✍ Scribed by Neal M. Ashkanasy
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Articles published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior have traditionally placed strong emphasis on theory development and testing. While this approach is consistent with the Popperian view of scientific discovery (Shareef, 2007), it can result in unnecessary and undesirable constraints on our understanding of the very phenomena that we as organizational scholars seek to study. This issue is not limited to the articles that are published in JOB. In a recent Special Research Forum (SRF) issue published in the Academy of Management Review, Sandberg and Tsoukas (2011) argue that, by placing emphasis on what Suddaby, Hardy, and Quy (2011) refer to as ''scientific rationality'' (p. 238), scholars may be losing contact with management practice. Glick, Miller, and Cardinal (2007, p. 817) proffer along similar lines the notion that this has resulted in ''weak paradigm development'' in our field.
A part of the problem is that the peer review process at journals like JOB tends to be so very conservative. Writing in the same SRF referred to above, Alvesson and Sandberg (2011, p. 247) grumble that this conservatism has led scholars to engage in ''gap-spotting.'' These authors advocate ''problematization'' as an alternative approach where, rather than seeking to ''fill gaps'' in extant theories, scholars challenge the basic assumptions of existing theories. Alvesson and Sandberg posit further that the gap-spotting approach limits scholars' ability to generate new and interesting theory. This has led to what Davis (2010) sees as our almost total failure to develop new theories of organization since the 1970s.
In my own experience as Editor-in-Chief of JOB since 2007, this does indeed seem to be the case. JOB has traditionally afforded its reviewers and action editors total autonomy; but it has been a continuing source of frustration to me that, with the exception of JOB's ''Research Incubator'' articles (Wright, 2003), the JOB review process rarely lets me publish really interesting and innovative research. Consistent with Alvesson and Sandberg's (2011) position, I find that reviewers prefer articles to ''fill gaps'' rather than to challenge the basic assumptions of existing theories.
As a consequence of the gap-spotting approach, high profile journals like JOB rarely publish truly revolutionary ideas. I am afraid it is the old story of avoiding Type I errors at the expense of making Type II errors. One example that comes to mind is a piece published nearly 50 years ago by renowned social ethnologist Glen McBride in the Journal of Psychology (McBride, King, & James, 1965). Although this article helped spawn a whole new field of social proximity research, and subsequently came to be recognized as a ''citation classic,'' it was not publishable at the time in the mainstream literature. McBride (1987) relates that, after receiving several rejection letters, he eventually decided to ''send it off to a 'pay journal''' (p. 12). McBride's work was not intended to fill any ''gap,'' but challenged basic assumptions of human ethology theory at the time. It is clear that nothing has changed since the 1960s, and similar revolutionary articles are likely to continue to be routinely rejected from our high profile journal titles.
A recent case in point is a theory piece I co-authored on the topic of applying complexity theory to understand the nature and structure of affect (Li, Ashkanasy, & Ahlstrom, 2010). Citing mathematical models of population growth
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