Abstract
In this piece, embracing ‘imperfectionism’ is offered as an idea for members of the Management Learning community to consider. As academics are subjected to growing professional demands – and as institutional pressures push them towards becoming the ‘ideal academic’ – imperfectionism presents an alternative (and more constructive) path to a sustainable career.
As we enter 2026, I am thrilled to welcome Thomas Calvard as co-Editor-in-Chief at Management Learning. Thomas has served as an associate editor at the journal for the last few years. In this position, he has been an excellent ambassador for Management Learning, including having shepherded several manuscripts to publication. Although the proverbial ‘big shoes’ have been left to fill with Martyna Śliwa’s departure from the co-EIC role, I could not think of a more suitable person to take on the responsibility.
In 2025, Management Learning received a record number of submissions. The 454 new submissions received in 2026 represented a meaningful increase from previous years. While the growth in submissions has placed increasing pressure on the journal’s editors, associate editors, international review board members, ad hoc reviewers and the editorial assistant, we have been heartened by how many people within the Management Learning community have stepped up to offer their voluntary service to the journal. Given the notable increase in submissions, in 2026, we will be welcoming several new associate editors to the team.
As is customary at the journal when a new co-EIC joins the team, I asked Thomas to offer some thoughts on how he would like to see Management Learning evolve. In the section below, he describes the thought-provoking idea of embracing imperfectionism. I would encourage members of the Management Learning community to consider this important idea as they engage with the journal going forward.
Finally, I would like to again, on behalf of the Management Learning community, extend my heartfelt thanks to Martyna for her dedicated service to the journal over the last decade, including as co-EIC over the previous 5 years. The journal has evolved in the way that it has thanks in no small part to Martyna’s immense contributions.
TC
I write this in January 2026 as I step into the role of new co-Editor-in-Chief at Management Learning, a daunting prospect given the journal’s 55-year record of going from strength to strength, but also a heartening one given the supportive community and fantastic platform the journal continues to provide. Furthermore, it is a great privilege and honour to be able to continue to be part of this enterprise, having previously been a submitting author, reviewer of the year and associate editor, deepening my involvement with and attachment to the journal over the last decade.
My reflections on the future of the journal are undoubtedly shaped by this prior involvement. They also raise the challenging question of how to continue to steward the quality and diversity and critical reflexivity characteristic of its scholarship while seeking out and suggesting ways to further evolve its ideals and rich conversations against the wider fields and worlds in which we live, learn and work. In casting about for an editorial framing device, I turned – in a very human, mortal, imperfect, New Year’s irresolution fashion – to a book I had been reading recently by Oliver Burkeman, entitled Meditations for Mortals: A Four Week Guide to Doing What Counts (Burkeman, 2025). 1
A guiding principle of the book is imperfectionism, defined as: [A] freeing and energising outlook based on the conviction that your limitations aren’t obstacles to a meaningful existence, which you must spend your days struggling to overcome, en route to some imaginary point when you’ll finally get to feel fulfilled. On the contrary, accepting them, stepping more fully into them, is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment-filled life – and never more so than at this volatile and anxiety-inducing moment in history. (Burkeman, 2025: xvi)
I should note here that, like many others in management and the social sciences, I am relatively wary and critical of self-help discourse in terms of its individualistic, neoliberal prescriptions for employee well-being (Calvard and Sang, 2017; Watson et al., 2023). Collective, structural and other-oriented conditions of possibility are often neglected and it is all too easy to equate self-help with self-optimization, self-flagellation and/or self-obsession.
At the same time, we need to engage with self-help to critically reflect on it and learn from its potential wisdom and contradictions. In recent years, self-help or personal development appears more popular than ever, driven by factors like destigmatized mental health discussions, proliferating online communities, socioeconomic stressors, and an appetite for self-awareness and empowerment (Swope, 2023). Oliver Burkeman is quite an interesting figure in that he is sometimes positioned, by himself and others, as a self-help sceptic, or as anti-self-help self-help. This leads to an inevitable degree of contradiction, such as criticizing self-help prescriptions or systems, while nevertheless needing to press some sort of recommendations on the reader. For instance, at one point, Burkeman (2025) declares: ‘remember that you don’t actually have to do any of this . . . You have my permission not to bother’ (p. 20).
What does any of this have to do with management research, business schools, academia and learning? Perhaps a good deal, depending on how you unpack some of the underlying themes. In the sweeping and loosely arrayed popular style so rarely permitted to academics, with a lightness of touch underlying conversational prose, Burkeman draws together elements of stoicism, existentialism, critical theory, psychotherapy and literature, among other sources. The book is temporally structured as a four-week guide, with four main parts corresponding to each week – being finite, taking action, letting go and showing up – and seven chapters in each part, making for quite a tidy holistic structure overall (Burkeman, 2025). The mission of imperfectionism is how to focus on doing what ‘counts’ or ‘matters’ to you in life by recognizing that that many things will feel overwhelming, infinite, unknowable and unsolvable, and by resisting seeing the world as ‘an endless series of things we must master, learn, or conquer’ (Burkeman, 2025: xxi).
As a management academic, I think we often find ourselves and those around us grappling with the idea that ‘less is more’ in many of our activities. This might encompass everything from how to focus the contributions of our research through to more complex balancing acts across teaching, leadership, mentoring, impact and many other categories and forms of service (not to mention work-life balance). In part this is a question of limits, and how approaching or crossing our limits can feel stressful and uncomfortable, yet ineluctably draws us into zones where important learning, relationships and decisions are at stake (Oliver et al., 2017).
The specific chapters of Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals run the gauntlet of addressing a host of general issues that can nevertheless be read back into management and academic life – imposter syndrome, procrastination, decision paralysis, information overload, productivity theatre and many more. The solutions, to my mind, fall uneasily somewhere between feel-good platitudes and useful wisdom. They include injunctions to accept personal limits, focus on small daily steps and accomplishments, worry less about the future and paths not taken, reduce self-imposed demands and value more of the present while going imperfectly on your way (Burkeman, 2025).
The challenge, as I see it, is how to translate or bridge this into something more collective, empathic and cohesive as a self-supporting, mutually adjusting system of belonging, and yet maybe that is just me falling back into a perfectionist trap all over again. In any case, the broader backdrops of journal publishing, academic life, and other social and organizational domains are the environments where Burkeman’s imperfect mortal perfectionists live and strive. It is tempting, in my view, to read recent management and business research articles and commentaries in conjunction with Burkeman as part of our own, more specialized and evolving form of self-help discourse.
For instance, Islam and Greenwood (2026) link the acceleration of academic publishing to broader patterns of acceleration in contemporary social and economic life, which have the capacity to both harm and transform, and will require careful temporal mediation between past and future knowledge, as well as movements with variable rhythms. Prominent German sociologist and social theorist Hartmut Rosa’s work on modernity and social acceleration is mentioned, while Burkeman (2025) also name-checks Rosa’s concept of resonance, and the idea that feelings of speed and uncertainty can harm our ability to form more meaningful, affective and transformational two-way relationships with the world around us (Rosa, 2019). For Management Learning, I’m keen to see how critical, reflexive scholarship can engage such temporal challenges, and how organizations and scholars will need to learn to find ways to choose which social and ethical challenges to focus on, and how best to engage them, under challenging conditions of technological and geopolitical uncertainty, information overload and systemic forms of control.
Drawing on the social resonance idea, there also seems to me to be a persistent need to build and understand ways for educators, managers and learners to establish more humane, just and inclusive reciprocal relationships in learning and development cultures of academia and practice (e.g. Korica, 2022). The editorials of my predecessor as co-editor-in-chief, Martyna Śliwa, and current co-editor-in-chief, Ajnesh Prasad, on empathy and forgiveness are instructive in this regard, and represent Management Learning as a home for these sorts of humanistic contribution to our field in ways that I would like to see continue (Prasad and Śliwa, 2022; Śliwa and Prasad, 2022). Many individual scholars have been brave and generous in reflecting on and sharing their own difficult experiences – of imposter syndrome, learning, identity, authenticity, becoming and the need for greater decolonization in academia (e.g. Barros and Alcadipani, 2023; Bothello and Roulet, 2019; Hibbert, 2025; Śliwa and Prasad, 2025; Śliwa et al., 2025). Again, I think there is an opportunity to further amplify and translate these individual voices into more concerted empirical and conceptual efforts and agendas in Management Learning in the coming years. This is particularly true given the renewed attacks or backlash on forms of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in particular contexts, where important learning in this area and the knowledge production of minoritized groups need to be defended against threats of renewed erasure and marginalization (Prasad and Śliwa, 2024).
In terms of embracing imperfectionism, this is in everyone’s interest, as there is no ‘ideal academic’ or ‘ideal worker’, despite the many normative pressures constructed to make us feel that this is the case (Sang et al., 2015). The challenge lies in trying to normalize a less overwhelming academia, where it is safer to discuss what ‘matters’ or what ‘counts’ in an imperfect, finite world indifferent to a relentless accumulation and commodification of online academic publishing and aresponsible research (Rhodes and Linnenluecke, 2025; Tourish and Craig, 2025). Outside of academia, organizations and management face parallel challenges with removing negative sources of friction, decluttering and doing less to focus on what ‘really matters’ at work (Alvesson and Spicer, 2025; Sutton and Rao, 2024). Reading this back through Burkeman (2025), it represents a potential sense of needing to ‘let go’ and to ‘show up’ willing to perfect the art of imperfectionism, to try to recover some much-needed time and space for learning at work and not just working at work (Petriglieri, 2020), with leaders that can cultivate a supportive, sustainable sense of calmness in their organizations (Gratton, 2025).
Management Learning represents a rich archive of work grown over decades that sheds light on the various follies of perfectionism and the many types of powerful insights that can arise from critically exploring and reflecting on the messy, intangible, human, processual ways in which genuine, transformative learning truly takes place. This goes far beyond slogans about embracing failure and learning from error, and more towards our human condition as emotional, creative, social, interpreting beings finding our way in an unknowable and demanding, yet awe-inspiring, world (Poulis, 2025). This is how I look forward to working more with the wider Management Learning community of publisher, editors, administrators, authors and reviewers – past, present and future. As imperfectionists – evolving our ideals towards the perfectly imperfect.
