Objectivity and Truth: The Role of the Essay in Management Scholarship

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12340
• Author: Roy Suddaby
• Date: 01 March 2019
• Published date: 01 March 2019

Objectivity and Truth: The Role of the Essay in

Management Scholarship

Roy Suddaby

University of Victoria and Newcastle University

JMS Says was introduced at a symposium of the 2015 Academy of Management.

During that session an audience member asked how business-school deans might evalu-

ate the publication of an essay. The implication of the question was clear. Business

scholarship is based on science and the essay is anything but scientific. So how could it

‘count’ as knowledge?

The question betrayed the assumptive status order of how different knowledge forms

are valued in business schools. Journal articles are legitimate. Books and book chapters

are not. Introducing the essay into this gnostic hierarchy was unsettling, like inviting a

philosopher to an accounting convention. As a form of knowledge, the essay was so for-

eign to the questioner’s ‘order of things’ that it simply did not make sense.

The cultural status order of legitimate management knowledge has co-evolved over

many years with the growing popularity of business education. It has several curious

characteristics that distinguish business schools from other academic disciplines. It is

odd, for example, that books count for so little in business, when they are highly valued

in the humanities. By citation count, books seem to have been quite influential in the

history of management theory. Though we bemoan our inability to interest practitioners

in the content of our journal articles, textbooks, which are the primary point of contact

with practitioners, count for very little, if at all. Like unfamiliar cultural standards of

beauty such as foot binding in China and or ear stretching of the Maasai, the fundamen-

tal codes of a community often generates its own peculiar logics of worth.

I was reminded of the questioner’s challenge to the legitimacy of the essay recently

when reading a series of papers that describe a growing legitimacy crisis in management

scholarship. The first was a paper that tried and failed to reproduce the findings of a

number of studies in a prominent strategic management journal (Bergh et al., 2017).

The second was a paper, currently working its way through the review process, that

Address for reprints: Roy Suddaby, Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, Business and Economics Build-

ing, Room 254, 3800 Finnerty Road, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada V8P

5C2 (rsuddaby@uvic.ca).

V

C2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies

doi: 10.1111/joms.12340

56:2 March 2019

For your comments about this discussion, please visit http://www.socadms.org.uk/

objectivity-and-truth-the-role-of-the-essay-in-management-scholarship/