Abstract
Keywords
Continuing inequalities in academic publishing are a major concern. Earlier conversations about this problem within Organization and Management Studies involved critiques of the marginalizing effects of journal ranking systems and how they privilege knowledge and writing conventions that are taken-for-granted as ‘correct’ in the Global North, most particularly North America (Couto et al., 2021; Murphy and Zhu, 2012). Also discussed have been power-related issues associated with efforts to improve inequalities. For instance, as Alcadipani et al. (2012) point out, the idea of ‘giving voice’ to marginalized scholars reproduces the hierarchization in which scholars from the Global North are seen as dominant and privileged. In the same way, the call for the inclusion of ‘indigenous knowledges’ within Organization and Management studies works to exoticize these knowledges and preserve the sense that they are less valuable or scientific than mainstream knowledges. Moreover, what needs to be considered is that the foci to which such knowledges are less likely to apply (and which therefore reinforces their marginal status) such as strategy or any other process thought to be central to corporate success, are themselves socio-political constructs or epistemic regimes (Alcadipani et al., 2012; Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Jammulamadaka, 2022) that make sense only in a world where capitalism and its associated imperatives and priorities dominate.
More recent conversations, recognizing the power of everyday and taken-for-granted activities and processes in reproducing any given status quo, have shifted to an exploration of how academic writing, reviewing and editing traditions reproduce inequalities even as many journals have made efforts to support scholars from the Global South (Barros and Alcadipani, 2023). Even so, the position of scholars from marginalized geographies remains problematic (Peticca-Harris et al., 2025).
Adopting a pragmatic rather than defeatist position on this situation, in this editorial, we want to interrogate some of the possible solutions that have been suggested to help scholars from the Global South enter the mainstream of academic publishing in management and organization studies journals. This idea of ‘mainstream’ is, of course, problematic, as it assumes that the mainstream is some neutral space, open to all. We want to problematize this assumption so we approach this task via a deliberately self-conscious and provocative dialogue between one of the EiCs of this journal and an invited scholar from the Global South, an approach inspired by and Allen and Girei’s (2024) piece on decolonizing the curriculum. We do so because, as Lehman and Tienari (2024) suggest, dialogue represents a transparent method for prizing open publishing hegemonies and exposing how these are reproduced and sometimes resisted. We also want to disrupt the narrative tone of editorials in top journals in which editors basically tell aspiring authors what they need to do to get published in that journal. This, as Willmott (2022: 1742) has pointed out, is at least partly to blame for the ‘isomorphic and formulaic’ nature of academic publications within organization and management studies. We therefore see ourselves as part of and reproducers of a problematic system, and we view this editorial as a form of subtle activism 1 (Kjærgaard et al., 2023) which we hope will stimulate further conversations and debate within the academy.
In this first exchange between Nimruji and Penny, Nimruji outlines what she sees as some of the baseline problems in attempts to decolonize academic publication, which explain why the evaluative and technical approach that dominates how we review and edit papers persists. Penny responds with her own thoughts as a Co-Editor in Chief (Co-EiC) of Human Relations.
As a decolonizing scholar from the South, the attitudes towards submissions from non-Western locations have always frustrated me. The decolonizing zeitgeist has meant that almost all journals now insist on internationalisation with Global South representation, and a focus on indigenous knowledges and decolonising processes. They want to increase submissions and publications from diverse geographies. However most editors and associate editors are struggling with bringing about these changes on the ground. While there is some increase in submissions from hitherto marginalized geographies, very few make it to the final publication stage. Even fewer bring to the table truly alternative knowledges.
I find the exoticization of indigenous knowledges and the limited foci of papers submitted by scholars from marginalized geographies intellectually disappointing and politically ineffective in disrupting the colonial impulse. As has been covered extensively in extant studies, the main reasons for the disproportionate amount of rejected manuscripts from marginalized geographies are often bundled together under a catch all phrase: ‘poorly written’ – which denotes a lack of dexterity in expressing ideas in English (Barros and Alcadipani, 2023). But the language issue cannot be divorced from related epistemological and material concerns. With respect to epistemological issues for instance, as Wa Thiong’o (1992) persuasively argues, language influences how we think, how we know, perceive and understand our world and life. This is because languages are crucibles of worldviews and philosophies. As Fanon (2016) has said, to speak in a language is to assume the burden of a civilization. A lack of dexterity in English, the dominant lingua franca of academic scholarship, prevents authors from marginalized geographies effectively communicating their worldviews. Coupled with more material issues, such as lack of access to funds for translation and editing services, research methods and resources, and we see why the difficulties faced by scholars from marginalized geographies persist (Jammulamadaka, 2020).
Addressing these writing challenges often involves the development and delivery of workshops for authors and extending writing assistance to help authors from non-Western contexts better write and prepare their manuscripts. Journals like ours also might offer ‘language editing waivers’ which offer support for writing for scholars from marginalized geographies. The idea here of course is to ‘school’ authors in the conventions and requirements of publishing that have developed in the West and Global North. But because, as pointed out in our opening paragraphs, these conventions reflect the writing preferences and standards of Western scholars, these efforts are simply reproducing the status quo.
Yes, unlike a decade ago, there are many more paper development workshops conducted by elite Northern 2 journals in parts of the Global South. While language is definitely a barrier, I do not think addressing this in an isolated manner is an effective solution. This will create an oversupply of submissions and homogenise writing about non-Western contexts. More importantly the emphasis on language incompletely recognises the nature of the problem. As you rightly say, what happens in workshops and outreach practices is that non-western authors are taught to write using conventions and expectations of Western editors/journals even if that requires sacrificing important insights from the non-Western context. Cao et al. (2025: 119) in a recent review of publishing in elite international business journals find, ‘at elite outlets, international-context-based research is characterized by a gradual decrease in intellectual vigor and methodological variety, a disregard for context and indifference to practice’. They also note, ‘in outlets on the edge [of the ranking system?] research is less constrained by dominant and rigid academic discourse’. Hence what happens is that despite being written by scholars from the Global South or other geographies, papers adopt the usual/mainstream/dominant theorisations/conceptualisations. It is the physical not epistemic geography that changes.
Agreed. But additionally these attempts to reduce inequalities in academic publishing fail to address the basic problem which is systemic and located in neoliberal mentalities in which the calculability of journals (their rank and impact factor), topics (those most likely to attract funding and citations) and ‘top’ authors (whose performance is judged by the number of papers published in ‘top journals’ rather than any other dimension such as – does this paper tell us anything new or interesting?) seem to be unreflexively used as proxies for publication quality.
Yes, the institutionalized structures of performance that are prevalent across universities and schools are a problem. But these structures manifest differently for scholars in different stages of their careers and in different geographies. Many of us senior academics are relatively immune to these pressures unlike young and early career scholars. Further, when we talk of career stages, we tend to assume that the pressures experienced by an early career scholar in the South and those faced by someone in the North are homogenous. While both face career uncertainties and the pressure to add publications to their portfolio, specific publication requirements are often moderated according to geography. In the Global South, some universities are cognizant of their resource scarcities such as lack of library and funding resources and moderate publication requirements accordingly. For example my own and other similar schools in India allow a diverse kind of publishing (not just A * and FT 50 journals) as a part of their performance management system.
Yet, the overall pressure to publish and the prestige of publishing in a top journal persist even in the Global South because academic prestige in the global community is tied to publications in these top journals. This perspective is reinforced by accreditation industries who imply that those universities who try to be a little more accommodating in their publishing requirements are lagging behind those who stick to the ranking formula.
Ok – so we agree that the problems encountered by trying to decolonize academic publication are much broader than English language and contextual issues. So what can we as editors and reviewers do to try to influence this rather depressing state of affairs?
Being an editor is frustrating work. One often struggles with finding willing reviewers with expertise on the one hand and on the other having to deal with author ire over inappropriate reviewing. Even if one were to chalk down these struggles to occupational hazards, something that comes with the territory, the truly frustrating and saddening outcome is the loss of good ideas and conceptualisations, as well as missed opportunities to be a part of great scholarship. I feel that we have not looked carefully enough at our everyday, routine practices of academic publishing, especially the blind peer review process and its invisible role in maintaining the status quo. We bemoan the general resistance to non-Western ideas from top tier journals and time and again call for openness. Rarely do we pause to ask how our everyday practices, with peer review the most important example, lead to the ‘closure’ we lament. My experiences over the last few years, especially since the popularization of the decolonizing discourse and the imperative to diversify authorship geographies, suggest that reviewing micro-praxis contributes to academic inequalities in more ways than has been acknowledged or understood.
Following this initial discussion and a first draft of this editorial, we identified five key areas that we felt needed some greater exposition and which illustrate our point that extant decolonizing solutions may not be as effective as hoped:
(i) What counts as a contribution;
(ii) Reviewing as evaluation;
(iii) The impact of developmental reviewing;
(iv) Reviewers and editors undermining authors’ intentions;
(v) Performative Allyship.
We first discuss what we see as problematic in each of these areas and then offer a number of ideas for disrupting some of the assumptions that we believe are illustrated by them, focusing specifically on those practices in which taken-for-granted ideas about what constitutes knowledge, effective writing and effective reviewing are reproduced. In doing so, we invite readers to consider how their own practices might contribute to or disrupt the current status quo in academic publishing and what we might be able to achieve by doing so.
What counts as a contribution?
The biggest challenge of all is how we make judgments about novelty and contributions. Many elite journals are fixated on the idea of a theoretical contribution but what this means in practice often reproduces some fundamental (and, I would argue, flawed) assumptions:
We know the standards of evaluation that need to be applied to judge whether a theoretical contribution has been made; These standards are valid and applicable to all scholarship; We need to maintain these standards to ensure quality.
When we use a decolonizing lens to interrogate these assumptions, however, we can see their flaws. The standards that we see as universal become problematic precisely because of this view. They silence/invalidate other possibilities, which is the crux of decolonial epistemic politics. Taking the decolonising perspective means that we accept that different knowledges have/require different standards of evaluation. In a sense the challenges we face are similar to those that emerged when positivist and quantitative scholarship was the dominant mode and qualitative research was seen as a risky outlier. Over the years, through concerted efforts there is now a reasonable consensus around what constitutes good qualitative research or post-positivist research. We have been able to develop different standards for these different paradigms. Colonialism, for instance, is a heterogeneous concept, and how it manifests is contextually anchored as are the responses to it on the part of the colonized. This means that evaluating the contributions from marginalized geographies cannot be addressed via a one-size-fits-all approach but needs a change in the mindsets we bring to bear on all scholarship, whatever its cultural-historical location.
Yes I see what you mean. But we have to be very careful how we approach this issue as otherwise all we will do is create further problems. I think a key issue here is that very often scholars from marginalized geographies are attempting to contribute to literature streams that have a long history in the Global North and which are pretty much mined to extinction with respect to what we know about the phenomenon of interest. Leadership is a case in point. Hence for any author, no matter their geographical location, making the level of contribution expected at Human Relations or any other top ranked journal is a difficult task. If you present a paper that is written in poor English and which does not follow the conventions expected in this type of scholarship – that is, if it is not clear how and why your own study is going to add something new or meaningfully extend what we currently know, then your chances of your paper being sent for peer review are pretty low. I see very few papers coming from marginal geographies that, for example, challenge leadership constructs or offer a different way of thinking about how collectives get organized and achieve things.
One example, however, is a study by Spiller et al. (2019) which challenges mainstream conceptualizations of collective leadership and the idea that this represents a relatively new and emerging form of leadership. They illustrate how Maori mātauranga which privileges ancient wisdom articulated through, for example, proverbs, stories, dances and songs speaks to principles of collective leadership through emphasizing leadership as a reciprocal process in which the leader emerges from the respect bestowed to that person by the collective. Employing the wānanga process as an empirical device which subverts the methodological principle of subject/object separation and distinction, the study seeks to develop insights that capture what the authors refer to as ‘nuanced notes’ of collective leadership. But of course the use of the construct ‘leadership’ inevitably invites comparisons with mainstream understandings of it and reproduces its reification as a definite object that can be studied.
Coming at extant scholarship from a different perspective is, as you are saying, one way to think differently about what making a theoretical contribution means. But for scholars from colonized locations this approach requires them to develop confidence in themselves and dislodge the printed word from its exalted status. Part of colonial violence is the inferiority and self-doubt it has bred within the colonized. When this combines with the epistemic privilege of the printed text against oral knowledges, it creates this hopeless scenario of Southern scholars trusting an extant conceptualization they read in a journal over their lived experience of that context. So they remain confined to operating within mainstream conceptualisations, trying to fit into the interstices rather than challenging them, and thereby unable to show the significance of their work.
Human Relations has a long and illustrious history of welcoming risky and edgy scholarship and that is why I am so proud to be one of the current custodians of the journal but I would say very few top journals share this philosophy. Indigenous knowledges do push us into thinking differently as Spiller et al.’s (2019) paper illustrates. But the top ranked journals i.e. North American journals are not, in my experience, particularly welcoming of left field ideas as my own outstanding record of desk rejects at these journals testifies. This is a particular problem if your scholarship is inter-disciplinary or does not fit easily into extant and recognized streams of literature. This serves to reproduce the increasing and escalating tendency for what has been termed ‘safe scholarship’ – the ‘don’t rock the boat’ approach to the study of organizational phenomena.
Yes, this is certainly one issue but I am also very uncomfortable with the accumulation logic that is implicit in the idea of a theoretical contribution, where progressively truer knowledge is produced with each publication. An accumulation logic assumes that knowledge production is linear and that a single universal truth is possible. There is thus a danger that offering new ways of thinking about (to continue with your example) collective leadership are seen to be adding to or refining what we already know. I think research especially in the human and social sciences is more than such accumulation. It has an ethical and political role and content. Many social sciences such as anthropology and sociology, for instance, were developed for explicitly political purposes. So I think we need to be much more cognizant of and reflexive about the ethical and political nature of the knowledge we are judging and I am inclined to reference what de Sousa Santos (2014) says about ecologies of knowledges, where diverse forms and practices of knowledge co-exist. And just as in the natural world, some knowledges become predatory, some friendly, and some incommensurable. From an ecologies perspective, research becomes less about which knowledge is a truer representation of reality and instead generates a concern with understanding different lived realities around the world. For example, decolonial feminisms draw attention to how gender and its challenges are lived differently in different parts of the world. Here knowledges about gender are understood as plural and relational, confirm, extend, contradict, reject, co-exist, thereby reshaping the knowledge ecology of what is currently understood. It is an interaction with extant knowledge rather than a prove/disprove accumulation logic.
From a knowledge ecology perspective, reviewing (for example) does not rest upon the presumption of knowing what the other (the author) is trying to convey. In simple terms, the micro-praxis of the question/comment, ‘there is no engagement with extant literature’ would change into ‘why is there no engagement with relevant literature/convention? Is there a reason for disengaging with extant literature on this topic?’ Such conversations open up possibilities of delinking from the Eurocentric canon while still enabling the development of globally useful knowledges. Such conversation is possible when the reviewer seeks intersubjective understanding, another idea proposed by de Sousa Santos (2014) as a way forward for Epistemologies of the South. In a hierarchical view of knowledges, for example, boundary policing is absolutely necessary. The reviewer therefore of necessity takes on an evaluative role to enforce these boundaries. Within an ecologies perspective, boundaries are fluid, they are transient. Ecologies are characterized by inter-dependence. de Sousa Santos (2014: 201) explains, ‘In a climate of ecology of knowledges, the quest for intersubjectivity is as important as it is complex. Since different knowledges take place on different spatial scales and according to different durations and rhythms, intersubjectivity entails also the disposition to know and act on different scales (interscalarity) and under the articulation of different times and durations (intertemporality)’. Intersubjectivity helps us overcome processes that erase and deny the very existence of other knowledges, i.e., knowledge outside the boundaries of modern Eurocentric epistemology.
I agree that an ecologies of knowledge perspective can be a useful way to think about differences in knowledges though I do have concerns about the relativism 3 that this then introduces which is by no means problem free. But I see what you mean about how such an approach can encourage us to see alternative perspectives as potentially co-existing with those that are dominant. It resonates a little with the quantum, Newtonian physics divide where the former cannot be easily applied to the macro- world just ats the latter doesn’t work in the micro-world. However, one of the points I would reiterate is that social phenomena are themselves socio-political constructs – they don’t have an inherent reality. Leadership is one example here – it is an idea developed to explain the behaviour of people in groups – it is not ‘out there’ as some definite tangible thing. Marginalized authors may, therefore, want to challenge some of these ideas by offering us alternative ‘takes’ on social phenomena (after all, what is constructed as ‘leadership’ from one perspective can be read as ‘tyranny’ from another), or even ways of seeing/thinking that offer us new phenomena.
Related to this, I tend to question the contribution being made in papers where the question ‘why is this important?’ is either not answered or not clear. I think reviewers can nudge authors towards answering this question. Authors can also ask themselves this question because this will make visible and scrutable the epistemic socio-politics that are being taken for granted. It will bring theory and empirics out of the hallowed halls of scientificity. Speaking relatively, it is far easier to write up contributions to literature, rather than to identify a truly compelling reason why something is important, because often these reasons are personal rather than universal, relating to authorial conviction, to that scholarly impetus that drove the work. It comes from a place that is a lot different from, ‘I want to publish my paper in a top tier journal’. It comes from a place of ethics, politics, of plurality, of influencing how people think and the consequences of this. It is not about fitting into existing literature or correcting it, fine tuning it etc. It is about why it matters. Any responses to the question of importance that present inane, conventional tropes will signal weak authorial conviction and inadequate reflection of ethical, political, plural or impact concerns.
It would be very tempting to attempt to parameterize such ethical, political, plural or impact concerns. In fact I see a lot of this happening already in statements about author positionality, practical implications and Sustainable Development Goals, etc. But I am not referring to this kind of parameterization. It is that feeling you have as a reviewer when you read a paper and you understand why someone would spend months/years doing that work. The answer is much more than saying, this is a gap in the literature or I need to publish a paper for my job. The closest word I can find for this is conviction.
I call this passion – it’s the visceral belief that what you’re doing is saying something that actually matters; that can cause someone to think and perhaps even say ‘wow – that’s interesting’. But, as you’ve said, we’re caught up in writing not for ourselves or our beliefs but for particular journals with high impact factors.
Disrupting the accumulation logic: Editorial intervention and why something is important
I personally believe if editors see promise in a paper, where they are thinking ‘this is really interesting and/or important’, they can exercise much more influence and use their power much more productively. While we can definitely encourage reviewers to think about the distinctiveness and/or challenge that can be brought to bear on any given idea or phenomenon by scholars from marginalized geographies, editors can be much more interventionist and seek to work with both authors and reviewers to bring a paper to publication. I personally work ‘behind the scenes’ with authors who have great ideas that they are finding difficult to (i) express within standard journal conventions; (ii) explicate using existing theoretical canons or (iii) defend within standard reviewer protocols. I will meet with such authors online to discuss what needs to be done and sometimes will override the review process where it is clear to me that Reviewers are not ever going to get on board with a paper. This is, of course, time consuming but if we are to work as ‘intercultural translators’ (an issue we discuss below) we also need to accept that this involves more effort than we might traditionally expend. An issue that I personally wrestle with while trying to act as an intercultural translator relates to my role as a custodian of Human Relations. Whether we like it or not, a journal with a reputation does have standards 4 to uphold and we cannot simply move into an ‘anything goes’ mindset to enable more publication success for marginalized scholars. So we have to find a balance. One way of doing this is, as I’ve already said, to encourage marginalized scholars not to try to ‘gap spot’ in making a contribution to a particular domain but to interrogate and challenge the knowledge based assumptions that currently dominate that domain and to show how their approach can offer an alternative way of thinking about a phenomenon or perhaps even to question its existence which, I believe speaks to your point about challenging the accumulation logic attaching to theory development. A few years ago I was on a holiday in Madagascar and was expressing horror at the amount of deforestation I could see happening in the surrounding landscape. The Malagasy tour guide on our bus told me that this happens because the Malagasy cannot survive without the income they get from the carbon they produce to sell from felling trees. This is just one instance of where apparently progressive ideals developed in the Global North such as sustainability which can include the protection of forests and trees, clashes with the realities of lives in countries that lack economic resources and, for me, raises our attention to how no knowledge system (especially those within the social sciences) can be treated as neutral and objective (see Li, 2007). I think this is the same as the point you make above when you talk about knowledge ecologies.
Unless we recognize and at least attempt to challenge this accumulation logic and its alleged techno-scientificity, I am afraid we will not meaningfully progress the decolonizing journey in academic publishing. Let me clarify. I am not advocating for anarchy or rejecting the importance of quality in research, nor am I advocating for relativism. Instead I suggest that we need to revisit the way we compare the value of what is known with what is being proposed/suggested. I am referring to the standards and terms of such comparison. So I agree with the points you have made but how we encourage this as an editorial and reviewing practice is a different question.
The question of how to encourage editors and reviewers to adopt a more open stance to papers utilizing marginalized knowledges is certainly a very tricky one to address. I have already mentioned editorial privilege as one means of dealing with situations where, as an editor, you see promise but the reviewers disagree. But I think we need to have more conversations about reviewing praxis which is something we discuss in more depth below. I remember once reading that Pierre Bourdieu recommended that in order to challenge the idea that standards of grammar and composition are objective rather than socio-political constructions that favour the middle classes, teachers should ask students to ‘write an essay that you know will annoy me’. I believe that opening up hearts and minds to different approaches to reviewing will, as you’ve said, take a lot of time but raising awareness of the political effects of boundary policing is important and perhaps editorials like this might be used to encourage reviewers to engage more reflexively with their own praxis.
We would do well, I think, to show some epistemic humility – engagement with the idea that dominant understandings of the world which privilege science and rationality are not the only ways of knowing it. Aguiar and Cunliffe (2025) for instance explore how deeper and more embodied understandings can develop from exposure to experiences which challenge these dominant world views, tipping us into a different awareness of our relationships between ourselves and the planet. How we encourage such praxis in the domain of reviewing is an open question but can start simply by acknowledging that social scientific knowledge is always partial and always interested in as much as it benefits some groups and marginalizes others.
Reviewing as evaluation
Reviewing as a practice is the bulwark of a journal. As a gatekeeper, it serves as the custodian of a journal’s quality. In this sense, reviewing practice constitutes ‘what is considered acceptable’ and what is ‘not quality, not acceptable’. The role of the reviewer is
The role is additionally one of stewardship, especially evident in the practice of the developmental review which we cover in more depth below. Strictly speaking, there is hardly any explicit socialisation into the process of how to do reviewing. Unlike the inputs, guidance and activities around how to be an author, how to write, how to address reviewer comments etc., most of us are self-taught with regards to our reviewer and editorial roles. There are a couple of pieces which guide novices, especially AOM mandates which are required reading when someone signs up as a reviewer for the first time. Despite being self-taught, most of us end up having highly isomorphic reviewing behaviours. In fact this isomorphism sustains workshops on how to address reviewer comments! Our isomorphism is a consequence of the institutional structures that actually constitute the review process. These structures, the formats for providing the review, the kind of questions posed on Reviewer forms, the awards for best reviewers etc., reinforce and encourage the gatekeeping evaluative function. A quick glance at the formats of various journals underscores this. It remains a fact that these formats have not undergone any change that reflects the decolonizing zeitgiest.
Yes I agree with everything you say here but I think this is where we run into a huge problem with systemic issues in academic publishing. Because North America has established itself as the dominant player in the academic publishing game, the foci of and approaches to research that get published in these journals reflect the interests, beliefs and politics of actors within that particular geography. They do gatekeep – you’re absolutely right. But in my view, this is not an intentional or deliberately oppressive process: it is because they take for granted the idea that there is, for instance, a definite ‘object’ to research (e.g. leadership) and that the long research history behind this construct (what you term ‘accumulation logic’) has led to progress within and refinement of that domain. When scholars from marginal geographies attempt to contribute to these domains – like any scholar – they will be disadvantaged if they do not follow convention in how they present their work. Those scholars who challenge the status quo be they those who are attempting to bring indigenous knowledges to bear on the field or who are simply trying to challenge mainstream thinking will not fare too well as I have already argued. But unfortunately, because in many Universities across the world, promotion and tenure decisions are based on publications in Q1 journals, scholars are forced down these routes. In my view, this problem cannot be solved unless we do much more to disrupt the incredibly worrying and I am going to say ridiculous narrative, that where you publish is more important than what you publish (Tourish, 2020). Until we do that, Reviewer and author conservatism will stay firmly in place.
Disrupting taken-for-granted reviewing conventions
Individual editors and scholars like you and I cannot do much on our own to disrupt the taken-for-granted systemic processes you have outlined. However, we can address the paradoxical situation of increasing submissions from marginalized geographies but not finding good scholarship. This, I believe, requires us to revisit review practices and processes, and to take the possible transformation of the role of the reviewer in this institutional space seriously. We have to approach decolonising and diversifying geographies as a praxis, which you mentioned above. Praxis in reviewing is a creative, generative effort, not an evaluative effort. From a decolonising standpoint it is an intervention intended to interrupt eurocentrism. As an interventionist the reviewer becomes not the gatekeeper of Western publication standards but, as you’ve already mentioned, an intercultural translator. This involves thinking from an ecological standpoint, where what makes something important and relevant is not that it meets the standards of Western scholarship, but that it is interesting, distinctive and/or different. I get that this seems like a wordplay on contribution and I will come back to this later. But my point is that as intercultural translators, knowing and appreciating difference, not just contribution is important. Such a translation requires an inter-subjective understanding. Reviewing then becomes an act of conversation that seeks to understand, and writing an act of seeking to be understood, even if at times such understanding is incomplete.
I agree with some of what you say here. The paper I refer to above by Spiller et al. (2019) illustrates the importance of encouraging geographically marginalized scholars to come at mainstream and Western/Global North liberal democratic constructs like collective leadership from left field (which is of course itself a politicized evaluation) – challenging both dominant ideas about what it is and how it is currently written about. This would be one way to reduce the Reviewer’s focus on the more technical, elements of the writing and presentation which, as you’ve said, leads to the adoption of an evaluator position by reviewers. But can you say more about what you mean by ‘intersubjective understanding’ and how this might disrupt the evaluation convention?
The most important process for developing intersubjective understanding within reviewing and editorial practices, is to recognise that neither the author nor the reviewer knows each other’s world adequately. I was recently interacting with an author from South Africa. Her work was on motherhood and the psychological load mothers carry. Her work was rejected by many journals who responded saying ‘but we already know all of this’. The underlying assumption, similar to what happens in well researched domains like collective leadership that you just mentioned, is that the knowledge we have about particular phenomena appears to be settled and established. But when I sat and discussed with the author about what she was wanting to say about motherhood, it was obvious that her understanding of the phenomenon was coming from a racialised place and world. This world, however, was missing in her paper. It was absent because that racial world was like the air she was breathing: it was everywhere, it was taken for granted, not ‘distinctive’ enough to report or articulate in the paper. It was, however, a world that the reviewers did not inhabit and did not understand. It was beyond the comprehension or imagination of the reviewers. That is why they could not ‘see’ the ‘distinctiveness’ of what the author was trying to do. At the same time the author could not ‘see’ the reviewer’s world where race was missing.
Intersubjective understanding requires us to reveal these worlds: alternative knowledges often emerge from these scarred, invisible, taken-for-granted features of everyday life that are ‘untheorised’ or ‘unconceptualised’ but which are implicit in the life of the author (as well as the reviewer). But this is an essentially visceral experience that is not readily discursively articulated (see Aguiar and Cunliffe, 2025) and therefore begs latitude and engagement during the review process. The reviewer’s role in developing intersubjective understanding is to open a dialogue where his/her world and the author’s world is made visible to each other. It is not something that can be addressed by a boiler plate statement on author positionality which is now the dominant canon with respect to such issues. It comes from asking simple questions about the phenomenon, and about the author.
The developmental approach to editing and reviewing
While I agree with the point you make about trying to shift the emphasis within reviewing away from evaluation in order to open our minds to the idea that there are definitely more ways than one of knowing about something or indeed of believing that ‘something’ is a definite object of knowledge, we need to be very careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water. I say this because it seems to me that the idea of the ‘developmental review’ is seen to be one way of shifting Reviewers from evaluation to a more reflexive engagement with an authors’ work. This is of course important. However, some of the harshest reviews I have ever received which pulled no punches and left me feeling diminished after having read them, are also those that
I agree with the danger and risk you have flagged. I once recall receiving eight pages of reviewer comments for a paper I had written and submitted for publication. It was all considered developmental. For me, ‘softening’ as you call it is one of the problems that exists but it is second is what I call, ‘how I would write this …’. With respect to the ‘softening’ issue – I am in favour of honest criticism, even if it is brutal. A paper represents a person’s work. They have spent days, months and years working on something. Irrespective of whether we like or dislike the paper, their effort deserves respect. And honesty can be the best form of respect. I utterly dislike touchy-feely soft reviews which dance around the substance. You can respect people without agreeing with them. It is not about whether one is supportive or not. It is only with friction that one can stand on this earth. In many ways academic writing is about co-writing with a reviewer/editor but not in ways that privilege the latter’s understanding of what you are trying to do as an author.
Disrupting the conflation of respectful and supportive reviewing
I think we conflate respectful and supportive and for me, this is the problem. I guess this reflects a wider malaise in society. We are moving increasingly towards being a society where difference and disagreement is construed as disrespect, antagonism and opposition. Gloria Anzaldua (2015), in Light in the Dark talks about our complicity and responsibility in this ‘if you are not with us, you are against us’ ideology. We need to recognize our imbrication in this ideology and ensure that developmental and supportive do not collapse into an abandonment of critical judgment and honest feedback. Reviewers can give immensely useful feedback without having to force themselves to appear supportive. Being direct and honest, while maintaining normal standards of decorum is so much more useful to the author. But in fact, we don’t teach this. I recently received review comments on a manuscript I submitted. It was a reject. But I wrote back to the editor to thank him for the comments because they really helped me with the manuscript. They were not soft comments. They were pithy. I was asked direct and challenging questions. The reviewer clearly conveyed what s/he felt/understood from the manuscript. And this invited me to consider whether those were the impressions I wanted to give. On the other side of this, I recently reviewed a paper where I agreed with the authors, but my review was not kind because I found the text to be inconsistent and muddled. It was not clear whether the authors wanted others to emulate them or whether they were reflecting upon their learning and limitations. It was also not clear how they arrived at the insights which were presented as if self-evident. The analytical process itself was weak. My usual metrics for reviewing centre on the consistency of argument and coherence of the analytical process. In many status quoist papers from diverse geographies, authors merely replicate and recycle existing thought. The authors are themselves not clear on the points of difference, points of distinction, conceptually speaking. 5
This is where I think your idea about going beyond gap spotting to challenging is useful. It can be one way of avoiding the problems we have already discussed with respect to the disadvantages scholars from marginal geographies face. At the same time, from an ecology of knowledges standpoint, challenging could be considered unnecessary: ecosystems are about co-existence, not adversarialism. Many decolonising knowledges do not take kindly to challenging as an approach as it perpetuates an us versus them mindset. So what could be important is consciously and systematically flagging points of difference, departure from extant understandings and coherently and consistently pursuing them analytically in the paper. It is about being able to explain and articulate what the differences are, why these differences are important and what it would mean to acknowledge this difference.
It is very like the conversation we are having in this editorial but such explanations cannot be part of the main paper. Yet it is vital for the editor and reviewer to know these details and for the author to share them because this then provides a different basis for reviewer engagement, introducing some quality assurance into the reviewing process. The questions I am suggesting above are not easy to answer unless authors have clarity. Even in the ChatGPT era, being able to articulate fundamental differences and importances requires a truly immersive understanding of a domain/discipline/phenomenon.
I see what you mean. It echoes with a conversation I had recently with a good friend of mine. We were bemoaning the polarized nature of the debates about nearly everything that we see in mainstream news and social media and we came to the conclusion that we need to adopt an ‘and and’ not an ‘and or’ position on some of the issues going on in the world currently. It is possible, for instance both to suggest that a particular way of conceptualizing or thinking about something is useful and valid
Reviewers and editors undermining authors’ intentions
Related to the whole idea of developmental reviews is the ‘how I would write this paper’ mindset. When I review something, I see so much promise in some data and arguments that I am tempted to provide comments to authors, in line with the way I would write the paper if it were mine. The eight page review I mentioned earlier was a developmental review, a supportive review but it was also telling me how the reviewer would have approached the issues I was discussing. I think many times problems occur in the review process because we forget that this is the author’s paper – not ours. I see much more of this in paper development workshops. I have often struggled with this assumption and constantly and deliberately remind myself about this when I’m reviewing papers. Whenever I catch myself reading a paper in this mode, I take a step back and remind myself, ‘this is not your paper – it is the author’s’.
I agree very much with this. I had a paper rejected recently partly because one of the reviewers wanted me to apply a very specific theoretical take on the data which I did not agree with. Doing what the reviewer suggested would have pushed it into a theoretical space in which it did not belong (or at least I didn’t want it to go there) and would undoubtedly have buried the political points I was trying to make with it. I do like Administrative Science Quarterly’s mission statement where they say that they very much see papers as ‘the author’s paper’ – that is for authors to feel the freedom to present their work and ideas as they see fit, not to fit somebody else’s template. Unfortunately, too many journals and too many reviewers operate in this myopic manner and do not always seem to be open to allowing others to express their ideas using theories or ideas they find most fitting. Our job surely should be helping them to articulate these ideas not forcing them down paths that they neither understand nor believe in.
Disrupting efforts to push authors into the reviewer’s/editor’s mindset
As I’ve said, I think a big problem here is that developmental reviews frequently make assumptions about what the author is trying to do and then offer suggestions about how to do this. It is important, therefore, as you pointed out above, to bring these assumptions out into the open and pose them as questions, hypotheticals and options, asking the authors whether this is indeed what they are trying to do. If these assumptions made by the review team are correct, then x, y or z holds. If not, they may not. I therefore often deal with this assumption by asking myself, what do I think the author is trying to do? What is he/she trying to accomplish? I then reframe my role as an assistant and I ask myself how I can provide advice that will enable the author to express their ideas so that readers appreciate the point they are trying to make. I also write my reviews in ways that ask questions and which seek explanations for and the reasoning behind the choices made/not made with respect to theory or argument development. Of course, these days almost all reviewers offer suggestions and comments for improvement which are, unfortunately, often instructions. Sometimes, if I feel that the approach taken is going to lead into a blind alley, I will make a small additional comment of the type ‘if I were you ….’ As an editor, I am wary of reviewers who provide reams of comments and very detailed responses as this can be a sign that the reviewer has his or her own agenda about what the paper should be saying.
These are all very useful tips for what we can all do to enable the author to retain intellectual ownership of their paper. I always offer very detailed editorial advice when the Reviews come in but I often also say something like – ‘this is
Speaking from an authorial standpoint, reviewer misunderstanding is one of the most potent feedbacks that is possible, because it tells us that we failed to communicate our intent. Another tip then – something else we can do is to re-examine the questions that are listed in the review form, or in the comments to the editor section: For example, having questions about whether the paper is a political piece or an empirical/knowledge piece in the review form itself. Some of these questions and their answers will provide vantage points for the reviewer/editorial process. The answers to these questions need not necessarily be addressed within the manuscript revision, but could be responded to separately, as a section which is not published or possibly published as a supplement. This section states the author’s vantage point, almost like supplementary files of data and analysis in quantitative papers. This practice could open a dialogue between the reviewer and the author. Consequently, authors can also learn to state upfront, why they chose not to engage with certain streams of literature. This will gradually lead to intersubjective understanding.
Performative allyship: What it is and what it could be?
I think another danger we are currently facing with respect to decolonizing academic publishing is the increasing ubiquity of what Erskine and Bilimoria (2019) refer to as ‘performative allyship’ which refers to the gap between a stated or discursive commitment to equality, whilst in practice (that is, what happens every day in taken-for-granted ways of behaving and acting) failing to do the things that can actually make a difference. An example from my own experience is where colleagues will publicly express concerns for the wellbeing of PGR students or early career scholars whilst acting in ways that clearly do not benefit such groups by for instance, appropriating their ideas or failing to help them navigate the increasingly complex and onerous requirements for gaining a lectureship or permanent contract. We need to do more thinking about how we actually put our money where our mouths are with respect to the position of marginalized scholars. To what extent do our own personal ambitions, for instance, which are themselves tethered to the valorization of publication as the dominant signifier of academic credentials help or hinder marginalized scholars? What can those of us occupying safe positions (safe, precisely because we have successfully played the publication game) do that might help marginalized scholars? Do we for instance, put more effort into running publication workshops in those geographies that are under-represented in the top journals? Will sensitizing reviewers to different ways of conducting reviews using the ideas we have presented in this editorial make that much difference? My worry here is that we will simply engage in more performative allyship by encouraging editors like myself to be more welcoming of scholarship from these geographies without challenging the status quo in any meaningful way.
This, I think, is beyond the purview of journal editors and reviewers and relies on some serious rethinking on the part of university leadership across the world. I was very much struck by an account from a Senior Lecturer in a paper by Gatwiri et al. (2025) studying the publishing experiences of racially and culturally marginalized academics in Australian Universities. A participant in the study, Angela, says ‘I haven’t published enough in the last few years. The work that I do won’t go into a high-impact journal where, when they look at the rankings, it’ll go into a niche journal. I believe in the quality of my work. I’ve always gone for quality rather than quantity, and that strategy doesn’t pay off, but I’m stubbornly sticking to it because I don’t know how to be anything other than what I am. I want to – I’ve fought hard enough to be genuine in what I do; I’m not about to change my stripes now. I’d rather leave academia rather than be something that I don’t feel comfortable being or playing the game’.
I think there is more than one issue here. First, I agree that many senior academics like us have to shoulder greater responsibility for changing the system and walking the talk. If we can resist the temptation to indoctrinate young academics to become like us, there is already significant potential for change. Second, this comes back to the points we made above about the importance of conviction or passion. I guess in referring to authorial conviction with respect to their own and not the reviewers’ ideas above, I was influenced by this idea of passion. And I think this is where editors and reviewers can be real not just performative allies. I remain forever in gratitude towards some of the editors and reviewers who saw potential in my work and worked with me as allies. I think allyship is a political act that is introduced into a process that has the veneer of technical and substantive merit. I think therefore the question for us needs to be not whether such allyship and politics is good or bad, but whether we are using this politics and allyship for desirable ends of greater good or using it for narrow personal interests.
Making allyship work
My personal view is that research and its potential impact (the latter of which is so beloved by leadership in Universities (and funding bodies) in the current era) would be much more likely to say and generate something important if scholars are encouraged to nurture their passion for what they write and believe in, rather than following technical rules to publish an incremental addition to an established knowledge brand in a highly ranked journal. So take heed University leaders and managers – think about how your own role and motivations perpetuate a status quo that seriously disadvantages certain groups of scholars and ask yourselves about the ends you are hoping to achieve by doing so. Accreditation bodies need also to bear a lot of responsibility for this situation since their ranking and evaluation systems rely on proxies of research quality such as where academics publish rather than what they publish which we have already discussed.
Another practical intervention to upend the lack of visibility of knowledges from the periphery is to introduce criteria such as having 10% of citations from local context/sources. This slowly encourages diffusion of knowledges produced outside the metropolitan. It makes the boundaries more porous and brings about greater understanding of the periphery within the metropolitan. It cracks the echo chambers of eurocentrism that top tier journals tend to become, progressively turning them into sites of engagement thereby moving away from a ‘rejection’ and an evaluation mindset.
Another thing we can do is require scholars to read 3–4 pieces which reflect diverse standards and ways of theorizing as a pre-requisite (e.g. Cunliffe, 2025) when they sign up for reviewing. This will ensure that even if a reviewer does not normally read that kind of literature, they are at least perfunctorily aware of diverse epistemic possibilities and the assumptions they entail. They can at least start a conversation with the authors.
This is certainly an important initiative and in its own way, disrupts some of the sharp practice around inflating impact factor scores by encouraging journal self-citation from authors whose papers are accepted. Another practice recommended to disrupt reviewing processes which serve the interests of some groups rather than others is open reviewing (Willmott, 2022). The idea here is that Author and Reviewer names are made public at the point of review. While I can see how this might discourage hostile reviewing and increase accountability for reviewers, there is also the danger that impression management will strongly influence responses to papers that are written by so-called ‘big names’ and/or that lesser known scholars giving critical reviews might be disadvantaged when they submit their own papers for publication if their review offends or dents the ego of someone who reviews or action edits their own papers.
I agree with the risks of open reviewing you flag. I also agree about the role of senior scholars, academics, who should walk the talk rather than just play safe and reinstate/reproduce pathologies. But in my experience, throughout history, only a small percentage of people have ever seriously challenged any given status quo. But, and this is what we need to remember, it really is not necessary for everyone or even the majority to do so. As long as a critical mass shifts their views, the others will automatically go with the flow. Simply put, you and I will do what we do because we want to do this, notwithstanding whether others do it or not. We will say this, whether others listen or not. We know the power we wield and we will use it irrespective of the ‘impact’ it might or might not produce.
End thoughts
In this editorial, we engaged in a dialogue about an issue that is close to both our hearts and that we have wrestled with for many years – how do we reduce geographical/cultural/racial inequalities in academic publishing? We have offered some analysis of why this problem persists and what we might do about it, but we want to conclude this editorial with a couple of thoughts, one from each of us.
For me (Penny), the problem is related almost completely to the valorization of certain journals and the role this plays in careers and institutional rankings. There is, despite claims to the contrary, a distinct lack of reflexivity around this problem, which is often reflected in the small talk you hear when you’re with other academics, for example, ‘can you believe that x didn’t get the job when s/he has a publication in AMR?’ I find this depressing. I am not for a minute suggesting that papers published in the top journals lack value or are in some other way deficient, but what I am saying is that publication in these journals is not an unequivocal stamp of quality or value. Nor is it only about your ability as a scholar, but is partly about the networks you’re in, the type of scholarship you pursue, and the position your own institution occupies in the hierarchies of value that constitute higher education around the world. We need to start thinking differently about publication, per se, in my view, and I hope that some of the issues we have discussed in this editorial might stimulate this.
I (Nimruji) believe that if we are to reclaim ourselves as scholars and secure our freedoms from the tyranny of publication, we need to consider other ways of defining our worth as academics and scholars. We are only too well aware of how current metrics and the cultures they have produced have furthered academic capitalism. If you (Penny) had viewed my worth according to conventional metrics, I would not even be in this conversation! We come from different standpoints and belief systems, but we neither gave up on ourselves nor each other, yet managed to influence and engage with each other to produce this editorial. Such engagement to me is the condition of possibilities – of a better future for all of us. Just as we are now turning our attention to sustainable economic practices in the wider economy to compensate for extractive capitalism, so we need also to recover and embrace practices of sustainable academia, where more publishing is not necessarily good. We need to rethink publication such that when we create valuable knowledge, we remember why we are doing it and also cherish the way we create it.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
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