We seem to be witnessing the birth of a cottage industry in our field as we, as a community of scholars, either reflect on our own publishing practices (e.g. Beatty and Leigh, 2010) or, more worryingly, permit others the licence to do so (e.g. Currie and Pandher, 2011, 2013) using methods that privilege technique over substance and method over an understanding of the complexities of the field in which we work. It is for us in management and organizational learning and education to decide collectively whether we permit this alarming trend to continue, gain momentum and become embedded and institutionalized within the growing panoply of academic performance management tools in a dean’s armamentarium. However, looking on the brighter side, one of the more productive outcomes of such inquiries is that they can cause us to stop, stand back and take stock of what we are seeking to achieve as editors, reviewers, authors and readers in the field of management and organizational learning and education, and equally importantly where we seek to place our significant conversations. The ‘what’ and the ‘where’ of our scholarship are instantiated in the aims and scope of the journals which populate our field. One of the difficulties that newcomers and outsiders face is that there may sometimes seem to be an embarrassment of riches for potential authors to choose from; witness the ‘84’ referred to by Currie and Pandher (2013). A cursory reading of the above list reveals many highly specialized journals (e.g. Journal of Applied Research for Business Instruction), the majority of which are in fact so specialized as to be unfamiliar to us, indeed only 11 of them have citation-based rankings. While an external perspective in general can have commendable attributes, one of the benefits of the expert-insider view is the privileged and sometimes tacit access that it grants to what really counts as important and what does not. In this regard, the majority of scholars working in the field of management and organization learning and education with whom we come into contact operate according to a number of fairly simple, reputable or tried-and-tested heuristics when confronted with choices about where they endeavour and aspire to place their work, for example, the Thomson Institute for Scientific Information’s 2and 5-year impact factors, UK’s Association of Business Schools Academic Journal Quality Guide, Australian Business Deans Council Journal Quality List 2013, the ‘Financial Times 45’ and, in our own field, Arbaugh’s (2008: 8) ‘big four’ journals, that is, Academy of Management Learning and Education (AMLE), Decision Sciences Journal of 510827 MLQ45110.1177/1350507613510827Management LearningCunliffe and Sadler-Smith research-article2014