Reflections on scientific misconduct in management: Unfortunate incidents or a normative crisis?

Taking as our starting point Merton’s (1942/1973) defense of science facing pressures from totalitarian regimes, we argue that today’s challenge to the integrity of management scholarship does not come primarily from external demands for ideological conformity, but from escalating competition for publication space in leading journals that is changing the internal dynamics of our community. We invited nine scholars from different countries and with different backgrounds and career trajectories to provide their brief views of this argument. Following an introduction that summarizes the argument, we present their different reactions by dividing and introducing the work into those who took a broad field-level perspective, those with a more macro view, and those who suggested possible remedies to our dilemmas. In conclusion, we note that questionable research practices, retractions, and highly publicized cases of academic misconduct may irreparably damage the legitimacy of our scholarship unless the management research community airs these issues and takes steps to address this challenge.