ABSTRACT
A seemingly enduring feature of contemporary management research is the dominance of an Anglo-American positivist tradition. As Gill and Johnson (2010: 4) suggest, ‘it may be argued that there is a dominant orthodoxy within management research which is maintained by very powerful institutional pressures.’ We would argue that despite challenges to this orthodoxy that include the epistemological and methodological (e.g., Prasad and Prasad 2002), and those that emerge from the development of critical management studies (e.g., Keleman and Rumens 2008), the pervasiveness of that orthodoxy remains. Indeed, it seems that management research is becoming increasingly more regulated by institutional pressures and procedures, for example, ethical regulation (see Bell and Bryman 2007); the increased signifi cance of accreditation by bodies such as the Association of MBAs (AMBA), the American Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and the European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS); and the increased proliferation of research audits (see Rowlinson, Hassard and Mohun, this volume). A more recent development has seen the emergence of journal quality lists such as that devised by the Association of Business Schools (ABS; see Morris et al. 2010). Such lists-where typically the highest ranked journals are North American based-are used increasingly as shorthand indicators of quality research within business schools with potentially devastating consequences for newly created or innovative journals in developing areas. The associated incentive systems being developed for staff to encourage publication in the top-ranked journals in the lists can also lead to increased standardization of the traditional management research orthodoxy, an issue that has not gone unnoticed by journal editors (see Clark and Wright 2009) or the contributors to this volume (see Humphrey and Lukka).
