09.07.2026

Management and organization research has become especially receptive to academic activism, particularly of the social justice-oriented and “critical” variety. This development cannot be explained simply by the political preferences of individual scholars or by the morally charged nature of topics such as inequality, sustainability, or corporate power. Many disciplines address such issues without experiencing the same degree of politicization.

A more convincing explanation lies in the structure of the field itself. Management research is unusually fragmented, interdisciplinary, and normatively oriented. These features have encouraged intellectual openness and methodological diversity, but they have also weakened the boundaries around what counts as legitimate scholarship. In a context where “engagement” and “societal impact” are increasingly valorized, activism can come to appear not as a departure from scholarship but as its natural extension.

A field without a strong intellectual core

Compared with disciplines such as economics or psychology, management research lacks a widely accepted intellectual center. There is no single dominant paradigm, no universally recognized methodological hierarchy, and no stable set of canonical problems around which the field is organized. Instead, management studies consist of a loose federation of partially overlapping subfields—strategy, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, innovation, human resource management, and others—each with its own journals, conventions, and intellectual traditions.

This pluralism is often celebrated as a source of creativity and interdisciplinarity. However,  such pluralism can also weaken the mechanisms through which disciplines enforce shared standards of explanation, evidence, and rigor. In more integrated disciplines—characterized by exemplary problem solutions, agreement on heuristics, and a clear reputational hierarchy [1] —deviations from prevailing methodological or theoretical norms are more visible and more likely to be contested. In management research, by contrast, multiple standards coexist without any one framework clearly dominating.

The result is that subfields can evolve in relative isolation from one another. Of course, the traditional scientific disciplines also evolve in relative isolation but are characterized by adherence to internal disciplinary standards. In management research scholarly communities may be  internally coherent but are only vaguely connected to each other. Partly because of the absence of a strong intellectual core, such communities may more easily be able to define their identity around particular normative or political commitments. This dynamic is especially visible in areas such as critical management studies, where the distinction between scholarship and activism has often been explicitly questioned.

Fragmentation and ideological niches

Fragmentation does not merely permit diversity; it also lowers the barriers to ideological capture. In a tightly integrated discipline, shifting the intellectual center of gravity requires persuading a broad and relatively cohesive scholarly community. In a fragmented field, influence over a limited number of journals, editorial networks, or hiring pipelines may be sufficient to shape an entire subfield.

Such conditions encourage the emergence of relatively insulated scholarly communities that share assumptions, cite one another extensively, and define contribution according to internally generated criteria. Where these communities are organized around a common ideological orientation, evaluative standards may gradually shift from explanatory adequacy toward political or moral alignment.

Over time, this can create intellectual environments in which certain questions become difficult to ask and certain conclusions increasingly difficult to challenge. Dissent is not necessarily refuted; rather, it is filtered out through publication practices, hiring norms, and peer review processes.

The influence of Critical Sociology

Another important factor is the growing influence of sociological traditions within management and organization studies. Sociology has made indispensable contributions to the study of institutions, legitimacy, networks, and organizational culture. Yet some strands of sociology—particularly those influenced by critical theory—have long embraced a more explicitly normative conception of scholarship.

Within these traditions, research is often expected not merely to explain and predict social phenomena, offering potential decision support, but also to contribute to emancipation, challenge power relations, or advance social justice. The scholar is understood not only as an observer, but also as an agent of social transformation. This is a normative agenda that goes significantly beyond how management researchers have traditionally looked at their fields.

Thus, as these assumptions migrate into management research, they alter conceptions of what scholarship is for. The emphasis shifts from explanation toward critique, and from critique toward intervention. This shift is particularly consequential in areas already concerned with values and meaning, such as organizational identity, culture, leadership, and corporate responsibility.

A normative discipline from the beginning

Management research is especially susceptible to this development because it has always possessed a normative dimension. Unlike disciplines primarily concerned with explanation (such as the historically oriented sciences, such as geology, cosmology, paleontology, etc.), management studies have historically been oriented toward practical guidance. Its central questions are often prescriptive: if managers and relevant stakeholders seek certain goals, then how should organizations be structured, how should incentives be designed, or performance improved?

This creates an important ambiguity. Once a discipline is accustomed to offering guidance about means—“if you want outcome X, do Y”—it becomes easier to move toward prescribing ends as well, i.e., become blatantly normative Activist scholarship frequently exploits this ambiguity by reframing the purpose of management research from helping organizations achieve their chosen objectives to redefining what those objectives ought to be.

In this framework, traditional organizational goals such as profitability or efficiency may be treated as morally suspect, while alternative goals—social justice, stakeholder inclusion, or sustainability—are elevated as inherently superior. The scholar’s role thereby shifts from providing conditional advice to prescribing substantive moral ends.

The “Grand Challenges” agenda

Recent developments within the field have reinforced these tendencies. Over the past decade, management scholarship has increasingly organized itself around the language of “grand challenges”: climate change, inequality, public health, and related societal problems. Journals, funding agencies, and academic associations frequently encourage scholars to demonstrate social relevance and practical impact.

These ambitions are understandable and often admirable. However, the framing has important consequences. Research organized around solving societal challenges implicitly prioritizes intervention over explanation. Scholars are encouraged not only to understand organizations, but also to participate in shaping desirable social outcomes.

At the same time, grand challenges are inherently politically contested. There is rarely consensus regarding causes, priorities, or acceptable trade-offs. Under such conditions, normative commitments can easily substitute for uncertain evidence.

Weak standards and incentives

Management research is also characterized by relatively weak and ambiguous evaluative standards. Although journal rankings and prestige hierarchies exist, there is less consensus than in many disciplines regarding what constitutes rigorous or cumulative knowledge. Quantitative and qualitative approaches coexist without a shared evaluative framework, while theoretical novelty is often rewarded more strongly than replication or consolidation.

Under these conditions, evaluative criteria such as “interestingness,” “relevance,” or “importance” acquire greater influence. These criteria are inherently more subjective and therefore more vulnerable to ideological interpretation.

Institutional incentives reinforce this dynamic. Academic careers depend on publication, and publication depends on peer review. Where journals or scholarly communities become ideologically homogeneous, shared assumptions can shape what is considered publishable, innovative, or legitimate. Activist scholarship often aligns well with contemporary academic incentives because bold moral claims and calls for transformation are frequently perceived as more novel and impactful than incremental empirical contributions.

Why the distinction matters

The concern is not that scholars have moral commitments or that research addresses politically relevant topics. The problem arises when activism changes the standards by which knowledge claims are evaluated. Scholarship ideally treats arguments and evidence as open to criticism regardless of whether they support morally desirable conclusions. Activism, by contrast, is typically organized around advancing particular outcomes. When these orientations become fused, there is a risk that empirical inquiry becomes subordinated to political commitment.

This matters because scientific disciplines depend on norms of organized skepticism, openness to dissent, and willingness to revise conclusions in light of contrary evidence. If certain conclusions become morally privileged, disagreement may increasingly be interpreted not as intellectual critique but as ethical deviance. Under such conditions, self-correction becomes more difficult, and scholarship risks becoming more rhetorical than analytical.

None of this implies that management scholars should ignore issues such as inequality, sustainability, or corporate power. Nor does it imply that values can or should be entirely absent from scholarship. The relevant question is not whether values matter, but how they should relate to the production of knowledge.

The danger is that, in a field already characterized by fragmentation and weak standards, activism may accelerate a shift away from cumulative and self-correcting inquiry toward more rhetorical and normative forms of scholarship. When the boundary between analysis and advocacy becomes blurred, evidence may increasingly be interpreted through the lens of desired outcomes, while dissenting perspectives risk marginalization rather than engagement.

Most importantly, the capacity for scientific self-correction may weaken. Intellectual progress depends on organized skepticism, open disagreement, and a willingness to revise assumptions in light of contrary evidence. These practices become more difficult to sustain when scholarly identities are closely tied to moral or political commitments.

The vulnerability of management research to activism is therefore not accidental. It is rooted in the field’s institutional and intellectual structure: its fragmentation, interdisciplinary openness, normative ambitions, and incentive systems.

Recognizing this vulnerability does not require retreating into narrow technical specialization or denying the importance of societal problems. It instead requires greater self-awareness regarding the conditions under which knowledge is produced and the risks that arise when scholarship becomes too closely aligned with moral or ideological projects.

In a field without a strong intellectual core in the forms of clear scientific standards, maintaining the distinction between explanation and advocacy is particularly difficult. For that reason, it is also particularly necessary.

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