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M@n@gement est la revue officielle de l’AIMS

M@n@gement is the journal official of AIMS

Olivier GERMAIN  
Emmanuel JOSSERAND             2013
The M@n@gement journey, spanning boundaries 
and navigating at the fringe
M@n@gement, 16(5), 535-546.

M@n@gement
ISSN: 1286-4692

Emmanuel Josserand, CMOS, University of Technology, Sydney (Editor in Chief)

Jean-Luc Arrègle, EMLYON Business School (editor)
Laure Cabantous, Cass Business School (editor)
Stewart Clegg, University of Technology, Sydney (editor)
Olivier Germain, Université du Québec à Montréal (editor, book reviews)
Karim Mignonac, Université de Toulouse 1 (editor)
Philippe Monin, EMLYON Business School (editor)
Tyrone Pitsis, University of Newcastle (editor) 
José Pla-Barber, Universidad de València (editor) 
Michael Tushman, Harvard Business School (editor)

Walid Shibbib, Université de Genève (managing editor)
Alexander Bell, Université de Genève (editorial assistant)

Martin G. Evans, University of Toronto (editor emeritus)
Bernard Forgues, EMLYON Business School (editor emeritus)

Special Issue



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The M@n@gement journey, spanning boundaries 
and navigating at the fringe

Olivier GERMAIN

Emmanuel JOSSERAND

Université du Québec à Montréal
germain.olivier@uqam.ca

CMOS, University of Technology, Sydney
emmanuel.josserand@uts.edu.au

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

A few weeks ago, one of the co-authors of this paper received a rejection 
from an FT listed journal. There is nothing in itself extraordinary in this: we 
are all used to rejections. The paper did have weaknesses and we could 
understand why it might have been rejected. What was remarkable about the 
decision was its concision and the motive presented for it. No justification 
was given beyond the following sentence: “a primary reason for rejecting the 
manuscript is that your research explores a unique case, which does not have 
applicability to many situations”. While the reviewers had picked out some 
of the other weaknesses of the paper, the main reason for rejection seemed 
genuinely to be the specificity of the case study (the French context) and the 
fact that it only examined a single case. What seemed to us an extraordinary 
opportunity to study this research topic, one that had been recurrently 
identified by other scholars as important, was seen by the reviewers as 
lacking possibilities of generalization. Among others, Bent Flyvbjerg (2006) 
suggests that it is conventional to assume that single case studies cannot be 
used to inform generalizations and do not therefore contribute significantly to 
scientific progress. He advocates and emphasizes the usefulness of “black 
swans” as a supplement or alternative to other methods, while suggesting that 
“formal generalization is overvalued as a source of scientific development, 
whereas ‘the force of example’ is underestimated” (Flyvbjerg, 2006, p. 228). 
This implies that academic journals are aware of this approach and, more 
widely, of the richness and diversity of research. 
Of course, we are not (only) telling this story because it is rare to be able to 
complain about a rejection in front of a large audience. More importantly, it is 
related to the story of M@n@gement, its origin and its mission in the ocean of 
academic journals. One of the starting points for the journal was, as argued by 
Bernard Forgues and Sebastien Liarte (2013), to create a high quality journal 
that could overcome language barriers and improve knowledge of rigorous 
revision processes in the French-speaking and European academic world. 
Academic communities have been enlivened by some vigorous debates on 
the contemporary dominance of the English language, the meaning systems 
tied to it and the micro-political issues associated with it that impact upon 
management and organization studies (Tietze, 2013 ; Grey, 2010 quoted by 
Tietze, 2013). One may submit her/his manuscript to M@n@gement in her/



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his native language (French, German or Spanish): the journal asks for an 
English translation if the piece is accepted and the paper is also edited in its 
original language. Our editorial policy is unique in this respect for identities 
and styles of narration. M@n@gement has helped break down cultural as 
well as linguistic barriers. It has managed to do this through its openness and 
by offering tribunes to different research traditions, thus accommodating a 
broad variety of contributions, from publications typical of the “French style” 
to more mainstream papers written by preeminent “international” scholars. 
The importance of breaking cultural barriers should not be underestimated. 
They have been discussed in various fields, including those of the Humanities 
(Chanlat, 2008), Social and Cultural Anthropology (Freedman, 1979), Cross-
Cultural Organizational Behavior (Gelfand, M. J., Erez, M., & Aycan, A. Z., 
2007), Economics (Johnson, 1973), Management of Information Systems, 
Psychotherapy (Orlinsky, 1989), Education (Robinson-Pant, 2005) and 
Business (Sullivan & Weaver, 2000). A key conclusion of this research is 
that different cultures research differently, perhaps because they rely on 
different philosophical traditions (Santistevan & Karjalainen, 2013). This led 
some of our colleagues in Management of Information Systems to ask, in the 
European Journal of Information Systems “Why the old world cannot publish?” 
(Lyytinen, Baskerville, Iivari & Te’eni, 2007). Well, for the last 15 years, they 
have been able to publish in M@n@gement. The gradual recognition of our 
journal in international rankings shows that its unique stance, amid the jungle 
of academic journals, has proved fruitful.
This special issue is a fantastic demonstration of the deep roots  
M@n@gement has put down in the international community and its capacity 
to attract contributions from the best scholars. Some say that we are now too 
international and that we have lost our ‘soul’; such comments are probably 
the price one pays for success. However, as underlined by Forgues & Liarte 
(2013), although M@n@gement is slowly being institutionalized, its position 
is still fragile and, while keeping its French/European roots is important, 
international branches are equally fundamental if we want to continue to 
span boundaries of culture, nation and research tradition, as we have in the 
past. The rules of the game are such that this key achievement of the journal 
would be at risk if its international impact were to diminish rather than grow. 
But we know that institutionalization can come at a cost, that of diminishing 
creativity. New ventures (here, M@n@gement) evolving in an emerging 
field (open access journals) have at first to establish in a proactive way their 
legitimacy and to conform to a set of strong rules as set down here by the 
former organizational field (Zimmerman et Zeitz, 2002). The collective identity 
of a nascent entrepreneurial group is more likely to be legitimated and can 
empower isolated creative behaviors (Wry et al., 2011), which may have 
emerged through the creation of more open access journals. 
M@n@gement has successfully explored another boundary in its exposure of 
ideas at the fringes of our field, through an openness to all types of methods 
and paradigms. It thus has combined new ideas with more established ones, 
notably through ambitious special issues and creative “unplugged” essays. 
Reflexivity has also been part of the M@n@gement journey, appearing in 
epistemological and methodological papers, some of which take the form of 
research notes. M@n@gement has even enjoyed publishing papers that make 
incursions into other disciplines. In its way, M@n@gement tries to respond 



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to regular calls for “conceptual blending”, the term for when the constructs, 
theories and approaches of two fields merge to generate new perspectives in 
order to transform the core of a topic (Oswick, Fleming and Hanlon, 2011). At 
the same time, our journal acknowledges a large range of attempts to build 
theories at the intersection of fields, maximizing the impact of management, 
strategy and organization studies. This research then borrows and replicates 
or extends existing theories from other fields (Zhara and Newey, 2009). As 
Augier and March (2011) remind us in their fascinating exploration of the 
roots of North American business schools after the Second World War, this 
“principle” of interdisciplinary research was at the heart of the creation of 
organizational sciences at Carnegie School.
When we decided to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the journal, we brought 
together a group of scholars who would represent the journey the journal has 
taken and who would be likely to propose more transgression of convention, 
to span boundaries, to discuss established ideas and to reflect on our 
researchers’ practices. All the scholars have a connection with the journal, 
some of them having served as editors (Stewart Clegg, Olivier Germain and 
Linda Rouleau), editors in chief (Bernard Forgues and Emmanuel Josserand) 
and editorial assistants (Sebastien Liarte, also co-editor in chief). The results 
have been staggering. An incredible group of scholars was formed and have 
sent us some wonderful proposals. The first series of papers is illustrative of 
recent efforts to renew fields such as strategy-as-practice (Linda Rouleau), 
socio-materiality (Paula A. Jarzabokovski and Trevor Pinch) and performance-
as-practice (Stéphane Guérard, Ann Langley and David Seidl). The second 
group practices renewal through interdisciplinarity (Stewart Clegg and Robert 
van Kriekeen, Eero Vaara and Ann Reff Pedersen, as well as Hugh Willmott 
and Jeroen Veldman) and suggests ways of contributing across disciplines 
(Mie Augier). Meanwhile, some of the most radical ideas of this special 
issue are to be found in the papers of André Spicer, Robert Chia, Stephen 
Linstead as well as Paula A. Jarzabkowski and Trevor Pinch. The four next 
contributors offer exercises of reflexivity and give us their perspectives on the 
difficulties and challenges of “good” research (James March, Yiannis Gabriel, 
Bill Starbuck and Joel Baum). Finally, we conclude with the contribution of 
Bernard Forgues and Sébastien Liarte, which tells the story of the field and of 
M@n@gement itself in view of the recent evolution of open access publishing.

SHIFTING BOUNDARIES WITHIN THE FIELD

In fifteen years, M@n@gement has witnessed both continuity and change 
in the organization, strategy and management fields. As Linda Rouleau 
points out in her essay, the rapid emergence of strategy-as-practice (SaP) 
research is one of the most promising, rejuvenating and “energetic” streams 
in the strategy field. Furthermore, it brings together questions of strategy and 
questions of organization. If we view strategy as a tangle of micro-socially 
embedded practices and everyday coping actions, we must subscribe to an 
updating of a discipline which is currently being partly stripped of the elements 
upon which, historically, it was based: predictive ability, deliberate intention 
and instrumental, predetermined action. 



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Linda Rouleau not only takes stock of the progress in this research stream but 
considers SaP research to be at a crossroads. First, she highlights the multiple 
underlying approaches of practice, all of which aim to inform the “doing” of 
strategy. Some views are closer to the mainstream approach of strategy 
research as they update or improve the content view of strategy. Others put 
a focus on strategy as a subjective discourse that influences everyday life 
and address the formation of power effects in strategy practices. A few views, 
meanwhile, are truly rooted in social sciences theories and sociological views 
of practice. Second, Linda Rouleau points out that new ideas generated in 
foundational SaP texts are partly based on a distinctive merging and re-
assemblage of classical metaphors with theoretical concepts and empirical 
materials. She then suggests that SaP research face two main challenges. 
The diversity or the relative disintegration of the body of knowledge under the 
umbrella construct of practice may reveal that it’s time to consolidate gains in 
order to control the growth of the field. This consolidation requires the fostering 
of specific theoretical contributions. The field should also take advantage of 
new ethnographic methods to address research issues more accurately. At 
the same time, however, comparative ethnographic research may sustain 
cumulative knowledge production to help better revisit today’s strategic issues. 
Performance has always been part of the vocabulary of strategy. Some would 
even consider that the strategy discipline was created to come to grips with this 
particular issue at the firm level. Stéphane Guérard, Ann Langley and David 
Seidl bring out in their essay how the concept may be revisited and renewed 
thanks to theoretical findings partly rooted in the SAP stream. The authors 
point out that some views extend the mainstream approach of performance 
as they maintain the positivist ontology of performance as a separate reality. 
On the one hand, performance should be addressed at a more disaggregated 
level of analysis so as to be closer to the phenomena studied and to the chain 
of consequences leading to performance. On the other hand, process studies 
may provide a richer understanding of performance building in suggesting 
a dynamic approach including performance as an input and as an outcome 
and how they relate to each other over time. Guérard et al. submit a radical 
re-problematization of performance much more consistent with a practice 
based ontology. A performative view allows us to re-consider performance as 
something people do rather than as a property of organizations. Performance 
is thus clearly related to the intertwining of everyday practices in situated 
contexts and claims and discourses about strategy.
In the very variety of strategy-as-practice views, some researches highlight 
the role and prevalence of materials in strategizing and stress the importance 
of the “materializing” of discourses within strategic texts. Of course, socio-
materiality aims to inspect the material facets of technology and organization 
with a broader scope. Paula Jarzabkowski and Trevor Pinch, in the special 
issue, question the socio-materiality stream in its ability to become more than 
a research fashion. They note that socio-materiality is divided into two schools 
– “affordance” and “scripts” approaches – which address the way objects may 
be re-purposed in situated interactions (affordance view) and how materials 
inscribe and prescribe sequences of actions (script view). According to the 
authors, both views tend to focus on the materials themselves and thus misdirect 
attention from social interactions in which activities are accomplished and 
objects are entangled. The “accomplishing” view, suggested by Jarzabkowski 



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and Pinch, is to complement those previous views and examine activities and 
materials, “as they are accomplished with objects in a multiplicity of contexts”. 
The use of material possibilities allows us “to repair the affordances contained 
in the materials and enable the material script to progress”.

DISMANTLING BOUNDARIES BETWEEN DISCIPLINES

Interdisciplinarity in organizational and management studies constitutes an 
avenue to generate promising theories and research questions in the extent 
that, as mentioned previously, it is not only an “import-export” process. Four 
contributions offer various representations of interdisciplinarity between 
management studies and other social sciences and humanities. More widely, 
lots of authors in this anniversary issue are used to using ideas and theories 
from other fields to feed their thought.
A true example of “conceptual blending”, Eero Vaara and Ann Reff Pedersen’s 
essay echoes the words of Linda Rouleau about the ramifications of SaP 
research and enriches the discursive turn of strategic practice by borrowing 
the Bakhtinian concept of the “chronotope”. Vaara and Pedersen elucidate the 
processes through which understandings of time and space are constructed 
in strategy narratives and enrich the understanding of how exactly strategy 
narratives construct the past, present, and future. The authors depart from 
the usual notion of “chronological” time and apply to narratives of strategy 
Bakhtin’s “chronotope”, the literary construct of time in which space is required 
as a reference point. They combine this with Ricoeur’s “meaning-based 
approach” to time in order to configure a new method of viewing past, present 
and future in the context of strategy. Strategizing is “reproblematized” as a 
creative activity, “both enabled and constrained by readily available forms”. 
The essay underscores that alternative antenarratives become living stories 
and institutionalized strategies and allow us to consider how strategy-making 
is based on dialogicality and polyphony. The detour through Bakthin’s as well 
as Ricoeur’s worlds not only extends but deeply enriches the way we deal with 
the narrative construction of strategies in organizations. 
Lots of works in organizational science and strategic management have 
been dedicated to questioning and defining the nature and the frontiers of 
the firm, widely rooted in organizational economics and corporate finance 
theories. Some may consider this excessive and think that ultimately, it simply 
weakens the frontiers of… management studies. Contrariwise, Hugh Willmott 
and Jeroen Veldman point out that management and organization studies 
surprisingly have never really thought about or “thematized” the corporation, 
which remains a shadow concept in the field. Seriously, what is a corporation? 
Interdisciplinarity also takes shape in imagination and myths underlying our 
theories and conceptualizations. Willmott and Veldman scrutinize how the 
corporation is a performative product of three analytically distinctive but in 
practice compounded imaginaries: legal, economic and political. These 
“imaginaries” give access to what we label as a “corporation”. They consistently 
enact and embody various social phenomena, and become a political and 
performative discourse. The essay offers a remarkable journey into some legal 
and neo-liberal economic imaginaries as well as a new lens throughout which 
to view them. It does this by highlighting the transition from the “corporate 
entity” to the “legal fiction” and the consequences of that transition. Willmott 



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and Veldman point to the prevalence of political imaginaries in concepts of the 
corporation and advocate a “de-reification” of it so as to understand corporate 
form as “a network of social and productive relationships”. This paper suggests 
nothing less than a reconstruction of corporate governance which means re-
attributing agency to the corporate entity: “its assets are indivisibly social, and 
not private, property”!
Interdisciplinary approaches may be organized around borrowing a specific 
concept, as Eero Vaara and Ann Reff Pedersen do, or embracing a more 
general “platform” as a coherent framework which facilitates the understanding 
or exploration of organizational phenomena. Stewart Clegg and Ad van Iterson 
root their essay in contemporary classical sociology and suggest that this 
approach should be prevalent in organization studies because it allows us 
to develop imagination. They try to address in an innovative manner how the 
liquefying boundaries of space, time and organizations impact or alter employee 
behavior. The uniqueness of their paper consists, inter alia, of the integration 
in the same framework of both an inspiring author, Norbert Elias, and his 
main opponent, Hans Peter Duerr. One may sometimes blame researchers in 
organization studies for borrowing locked and homogeneous theories without 
viewing them through critical lenses. Elias points out the effects of the social 
structure of human behavior, from an historical long-term perspective. Duerr 
enriches Elias’ thesis with aspects of physical proximity and distance which 
are at best implicit in the former thesis. According to authors, these theories 
may inform trends such as distance work, inter-organizational cooperation and 
dedifferentiation as liquid phenomena “may bestow organizational members 
with a varying need for self-regulation”. Management and organizational 
studies should therefore address more fully the effects of physical distance/
proximity and of interdependence of work activities on social control and self-
regulation.
As mentioned above, Carnegie School delivered two pieces that are 
both considered as matrixes for organizational studies and the influence 
of which has spread into various streams of research: March and Simon’s 
1958 Organizations and Cyert and March’s 1963 The Behavioral Theory 
of the Firm. As mentioned by Mie Augier, the foundation of Carnegie was 
characterized by the absence of true experts in… organization studies; 
some founding members came from the fields of, amongst others, 
informatics, cognitive sciences, mathematics, the arts and economics. This 
interdisciplinarity “by necessity” generated a unique view of organizations and 
constituted the organizing principle that is so important to management and  
organization studies. 
Research-ing is also an organizational practice embedded in multiple flows 
of action: Mie Augier offers in her history-based essay a thick description of 
the social, institutional and intellectual context from which The Behavioral 
Theory of the Firm emerged fifty years ago, celebrating another anniversary. 
She explains the reviews and reception which The Behavioral Theory of 
the Firm received in 1953. One of the most interesting comes for Sydney 
Winter who saw the book as developing an alternative to neoclassic theory. 
Augier is certain of the direct engagement of Jim March and Richard Cyert 
with the disciplines they solicited to construct their theory and her essay 
shows how The Behavioral Theory of the Firm impacted various disciplines 
including economics, political science, population ecology and psychology. 



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Interdisciplinarity is not only carried out by individual researchers; it is also 
considered a legitimate venture for a field as a whole to undertake. Research 
should be a conversation with other disciplines, not a one way monologue. 

PLAYING AT THE FRINGE WITH PROVOKINGLY NEW 
IDEAS

Interdisciplinarity is a source of freedom and of creativity, in that it arouses 
deviance in otherwise institutionalized research fields. One needs to brand 
or label deviant ideas by producing strong narrations to enhance the 
legitimacy of new materials. Terms, sentences, metaphors and symbols 
have a performative effect within scientific communities. André Spicer, 
Robert Chia and Stephen Linstead suggest three terms that could be used to 
nourish strategic and organizational thinking and may, perhaps unfortunately, 
reflect contemporary organizational life: bullshit, strategic indirection, and 
organizational bystanding.
André Spicer notes that the production of “talk” and “text” has become 
increasingly prevalent in organizational life and, furthermore, that these 
discourses constitute the social reality of organizations. He suggests that 
actually talk and text do not produce any aspect of organizational reality 
beyond, as he puts it, bullshit. Bullshit consists of all “discourse which is 
created, circulated and consumed” in organizational life “with little respect 
for or relationship to reality”. Bullshit has a performative function in the extent 
to which it empowers the “bullshitter”. Bullshit is not concerned with truth, it 
diverts attention from primary tasks of organization and enables bull-shitters 
to go about their own purposes. The more the immaterial context of an 
organization is filled with ambiguity and vagueness and the more it is empty 
of purpose and sense, the more bullshitters have the opportunity to cloak 
fundamentally ephemeral or even meaningless talk or text in a sophisticated 
garb. The continuous production of materials by the management fashion 
industry enables the exploitation of this excess of discourse by bullshitters. 
We may thus question our own role in this industry of bullshit! Bullshit can 
have positive returns however and may help, for instance, to back up an 
organization’s branding and legitimacy. Yet it remains true that it may “trigger 
a deep sense of affront among organizational members” and “severely 
undermine the trust” of stakeholders. Bullshit may sound like an entertaining 
concept but refers to the most unpleasant aspects of organizational life!
In a very different vein, Robert Chia continues his deconstruction of 
“spectacular” strategy thought that led him to suggest some avenues which 
challenge our underlying assumptions derived from the Western outlook. 
This traditional outlook generates and overestimates some persistent 
myths which tend to format our research traditions in strategy. These myths 
include concepts such as the direct and visible intervention of the heroic 
manager endowed with unique qualities and a calculative rationality, a quasi-
mathematical and direct causality between discrete and decisive action and 
organizational performance as a whole. Chia roots his essay in process 
philosophy and Francois Jullien’s Chinese thought for two reasons. First, this 
allows him to demonstrate the weaknesses of a direct approach of strategy 
and its underlying consequentialist form of reasoning. Second, it enables 



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him to elaborate on strategic indirection as a more promising way to account 
for a more oblique and indirect form of engagement. This fresh perspective 
adopts an undetermined becoming worldview rather than a being one. It also 
acknowledges the existence of “unowned” (rather than owned) processes, 
which are seen as phenomena “taking place regardless of human intervention”. 
This immanent view of strategy concentrates upon silent transformations 
which, in Francois Jullien’s words, are implied in the strategic process so as 
to facilitate the conditions for the emergence of an outcome. The task of the 
strategist, a “sage”, is to turn the “potential at work in the configuration” into an 
opportunity; he does not tackle certain alleged strategic challenges head-on, 
instead maintaining an oblique approach and opting for “strategic inaction” in 
everyday organizational life.
Stephen Linstead’s paper similarly starts by deconstructing a vivid myth of 
organizational studies. With respect to any scandal or unethical behavior 
in organizations, researchers are used to documenting and labeling some 
“active”, direct or explicit behaviors and to distinguishing between, so to speak, 
the good, the bad and the ugly. Contrary to this style of thought, Stephen 
Linstead aims to offer an alternative to corruption, incompetence or collusion 
in explaining the formative contexts of escalating unethical action. He draws on 
the social psychology notion of bystanding, “an inability or refusal to look down 
the causal chain and acknowledge its human and social effects”. You know or 
witness some deviant and harmful actions but do nothing to stop or ameliorate 
it. This seems closer to the reality of everyday life in organizations. Linstead 
departs from a purely sociological notion to elaborate an organizational 
understanding of bystanding. In his words, organizational bystanding “reflects 
the state of non-involvement as a form of involvement, dissolution of any 
resolution to resist and a prelude to active involvement”. His essay points out 
the uniqueness of the organizational context for addressing bystanding. For 
instance, “bullying” may take forms that are not easy to discern and symbolic 
violence in organizational situations may not always be obvious, nor capable 
of direct confrontation. Organizations are also more formally interconnected 
ordinary worlds in which a large plurality of self- and collective interests 
overlaps. This highlights the need for “paradoxical thinking” but also makes 
bystanding more difficult in organizations. Bystanding behaviour requires 
critical efforts and faculties to understand what is really going on. Above all, 
the bystanding approach within organizations puts the responsibility of “being-
in-relation” on the agenda of organization studies.

THE ART OF SPANNING, BALANCING CREATIVITY AND 
RIGOR IN OUR RESEARCH JOURNEYS

These four contributions address different aspect of a fundamental paradox 
in research in general, one that is perhaps even more salient in certain 
approaches of social sciences. It results from the tensions between rigor and 
creativity, genial ideas and well-constructed discovery processes, emotion 
and rationality. Far from offering solutions or choices, their combined efforts 
constitute an invitation to live with the paradox, to accept it as part of the  
job – or maybe as part of any human activity. So, “more of the opposites” seem 
to be the core message that we can take home.



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First, we need a more precise and rational approach to how our practices are 
regulated. If we accept that no evaluation system will ever be perfect – and as 
Bill Starbuck’s papers suggest, this offers a margin for manoeuvre that can 
be useful – it does not mean that we should not try to fix some of the most 
obvious problems and thus increase rigor. Joel Baum’s paper is about exactly 
that. Considering the increasing importance of citation indices for journals, 
gaining some form of consensus on what is fair and trying to get the measures 
right is of importance. Accordingly, Baum proposes a solution to correct 
journal impact factors for citation quality. Indeed, well established journals 
benefit from the sensitivity to a few highly cited papers, when many others 
do not have such an impact. The result is that many articles published in 
these journals can “free-ride” on the reputation gained by the most cited ones. 
By adjusting journal impact factors according to relative number of citations, 
Baum shows how our perception of journal quality is changed, which is of 
course important in relation to individual evaluation. 
While Bill Starbuck concurs in his article that the main processes regulating 
our field are imperfect, he demonstrates how this can be used to the profit 
of the creativity of research products. He describes how difficult it is for 
academics to get a clear perspective on what is happening in the field. This 
is due in particular to the ambiguity of messages about what constitutes 
good research. Depending on their research traditions and their personal 
backgrounds, reviewers and editors produce contradictory evaluations. This 
is partly due to the concentration of the publishing industry and also due to 
increasing pressure from the business school rating system, both of which 
reinforce the status quo. In concentrated industries, firms are used to repeating 
and protecting imperfect behaviors. However, Starbuck offers an optimistic 
conclusion, arguing that this situation of blundering randomly in disagreement 
can actually lead to more creativity in research if academics are ready to take 
risks. Indeed, the ambiguity of academic evaluation means that creative and 
risky research topics, methods and designs have their chance to be accepted 
and consequently our path is not as blocked as we might think as we might 
think. Starbuck suggests, however, that, to be accepted, authors should pay 
very close attention to any feed-back they can get before publication since 
this can provide useful data about possible audiences and thus constitutes a 
way to navigate their complex environment. 
Yiannis Gabriel and James March further reflect on how and why creativity 
should be pursued and how and why it is likely to be rewarded and rewarding. 
Yiannis Gabriel both advocates and explains surprises as the sources of 
knowledge. He suggests that we must break free of assumptions and cross-
fertilize and engage with different disciplines and ideas. Researchers have to 
break free of the tyranny of “purposiveness” and venture into less controlled 
territories. These are the territories of unmanaged inquiry, directed by pleasure 
rather than by purpose. Gabriel describes how, when the managed and the 
unmanaged (or perhaps “play” and “method”) follow parallel paths, they can, 
in specific contexts, mesh. While Bill Starbuck’s paper explains why ambiguity 
in our field creates a space of freedom, Yiannis Gabriel provides a teleological 
explanation in which pleasure is the drive. And indeed, our life as researchers 
would be very dull without unmanaged and playful ideas.
In the same vein, James March describes how beauty is more important than 
relevance. Playfulness is vital and has been an important driver to some of 



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the key ideas of our field, such as the “garbage can” model or the “temporal 
sorting in decision making” model. If we apply this model to the question of 
beauty, we understand how beautiful ideas can solve problems and perhaps 
realize that they are more likely to do so than ideas generated by the obsession 
of relevance. It should be noted, however, that March does not imply that the 
pursuit of relevance is unimportant, but rather that it should not come at the 
expense of playing with beautiful ideas. He rejoins Yiannis Gabriel when he 
writes that such ideas are sources of surprise, made of simplicity and fertility. 
He mentions some of the ideas that touched him over the years and includes 
two recent unpublished papers. Let’s hope that Bill Starbuck is right and that 
these beautiful ideas will find a space in our ambiguous field. 

AN ON-GOING JOURNEY

The last paper is that of Bernard Forgues and Sébastien Liarte, two very 
important persons for M@n@gement. Bernard was the founder and the energy 
behind the journal for many years, and if we can celebrate a 15th Birthday, it 
is thanks to his relentless work for so many years to establish the journal. 
Bernard worked almost full time for many years on this, producing decisions of 
a very high standard while simultaneously handing out flyers at the Academy 
of Management. So, we would like to take the chance to thank him for this 
great success. And we are also happy to pass the baton to Sebastien, who 
was Editorial Assistant in the early days and who is the incoming Co-Editor in 
Chief along with Laure Cabantous. Their paper portrays the evolution of our 
field and describes the impact of the emergence of online journals and of the 
online access movement. This will help us to probe into the future of our field 
and forge an idea about what its future will be. This paper is our conclusion 
because it also tells the story of M@n@gement’s journey and delivers an 
optimistic message regarding its future. So, happy birthday, M@n@gement! 
And many happy returns!



545

The M@n@gement journey, spanning boundaries and navigating at the fringe M@n@gement vol. 16 no. 5, 2013, 535-546

Olivier Germain is Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at the 
École des Sciences de la Gestion, Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada). 
He is also Regular Visiting Professor at Ecole de Management de Normandie 
(France). His research interests now focus on critical studies and process 
approaches in entrepreneuring.

Emmanuel Josserand is professor of management and Director of the 
Center for Management and Organization Studies at University of Technology, 
Sydney. His research interests are networks and identity. He served as Editor 
in Chief for M@n@gement from 2008 to 2013.

Acknowledgement
Very special thanks to Bernard Forgues who helped us to invite some of the 
authors. Thanks also to Laure Cabantous, Bernard Forgues, Yiannis Gabriel, 
James March, Grand Michelson, Rodolphe Durand, Viviane Sergi, André 
Spicer and Eero Vaara who helped us in the friendly reviewing process of 
essays. We would like to thank them for their very helpful comments and 
support. We are grateful to Walid Shibib for his impressive job of managing 
this anniversary issue.



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The M@n@gement journey, spanning boundaries and navigating at the fringe M@n@gement vol. 16 no. 5, 2013, 535-546

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