticism from one of its best. Perhaps, in the same light, Schekman’s very public comments ought to give us in management research some food for thought with regards to our own journal publication ranking process and the direction the ‘publications game’, which seems to preoccupy much of management academia these days, is taking us. This, together with the perennial question surrounding the relevance/irrelevance of management theory to practice that continues to rumble on, should provide sufficient grounds for us to seriously rethink and reconsider the future of management scholarship particularly within the European man- agement academic context. To be sure these concerns about research contribution and relevance are now beginning to be raised even within the ‘top’ management journals themselves. In his Editorial in the February 2014 issue of the Academy of Management Journal, the incoming editor Gerard George, in his attempt to rethink management scholarship, signalled what appears to be an important ‘shift’ in emphasis for the journal’s pub- lishing priorities. George (2014, 1–6) argues, quite rightly, that the traditional emphasis on ‘technical rigour’ and ‘theoretical contribu- tion’ has distracted attention away from the ‘soul of relevance’ and http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2014.06.002 0263-2373/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Tel.: +44 (0)141 330 2734. E-mail address: Robert.Chia@glasgow.ac.uk European Management Journal 32 (2014) 683–688 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect European Management Journal journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emj