Reflections on the distinctiveness of European management scholarship

Management scholarship and the journal publication process has been increasingly criticised for being overly elitist and largely irrelevant to the needs of business. There is some justification for such criticisms. Yet, paradoxically, university business schools must resist the urge to be superficially relevant in order to be genuinely useful. I argue here that the very best of management research scholarship relies on a ‘scholarship of common sense’ that actively mirrors the very best of business and management practices. Artistic rigour, much more than technical rigour is needed. Openness, empirical sensitivity and the capacity for achieving ‘flying leaps’ of imagination, are to be preferred to procedural adherence in the research process. This alternative understanding of academic rigour and the intellectual richness and diversity of perspectives associated with it is clearly more evident in the British and European intellectual traditions. Such a European-styled management scholarship can help in actively reshaping the intellectual landscape, priorities and parameters of management research by encouraging the kind of scholarly contributions that is not simply technically rigorous, but imaginatively interesting and often counterintuitive.