Shaping Management Scholarship in Ireland - Editorial Perspectives on the Irish Journal of Management

What Makes Research Possible? The Management Studies Research Division at the London School of Economics

Purpose The main research attempts guiding questions about management research agendas had been relevance questions versus rigor questions. Researchers have also attempted to set management research agendas in particular sectors. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no research, however, has addressed the infrastructural and foundational questions of what moral priorities and ethical principles should guide the future development of management research. Because the Islamic theological approach is a “transcendental values integration” approach, it presents a potentially viable source of reference particularly for scholars interested in ethical philosophical paradigmatic approaches. Islamic literature has presented guiding principles as to how to balance priorities through the Jurisprudence of Priorities (Fiqh Al-Awlawiyyat). The purpose of this exploratory conceptual paper is to synchronize the Islamic background literature on the jurisprudence of priorities with management research development and agendas. The research is exploratory in nature. Design/methodology/approach The paper is conceptual, merging Islamic literature with management research for the development of a framework to potentially guide management researchers in prioritizing their research agendas. Findings The research resulted in the conceptualization of a framework aiding researchers in the prioritization of their research agendas. Research limitations/implications The research has implications for management scholars who are interested to prioritize their research projects and agendas. The research presents a schematic diagram and guiding framework through which scholars can reflect on their choice of research topics. Practical implications The research is also relevant to funding agencies as they devise the funding priorities in the management field. Originality/value This paper addresses the unique and foundational question of what moral priorities and ethical principles should guide the future development of management research. The authors build on a religious-philosophical approach, drawing on the Islamic jurisprudence of priorities as a literature base. The authors, therefore, address the key principles of responsible research regarding how it can be relevant on the infrastructural level to society and how the benefit to key stakeholders should be tackled. To the authors’ knowledge, this was not done in previous literature.

Beyond Rigour and Relevance: The Underlying Nature of Both Business Schools and Management Research

Although reciprocity is fundamental to all social orders, management research offers few reviews of the concept’s theoretical origins and current applications. To help bridge this gap, we elucidate the dominant understandings of reciprocity, ask which areas of research emerge from them, and explore how they interconnect. Our bibliometric methodology detects four clusters of management research on reciprocity. Across these clusters, authors subscribe mainly to substantialist ontology, marginalize morally oriented motives consistent with relational ontology, and largely assume that benefit-oriented motives underlie reciprocity. We outline the advantages of a moral-oriented relationalist concept of reciprocity and discuss potential areas for its development in management research.

The popular and professional press is filled with discussions of major changes on the organizational landscape, including organizational design experiments at entrepreneurial firms as well as at major corporations, the slashing of corporate staffs, the downsizing, delayering and revitalization of firms, the emerging electronic organization, mergers and acquisitions, failures of high reliability organizations, and time-based competition. Each of these issues has been associated with the redesign of organizations, yet these redesigns seem far removed from academic research, and they do not typically utilize the academic body of knowledge. Although the field has progressed enormously in new methods and insights during a century of research, it seems to us that organization studies have been a source of recurrent disappointment for practitioners and academics alike (Bedian 1989; Cummings 1983; Luthans 1986; Slocum 1984). For example, Miner (1984) analyzed 32 established organizational science theories and concluded that with the exception of theories of motivation there is no relationship between usefulness and validity. Is the field of organization studies irrelevant? Organizations have become the dominant institution on the social landscape. Yet the body of knowledge published in academic journals has practically no audience in business or government. Unlike a field such as economics, research on organizations has not typically focused on problems relevant to business and government organizations, and the real world of organizations has not drawn on the work undertaken by organizational scientists. From colleagues within our field and in allied disciplines, we hear complaints that manuscripts espousing radical ideas, or topics outside the mainstream, are difficult to publish. Reviewers for established journals seem to value papers whose theses are anchored in established theories or that use "legitimate" methods, thus implicitly creating a publication barrier for research that falls outside mainstream topics or methods. Moreover, we observe that scholars with interests in organizations span many disciplines and fields of inquiry such as anthropology, economics, history, information science, communication theory, artificial intelligence, systems theory, psychology, sociology, political science, policy sciences, as well as organization behavior, strategic management and organization theory. We sense that a new discipline of organization science is evolving and we envision that a new journal can become a forum for a discipline defined more broadly. The purpose of this essay is to discuss these issues and the need for reorienting research away from incremental, footnote-on-footnote research as the norm for the field. Although current research approches have made solid contributions, they do not

Management theories and models aim to predict future states and outcomes. Yet, as management scholars, we often tend to prioritise model fit metrics over prediction and forecasting, assuming that strong model fit inherently leads to accurate predictions. We challenge this assumption, arguing that an exclusive focus on model fit can yield theories that fail to generalise to new datasets, thereby limiting their forecasting accuracy and practical relevance. In a systematic review of 6,514 studies, we find a pronounced dominance of model fit approaches. Model fit metrics are susceptible to overfitting, where models capture noise rather than patterns, and underfitting, where key relationships are overlooked. Both problems undermine predictive performance. Drawing on insights from operations research, we apply newly developed forecasting metrics to address these limitations. Empirically examining the gender gap and motherhood penalty in returns from employment and entrepreneurship, we demonstrate how these metrics can complement traditional fit measures. By integrating multiple assessment metrics, we offer a comprehensive framework for improving both predictive accuracy and theoretical development in management research. We provide the Stata syntax that scholars can download and use to assess the forecasting ability of their models.

Purpose Over the years, the pervasive existence of corruption within the public administrations of many countries worldwide has interested large numbers of scholars. Often involving accountability issues within public institutions, the topic has been explored by research adopting multiple perspectives. This study aims to explore the current state of development in management research on corruption and public administration. It highlights the complexities that define their relationship and offers valuable insights into emerging trends in this field. Design/methodology/approach This study adopts a topic modelling approach to explore the topics and research trends deriving from corruption in public administration studies published by management scholars. Specifically, the study adopts a machine learning algorithm, namely “latent Dirichlet allocation,” to explore the underlying topics behind portions of scientific text. Findings The analysis has revealed eight different and connected research trends: the role of transparency as an anti-corruption tool, the impact of political corruption on government quality, the psychological effects of corruption on communities, the reduction of public information credibility due to corruption, the use of anti-corruption practices as performance management tools, the influence of corruption on social and economic development, the effect of public corruption on external companies’ behaviour and the theoretical perspectives on corruption in public administration. Originality/value This study adopts a machine learning approach to map the topics explored by management scholars in prior research studies while providing a perspective on the following research trends on corruption in the public context.

A development in Management research is observed in recent years: interface of literature and management. The paper highlights the possibility of constructive impacts on human development through philosophy and experiments of Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Laureate literary genius from India (1913), in the field of education. The essential equality of all, preservation of cultural diversity, and the infinite possibility of deepening our understanding of each other form the core of Tagorean values. Tagore was a visionary and, throughout his life, he tried to bring about a radical change in society through education which would enable the world to come together—irrespective of diversity of language, identity, race, nationality, or religion. He recognized the need to promote a culture that fosters intellectual, social, and cultural growth in the global community. Using the classic example of Tagore the paper will examine how embracing of diversity in leadership and organizational development can contribute to holistic effectiveness through the introduction of non-conventional and alternative learning as advocated by Tagore that makes him all the more relevant in the present globalized context. The paper will also attempt to outline a learning path and unfold a voyage from knowledge to wisdom for leaders and organizations in future.

Revisiting Pink Vanilla

Addiction Biology will, from January 2005, be going forward under strong new editorial leadership. The Society for the Study of Addiction (SSA), the owner of Addiction Biology, has appointed Professor Rainer Spanagel as Editor-in-Chief. He is a distinguished brain scientist who is director of the Department of Psychopharmacology and head of Basic Research at the Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH), Mannheim, Germany. The SSA is fortunate to have recruited him to this key editorial position. The journal will continue to be published quarterly on the Society's behalf by Taylor and Francis, and goes free to all members of the Society. Dr Spanagel has invited Markus Heilig, of the US National Institute of Alcohol and Alcoholism, to join him as Associate Editor for the USA. A team of 29 Reviewing Editors, who have the task of reviewing submissions and giving the re-launched journal a strong intellectual base, will support the two senior editors. With the intention of speeding up the reviewing process, external referees will only be approached if the reviewing editors do not cover a specific expertise. Addiction Biology was originally launched in 1996. The Society's purpose at the time was to maintain Addiction’s orientation as a journal dealing primarily with psychosocial and public health aspects of addiction science, with Addiction Biology taking as its distinct but complementary focus biological contributions to addiction science, with ‘biology’ broadly defined. It was felt that the field would over time be best served by two journals each with a distinct image and addressing a distinct readership, rather than by a journal which tried to embrace the total and hugely wide range of modern addiction sciences. Rainer Spanagel tells us that he has, as one of his key intentions, a sharpening of Addiction Biology’s remit so that it will be evidently a brain science journal. The lead issue for 2005 will be a special issue of DNA microarrays and expression profiling in drug abuse research, with Professor Peter Gebicke of CIMH as guest editor. Addiction looks forward to a close working relationship with Addiction Biology and Rainer Spanagel is one of our assistant editors. We wish Rainer and his colleagues every success in what is virtually the re-launch of an important publishing initiative. At the same time, we wish Timothy Peters, Addiction Biology’s previous editor, a happy retirement. In the interregnum Kim Wolff generously served as acting Editor-in-Chief from April 2003 to March 2004, with Susan Savva taking over as acting managing editor for the remainder of 2004. Lastly, for those who see or want to see a copy of Rainer's new launch issue and decide that Addiction Biology is a journal to which they wish personally to subscribe, or one to which they hope to see their library or institution sign up, subscription information can be found at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

In our time, as the need to expand the output of foodfor the rapidly rising population of the world becomesmore acutely felt, and as development acceleratesthroughout the world, the scope and tasks of appliedecology cannot but increase. Ours is an age in whichecological thinking and methods have more than everbefore to contribute to the progress of mankind: theJournal of Applied Ecology hopes to play a useful partin the common effort.These aspirations represent the closing statement of thevery first Editorial published in the first issue of Journalof Applied Ecology in 1964 (Bunting & Wynne-Edwards1964), and yet are still highly relevant today. It was withconsiderable vision that the British Ecological Society(BES) launched a new journal that not only spannedplant and animal ecology but addressed issues ofrelevance to human well-being.The Journal of Applied Ecology was founded to publishthe results of original research, particularly of a quantita-tive and experimental kind, on ecological subjects that areof economic or social importance. Fifty years ago, appliedecology was widely viewed as the poor relation of themore glamorous fundamental areas of this young science.Scientific research relating to the conservation of biologi-cal diversity was in its infancy, journals such as Conserva-tion Biology were not even on the horizon, while it wouldbe more than a decade before the integration of agricul-ture and the environment became a recognized area ofresearch with the launch of the journal Agriculture, Eco-system and Environment in the 1970s. The Journal ofApplied Ecology had already celebrated a quarter of acentury of publishing the best applied ecological researchwhen the Ecological Society of America launched Ecologi-cal Applications. Few applied journals can compete withthe Journal of Applied Ecology in terms of its heritage andits contribution to establishing applied ecology as animportant discipline in its own right.To celebrate our golden jubilee, we have launched avirtual issue online (http://www.journalofappliedecology.org/view/0/virtualissues/fiftyyearsvirtualissue.html) that re-views some of the key articles we have published over thelast five decades. Much of the focus of the first decadewas on improving the productivity of agricultural ecosys-tems rather than addressing agriculture’s potential impacton species conservation. Nonetheless, the Journal had aglobal outlook from the start, drawing its examples fromecosystems around the world. Surprisingly, given thelaunch of the journal less than 2 years after the publica-tion of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Carson, Darling &Darling 1962), studies describing the impact of agrochemi-cals on wildlife only appeared towards the end of the1960s. These studies did, however, include early classics inthe field. Work published at this time continues to haveimpact today. For example, Newman’s (1966) article, on amethod for estimating the total length of root in a sam-ple, is still heavily cited more than four decades later, with62 citations listed in Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.co.uk/) from January 2011 to November 2012.These recent citing articles include authors estimating car-bon stocks in Amazonia, understanding the effects ofmycorrhiza for coffee in Puerto Rico, and investigating thepotential for biocontrol of tomato root rot in Denmark.During the 1970s, much of what was published reflectedthe need for basic information about the biology of pestspecies that had large economic effects. This was a periodof rapid agricultural expansion and modernization, exem-plified by the so-called ‘green revolution’, and researcherswere acutely concerned with pests that lowered crop pro-ductivity. By the 1980s, while pests of agriculture werestill an important focus, models of their populationdynamics became increasingly more realistic and includedcrop phenology in assessments of the likely damage fromdefoliating insects. Furthermore, the management of agri-

Recalibrating Management Research for the Post‐COVID‐19 Scientific Enterprise

The main purpose of this study is to explore and map the intellectual structure of technology management studies during 1997-2009, by analyzing 101,360 cited references of 4,257 articles from four technology management related journals in SSCI and SCI databases. In this paper, bibliometrics and social network analysis techniques are used to research intellectual structure of the technology management literature. We are able to identify the important publications and the influential scholars as well as the correlations among these publications by analyzing citation and co-citation. This study provides management researchers a tool for evaluating technology management publications and provides a systematic and objective means of determining the relative importance of different knowledge nodes in the development of the technology management research. Four factors emerged in this study: (1) knowledge, learning and innovation, (2) resources and competitiveness, (3) innovation types and patterns, and (4) collaboration strategies.

Editorial decision-making is a critical yet often opaque component of scholarly publishing, particularly in relation to manuscript rejection. While existing literature has examined peer review mechanisms and publication ethics, less attention has been paid to how editorial leadership is constructed, justified, and critiqued within professional and policy-oriented discourse. This study employs a document analysis approach to examine how editorial practices, ethical standards, and institutional power relations shape manuscript rejection processes in contemporary academic publishing. Data were drawn from editorials, reflective essays, policy documents, and peer-reviewed commentaries produced by major academic publishers and recognized governance bodies. Through thematic synthesis, the study identifies recurring concerns relating to transparency, editorial discretion, perceived bias, and the tension between formal ethical guidelines and lived editorial practice. Rather than presenting primary empirical findings, the study offers a conceptually grounded interpretation of documented perspectives on editorial leadership. The analysis contributes to ongoing debates on fairness, accountability, and trust in scholarly communication and provides reflective insights for authors, editors, publishers, and other stakeholders engaged in academic publishing. The study concludes that editorial leadership must be reframed as both a curatorial and ethical responsibility. To achieve greater equity, transparency, and accountability, it recommends the adoption of open peer review systems, diversification of editorial boards, targeted capacity-building, and formalized accountability frameworks. These strategies are essential for fostering a more inclusive and just academic publishing ecosystem.

This paper introduces action research as an approach for change and development in management research based on its outstanding characteristics and discusses the application notion of action research by critically reviewing its strengths and limitations as well as representing an example case to demonstrate how to employ it in practical setting. Finally, the author draws attention to bias avoidance in action research by introducing three effective practices to mitigate against sources of bias.