Challenging Disciplinary Norms in Management Research to Catalyze Climate Action

Abstract

In their recent Academy of Management Perspectives article, "Climate-Proofing Management Research," Daniel Nyberg and Christopher Wright deliver an impassioned critique of management research. They note the overall lack of engagement with climate change in our field and question the merit of extant research. We reveal significant and proportionally greater engagement with climate change outside our discipline's elite journals. We also show that this research, often in a more applied and phenomenondriven mold, enjoys more recognition in other disciplines. We argue that Nyberg and Wright's critique is caught up in powerful disciplinary norms fetishizing a narrow set of elite journals to gauge research impact. Those norms also account for their recommendations' emphasis on (re-)theorizing or "reimagining" capitalism and society at large. We argue that these measures would reinforce our discipline's preoccupation with novelty and "interesting research," and its inattention to developing pathways to impact. We propose a less restrictive but also less abstract research agenda that is ultimately focused on real-world impact. We outline an adaptive, participatory and transdisciplinary research paradigm designed to generate useful, actionable management knowledge for catalyzing climate action.