On crisis, genuine imposters, and complacency in management studies

I am grateful to all those who responded to my original ‘provocation.’ In this short response I will mostly take our areas of agreement as read. However, I will clarify some issues that have arisen, and then focus on where disagreements exist. It is worth reiterating what has brought this debate into being. Fundamentally, many of us are concerned about our publishing practices, including what we write about and how we do it. Audit, accountability and ranking systems have proliferated, bringing with them escalating demands about how much we need to publish (Warren, 2019) and where we must publish it (Tusting, 2019). This also affects how we write and what we need to write about in order to do secure publication in a prized elite of ‘A’ journals (Frémeaux, et al, 2019; Yoshikawa, 2019; Aguinis et al, 2020). Since these journals stress theory development above all else, most of us focus ever more on developing theory as our main goal. Other objectives become less important or disappear altogether.