Looking for good research in management – a publisher’s case study

Management is not a science. There are too many variables for it to be anything other than the exercise of contextual judgement in situations which are understood as well as possible by the protagonists. But the scholarly management community, including researchers, educators, publishers and consultancies, encourages a statistically‐driven research approach more suitable to hard science than a multivariate social science like management. We can, of course, measure very easily whether statistically‐driven research is statistically sound or not. But “statistically sound” does not equate to “good”. We tend to value what we can measure. But in research, like the rest of management practice, we need to learn to measure what we value. This article will be discussing the nature of “good” as applied to research in management, and addressing, as a case example, how a scholarly publisher is reacting to the challenge of promoting good research in management.