RESEARCH NOTE

Publishing in top journals–—A never-ending fad?

Stuart Macdonald a,*, Jacqueline Kamb

aManagement School, University of Sheffield, 9 Mappin Street, Sheffield S1 4DT, UKb School of Economics, Finance and Management, University of Bristol, 8 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TN, UK

Received 4 March 2009; accepted 4 March 2009

Scandinavian Journal of Management (2009) 25, 221—224

KEYWORDSFad;Publishing;Management studies;Top journals

Summary Starbuck is critical of faddishness, and with good reason. Fads may come, and fadsmay go, but go they must–—or must they? We look at the relentless pressure to publish in the topjournals of Management Studies. There is no sign of decline, and yet such desperation to dosomething of value not because it is useful but because demand for it is great certainly satisfiesthe definition of fad. Is a fad that runs and runs still a fad?# 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

ava i lab le at www.sc ienced i rect .com

journa l homepage: ht tp://www.e l sev ier.com/locate/scaman

So there are fads in behavioural and social science research(Starbuck, 2009). How surprising is that? It is not too hard toimagine academic folk reading a paper in some social sciencejournal and being so fired with enthusiasm that they writetheir own paper on the subject, which is read by otheracademic folk, who write their own paper, and so on. Star-buck identifies four factors that would intensify this basicprocess, and it is difficult to disagree with his observationsthat the mass production of knowledge, mechanistic the-ories, generalisations, and the misuse of statistics could eachlead to the concentration of academic research into faddishbursts of output. And yet, there is something wrong here,something about Starbuck’s own generalisation that is uncon-vincing.

Let us start from the beginning and make clear what weare talking about. The term ‘fad’ is often used in conjunctionwith ‘fashion’. Those who specialise in the study of thesethings are keen to point out that ‘fads’ peak and then quicklydecline, while ‘fashions’ show somematurity before their fall(Ponzi & Koenig, 2002; Thackray, 1993). We are content to let

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 114 222 3446;fax: +44 1993 772871.

E-mail addresses: s.macdonald@sheffield.ac.uk (S. Macdonald),jacqueline.kam@bris.ac.uk (J. Kam).

0956-5221/$ — see front matter # 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reservedoi:10.1016/j.scaman.2009.03.009

the two be synonymous, describing people doing somethingbecause other people are doing it. An economist might saythat fad relates demand not to supply in the normal marketway, but to demand itself. Something is wanted becauseothers want it (Strang & Macy, 2001).

So far, so good, but focus on the rise and longevity of thesethings may detract attention from the small print of theliterature on fads, which is clear that they go down as well asup (Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999a,b; Carson, Lanier, Carson,& Guidry, 2000). In fact, fads tend to rise rapidly and thencollapse evenmore abruptly (Ponzi & Koenig, 2002; Thackray,1993). Starbuck pays little attention to the decline of fads,but then what he finds ‘never-ending’ is not the fad itself, but‘faddishness’, presumably meaning characterised by fad. Arethe social sciences characterised by fad? Our evidence, suchas it is, comes from Management Studies rather than thewhole sweep of social science, but we present it for what it isworth.

As it happens, researchers in Management Studies know athing or two about fads (e.g., Abrahamson, 1996; Abraham-son & Fairchild, 1999a,b). They study them: the managementmethods demanded by desperate managers, and supplied byeager management consultants (Huczynski, 1993) and half-crazed gurus (Clark & Salaman, 1996), are fads, demandedbecause they are in demand by other managers rather than

d.

Fig. 2 Source: Scopus.

222 S. Macdonald, J. Kam

because they are of any practical use. Those who wouldunderstand the workings of the organisation and the manage-rial mind investigate these fads (Watson, 1994). Does thismake the research itself faddish? In a sense, yes: BusinessProcess Reengineering (BPR) was studied as much becauseeverybody was into BPR as because of any intrinsic value. Andpapers were written about BPR as much because others werewriting papers about BPR.

For the academic, just as much as for the manager, BPRhad more value as fad than as management method. In suchcircumstances, the fad can easily obscure the method andbecome a barrier to its analysis. Folk can get a mite tetchywhen they have to justify faddish behaviour. Nick Oliver andhis colleagues once questioned the contribution to firmprofitability of such Japanese methods as lean managementand just-in-time (Oliver, 2008). Publication of the results inthree Financial Times articles was followed bymedia interestand then by coverage in engineering and business journals.Much of the last poured scorn on the findings: ‘‘I’m boilingmad about the way what has been disclosed by CambridgeUniversity research has been presented by the press as if thewhole production management profession were a load ofgullible wallabies responsible for their firms’ loss of profit’’.Indeed, the authors received a good deal of hate mail.

Starbuck suspects that academic methodology has con-tributed to faddishness. We observe that one particularmethod has been effective in revealing management fads.We are thinking of the simple technique of running keywordsthrough the titles of papers in bibliographic databases. Thusdid Scarbrough and Swan (2001) discover that the learningorganisation had become unfashionable and had been sup-planted by knowledge management. We used the same roughand ready technique to track the rise and fall of specificmanagement methods towards the end of the last century.The results are sometimes quite dramatic (Fig. 1).

Of course, such method is open to criticism, not leastbecause it is so simple. Where does the faddishness really lie–—with managers or with academic authors? Perhaps all that isrevealed is changing fashion in the titles of papers. And theremay be something in such criticism in that the method nolonger seems to work; at least it seems to produce verydifferent results. Can it be that there are no longer fads inManagement Studies? We applied the same method to Sco-pus, a new bibliographic database, more comprehensive thanABI Inform. We looked at some of the weasel words ofManagement Studies (Micklethwait & Wooldridge, 1996),the sort that might appeal to editors of the subject’s topjournals. We expected to find huge swings in fashion: instead,we found only relentless growth in their incidence, with the

Fig. 1 Source: ABI Inform.

proportion accounted for by Management Studies increasingwell beyond what its growing share of the social sciencesmight explain (Fig. 2).

Have we discovered here the beginning of never-endingfad? What might explain such an oxymoron? Well, the aca-demic world has changed a great deal in the last couple ofdecades. The university has become a business competing tosupply an international market with ‘education’, by which ismeant qualifications. Students have become customers andacademics employees. University administrators havebecomemanagers, managers with the responsibility of seeingthat resources are used efficiently. Trust has given way tomeasures of performance and league tables, the sort ofquantification and statistical abstraction that Starbuckabhors. Academic research is more important than ever inthis competitive environment, but academic research asmeasured by indicators of its performance. On success inpublishing in top journals careers are built and universitiesfunded. This rapid and radical translation may be hard todiscern in the United States, where selection and promotioncommittees have long calculated academic performance interms of indicators. In the UK, though, and in many othercountries now, reliance on academic performance indicatorsis relatively new, and the difference is stark.

Just as there are now many more students, universities,and academics, there are many more academic journals. Yet,by and large, there are no more top journals these days thanwere considered top journals twenty years ago. Strange, too,that, by and large, the very same journals are still the topjournals (Johnson & Podsakoff, 1994; Podsakoff, MacKenzie,Bachrach, & Podsakoff). Such stability in the midst of fiercecompetition requires explanation. In the sciences, editors oftop journals (abetted by publishers) ensure the data are fitfor purpose (Chew, Villanueva, & Van Der Weyden, 2007;Ronco, 2006; Rossner, Van Epps, & Hill, 2007; Young, Ioanni-dis, & Al-Ubaydli, 2008). They are able to do this because thepressure to publish in these few top journals is great. It isgreat because the rewards are great. Pressure is just as greatin the social sciences. If they are to be published in topjournals, authors must supply editors with the sort of paperseditors want (see Starbuck, 2003), and they want papersredolent with citation of their own journal, they want inter-minably long papers, they want papers weighed down inmethodology, papers with vast literature reviews (MacRo-berts & MacRoberts, 1989; Phelan, 1999). In short, theydemand papers suitable for multi-purpose, universal cita-tion, papers with content so sweeping that it is relevanteverywhere, argument so vacuous that it says anything any-one might want it to say, data so impenetrable that they can

Publishing in top journals–—A never-ending fad? 223

be interpreted in almost any way. Thus are journal impactfactors elevated, and high impact factors are the key indi-cator of a top journal (see Macdonald & Kam, 2007a,b).

Peer review is no safeguard against this abuse. Withrejection rates of top journals often well over 90%, therecan be no proper peer review. One does not have to be muchbetter than the statisticians Starbuck castigates to realisethat picking a winning horse from a field of 5 is much easierthat picking the winner from a field of 20. Given that journalreferees have trouble reaching consensus even when the fieldis small (Gans & Shepherd, 1994), journal editors are forcedto expedite the process when the volume of submission ishigh. They invite legions of academics to submit papers inorder to keep up their rejection rate (another, though lesser,indicator of a top journal), desk-reject themajority, and thenfast-track a few favoured papers. Most of the papers sub-mitted to top journals are never refereed.

‘‘. . . I found it difficult to place papers in the so-called‘best’ journals, because they already had such a hugebacklog of contributions. I cannot even say that theyrefused my contributions for their lack of quality becausethey did not even look at them.’’ (young academic quotedin Barnard, 1998, p.479)

And which papers are favoured? Well, papers from authorswho know the importance of an impact factor, authors whocite what counts, and who will be cited where it counts. Tightcliques have formed of authors whose citation is mainly toeach other, and tight groups of top journals publish paperswhose citation is mainly to papers in these top journals.

‘‘. . . the same old researchers taking the same old linetend to get published. My experience is that there are onlyabout three or four names in my field who get published. Ifyou are not one of them or you are not connected withthem, you haven’t got much chance.’’ (academic quotedin Bunting, 2005, p. 18)

It is amusing to wonder whether pressure to publishpapers in top journals is rather greater than pressure toread them. If such papers say only what has already beensaid, why bother to read them? Editors of top journals worryabout journal impact factors, not readability. Authors worryabout pleasing editors of top journals, and have little inter-est in readability either. Editors talk aboutwho they publish;authors about where they publish: neither is much con-cerned about what is published. Citation is critical to botheditor and author, of course, but only as ameans of establish-ing credentials. Interminable reference lists neither directreading, nor demonstrate what reading has been done.Indeed, reference lists in top journals are now so long —they averaged 10 citations in the ‘seventies (Price, 1976) —that reading all that is cited would seriously impede both apaper’s production and its consumption. There are lesserjournals, of course, publishing empirical papers, originalresearch and sometimes even critical findings, but theirpapers will not be cited in top journals, and so there is littlepoint reading them either. In short, the academic has mas-sive incentive to publish in top journals, but little incentiveto read them. Starbuck (2005) dares to suggest that some ofthese papers are not all that good: we observe merely thatpapers in top journals arewritten to be published rather thanto be read.

This brings us neatly back to fad, something of value notbecause it is useful, but because demand for it is great.Publishing in the top journals of Management Studies is a fad,but it shows no sign at all of decline. Can a fad be enduringand still be a fad? When papers are written to be countedrather than read, there is no mechanism to generate thecriticism that lays fad low, or that sparks off a new fad.Instead, there is fad without end, entrenched and fortified bythe fiction that peer review and competition guarantee thattop journals publish nothing but the best. Peer reviewrequires a collegial environment: competition encouragesthe very opposite. Their unnatural alliance is surely amongwhat Starbuck calls the ‘‘constant causes of never-endingfaddishness’’, and is surely among the reasons why, in Man-agement Studies, fads themselves now promise to be never-ending.

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