Publishing without betrayal: Critical scholarship meets mainstream journals

SummaryIn this paper, I discuss challenges critical scholars face with respect to publishing qualitative research in ‘top tier’ mainstream journal outlets. Relying on ideas and insights from postcolonial and feminist thinking, I discuss how these theoretical positions inform reading, writing, and reflexivity in the production of critical management scholarship. To this end, I use examples from reviewers’ comments on work I’ve submitted to the Academy of Management Journal as well as conferences to demonstrate specifically the problematic assumptions that guide qualitative research expectations particularly in ‘top tier’ management outlets. Adopting a reflexive stance that recognizes the limits of individual agency, I suggest that engaging in interdisciplinarity across social science disciplines may promote critical and socially engaged scholarship as legitimate business knowledge.

► Postcolonial feminist qualitative research is an ethico-political commitment.
► This approach requires movement from reading critical work to reading critically.
► Reflexivity as concern over power relations is necessary for writing such research.
► Interdisciplinarity can provide engagement between critical and mainstream scholars.