In April 2026, the Financial Times (FT) introduced the first major revision of its FT50 journal list in more than a decade, removing Journal of Business Ethics, Human Relations and Organization Studies and replacing them with Academy of Management Annals, American Sociological Review and Psychological Science, respectively. This paper aims to critically examine the assumptions underlying these changes and their implications for the governance of management knowledge.
This paper adopts a position paper approach informed by critical scholarship on research evaluation, journal rankings, academic capitalism and knowledge governance. The FT50 revision is analyzed as a mechanism that shapes academic legitimacy and defines the boundaries of valued scholarship.
This paper argues that the 2026 revision reveals important epistemic tensions within contemporary management research evaluation. Two of the newly included journals are disciplinary outlets rooted outside management studies, while a third primarily publishes review articles rather than original research. At the same time, the removal of Journal of Business Ethics eliminates the only dedicated ethics and sustainability journal from the FT50, despite the growing emphasis placed by business schools on responsible management and societal impact. More broadly, the revision reflects a conception of scholarly value that prioritizes citation-based prestige and elite institutional recognition while marginalizing intellectual diversity and socially relevant research.
This paper contributes to debates on journal rankings by conceptualizing the FT50 as an instrument of epistemic governance rather than a neutral indicator of quality. It highlights how ranking systems actively shape what counts as legitimate management knowledge and exposes tensions between business schools’ responsibility rhetoric and the evaluation systems through which academic value is constructed.
