Abstract
In April 2026, the Financial Times published a revised iteration of its influential FT50 journal list. In the revision, three journals were removed from the list, which were described as “less influential”—Human Relations, 1 Journal of Business Ethics, and Organization Studies. The list replaced them with three other journals, which were described as “more relevant”—Academy of Management Annals, American Sociological Review, and Psychological Science (Financial Times, 2026b). The Financial Times refreshed the list after surveying business-school leaders and some stakeholder consultations (Financial Times, 2026a)—it was not necessarily an open scholarly process.
The revised FT50 journal list generated an immediate and significant response on social media from business school academics. With this editorial, we engage with the ongoing debate on the revision to the FT50 journal list. Our focus is on the palpable tension between the growing acknowledgement among business school faculty and senior administrators that such a list is inherently problematic and the field’s stubborn inability to dislocate its discursive and governing powers.
To provide context for our editorial, we begin with a report published by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). In October 2025, AACSB published, Global Research Impact Framework: Exposure Draft (AACSB, 2025). Using a survey of over 900 business school deans and faculty, the report identified publications in elite journals as both the most important and the most overemphasized indicator of research quality. Indeed, on the latter point, the report found that 87% of deans and 82% of faculty agreed that business schools ought to broaden their definition of impactful research. This observation comes from the undeniable but unsettling fact that Faculty behavior is often driven more by what “counts” in evaluations—in value and in number—than by what creates meaningful impact. This pressure is especially true for early-career researchers, who often feel that without evidence of publishing in top-tier journals, their career progression is at risk.
In sum, while business school faculty and senior administrators increasingly recognize the need to broaden how research is assessed and valued, the system of publishing in top-tier journals is so codified as an institutional norm that it sustains itself with little disruption.
In the same month that the AACSB released its report, the Financial Times initiated a consultation process in anticipation of a revision to the FT50 journal list. As part of the process, the list conveners asked whether it should include “more interdisciplinary, global, and applied journals” and whether the methodology should “go beyond journal placement” (Ethier, 2025). When the Financial Times published the revised FT50 list what became evident was that instead of broadening its scope, the revision narrowed it, with no alternative metrics introduced in any substantive manner.
The use of journal quality lists has been defended on various grounds—including that it enhances scholarly rigour (Foss and Mol, 2026), or that it can operate as a mechanism for racialized members of the academy to withstand intra-organizational discrimination (Prasad, 2023). In a sense, lists promise certain transparency in the process that aims to measure “what counts,” relocating evaluative authority from local disputes within departments and schools towards field-level actors, such as accreditation bodies or scholarly associations (Alajoutsijärvi et al., 2018). Yet, relocating power away from departments and schools does not guarantee epistemic freedom, nor does it guarantee safety from arbitrary decisions. Field-level actors may also be insulated, operate with opaque criteria, or direct their accountability towards communities that give different weight to academic outputs (Sauder and Espeland, 2009). As lists and rankings reconfigure parts of knowledge governance, they allow for broader discussions about who gets to define what counts as scholarly value and how, including which sorts of work are valued, how, whose research is visible, and which communities are deemed less relevant (Mingers and Willmott, 2013).
Most scholars who have commented on such lists have critiqued them for the detrimental consequences they can have on academia (e.g. Adler and Harzing, 2009; Butler and Spoelstra, 2020; Willmott, 2011). These include tendencies to foster monocultures (Willmott, 2011), recreate the worlds they claim to measure (Espeland and Sauder, 2007), function as rhetorical devices that construct legitimacy rather than reflect it (Wedlin, 2011), and draw scholarship away from its fundamental purpose (Adler and Harzing, 2009; Tourish, 2020), producing a debris of “predatory research practices, mimetic imperialist knowledge, socio-political irrelevance, and academic precarities” (Vijay et al., 2025: 32). Every measurement tool has the potential to become perverted—losing some of its measuring capacity, while also distorting output expectations (Kerr, 1975). Therefore, lists that substitute for research evaluation can become the key goal of academics that divert efforts towards reaching these measurement goals (Sauder and Espeland, 2009). However, the quality of lists and rankings must be considered. Broad, field-sensitive guides behave differently from narrow prestige lists.
These critiques resonate with the views expressed by faculty and senior administrators in the AACSB report cited above. Likewise, the immediate response to the publication of the revised FT50 journal list only reiterated concerns about the list. For example, in a LinkedIn post, Horacio Arredondo, the current dean of Tecnologico de Monterrey’s EGADE Business School, wrote: Two weeks ago, the Out: Human Relations, Organization Studies, and the Journal of Business Ethics. In: Academy of Management Annals, American Sociological Review, and Psychological Science. A clarification first. Business research has always been transdisciplinary. Psychology gave us organizational behavior. Sociology gave us organization theory. Philosophy gave us business ethics. New disciplines on the list are not the issue. The issue is a different one. The three journals leaving brought moral philosophy, critical theory, qualitative sociology; a form of pluralism much needed in today’s polarized world. In particular, the Journal of Business Ethics leaves precisely when ethics, sustainability, and stakeholder purpose are more central to corporate practice than at any point in decades. From where I sit in A good moment for business schools across the world to lead a broader conversation. Not against the FT, in dialogue with it. Toward a more plural definition of what excellence in business research means in 2026, and beyond. (Arredondo, 2026, on LinkedIn)
In even stronger words, Carl Rhodes, Professor and former dean of University of Technology Sydney Business School, declared the revised FT50 journal list to “take a broken system and make it more worse,” and further argued that “rankings that equate research excellence with conformity must be resisted” (Rhodes, 2026, on LinkedIn; for a fuller critique from Rhodes, see Rhodes and Pullen, 2026). Sentiments such as these were repeated over and over again by business school professors.
The question that remains palpable in the ongoing discourse about the FT50 journal list revision is why do we, as central stakeholders in the profession, allow for the Financial Times to dictate how academic research quality is measured and valued? Lists are created differently. For instance, the AJG is presented as a guide produced through a peer-review process, expert consultation, and informed by citation data (Chartered Association of Business Schools, 2024). On the other hand, narrow lists such as the FT50 and UTD24 are less transparent as they do not aim to serve the totality of the business school academic community, but rather the interests of select actors.
At some point, we must turn the critical gaze upon ourselves and take some degree of responsibility. The Financial Times might not be the best judge of academic standards, as in fact this is not what they are set out to measure. Their narrow and mostly fixed journal set is used in the research component of its MBA/EMBA rankings, which caters to a very specific audience (mainly which schools are assessed to offer the best executive programmes) (Financial Times, 2026a). In fact, the Financial Times education editor found it “disturbing that the FT50 is apparently so tightly integrated into some business schools’ actions” (Jack, 2026).
The Financial Times is a corporate publisher, ostensibly motivated by profit maximization—it publishes a slate of MBA rankings and revises the FT50 journal list because they are popular with its audience. The popularity of such initiatives allows the Financial Times to sell advertising space (Hammett, 2024). The Financial Times does not operate with the intention to ensure the sustainability and advancement of academia—nor is it mandated to. It is our responsibility to safeguard the profession, including the integrity of the research we produce. This responsibility calls on us to take back the power that we have ceded to such lists.
In sum, the Financial Times did not impose authority over scholarly quality. We confer it, and we reproduce it at every point where we could otherwise choose. Deans and promotion panels write “FT50” into their selection criteria, emphasizing a newspaper’s judgement over their own; doctoral supervisors socialize doctoral researchers into consulting ranking hierarchies; editors and reviewers read work with rankings in mind; and scholars suppress their theoretical and empirical instincts to fit a target outlet’s conventions. The temptation to outsource the definition of quality to a list exists because it is easier than doing the difficult, contestable work of reading each other’s scholarship and judging it on its own terms. The true crisis this FT revision reveals is how fragile our field’s scholarly recognition is that a newspaper’s editorial decision can change its conditions overnight. The FT successfully established a ranking that increases specific competitive pressures that make ignoring it costly (Sauder and Espeland, 2009), since organizations often need to conform to rankings even if they have little say over them or find their substance disputable (Bitektine and Haack, 2015).
Inverting the critique into ourselves, we, academics, continue to internalize the list as a measure of our own worth, and assess our own research outputs and those of other academics against journal ranking lists, even when holding negative views of them, because institutional norms leave no alternative. We continue to engage with years of peer-review revisions, “strategic” framing, smoothing off our methodological, theoretical, and authorial voices, and all this labour rests on the premise that publication in one of these FT50 journals confers a recognition that is secure. Yet, if recognition can be revoked by an institution that is not accountable to the field, the recognition was never ours to hold.
