And that is the best case. It is writing by committee.

So below, some more tips & tricks how to navigate this process.

Catch-up service:

• Writing for publication: what nobody tells you – Part 1

• Publishing Strategies for Historical Researchers in Management

• Wanna be an academic? Embrace rejection

What your editor actually needs from you

There is a widely cited piece by Grant and Pollock (2011) in AMJ — “Setting the Hook” — that provides useful guidance on structuring introductions. It identifies four moves: establish why the reader should care about the problem, show what is missing or unresolved in existing work, state precisely what your paper does, and preview what the reader gains. These four moves should fit on three pages, maybe five. If your introduction is still scene-setting on page ten, it is not ready.

Writing openings

The underlying logic is the classic rhetorical structure: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. What do we know? What unsettles it? What does your paper do about that? Booth, Colomb and Williams’s The Craft of Research remains the most practical guide to actually writing this structure into an opening — the exercise they propose of drafting “I am studying X because I want to find out Y, in order to help my reader understand Z” is a useful diagnostic for whether you have a real argument or just a topic. It is not complicated in principle. Learning the art of setting up these openings will get you past the desk reject stage more often.

Don’t forget to set up the research question here - in many management journals, an explicit question is expected.

Research questions flow from research problems. Often, people are taught to identify a gap, but this is not always the most compelling way to set up work. Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) developed an alternative approach, which they termed problematization. This functions as a methodology — problematization as a way to identify and challenge the assumptions underlying the existing literature, rather than merely spotting gaps in it. The distinction matters: gap-spotting produces incremental work; problematization is what produces interesting theory.

The cover letter

The cover letter gets neglected — I am certainly guilty of this. Wiser people than me have pointed out, very reasonably, that the cover letter is where you can make the editor’s job easier:

• Summarise the contribution in two or three sentences.

• Make the case for fit with this specific journal.

• Suggest potential reviewers.

One page. What you are doing is handing the editor the argument they need to send the paper out, rather than desk-rejecting it.

On rejection

We’ve talked about rejection before, and it is inherent in this activity.

After the jump, what the different types of rejection (yes, there is more than one!) mean when you are trying to publish your work.

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Catch-up service:

• Publishing Strategies for Historical Researchers in Management

• Wanna be an Academic? Embrace Rejection

• Is AI taking over Social Science? Part 1 & Part 2

The numbers are worse than you think

Not to be alarmist, rejection rates at leading management journals range from 80 to 95%. And that was before AI supercharged the production of the written word. However, having been an editor for many years and responsible for desk rejects, I have seen numerous submissions that are simply out of scope and irrelevant. So, there is no reason to be too disheartened.

Unless, of course, you are desk rejected many, many times. Then, you may need to consider whether a full reset is necessary. One thing I have noticed is that novices to academic publishing systematically underestimate how much work is required to get an article published.

The other thing I sometimes encountered is an ends-means orientation: I want tenure (or a safe academic position, or a safe academic position at a better, more research-oriented university), so I need more and better publications, and how can I achieve this as soon as possible?

That’s nice.

But it’s not the responsibility of the editors, the reviewers, or indeed of the academic community reading the journal. Your job situation is absolutely none of their concern. Nobody is forcing you to become an academic; that is a choice. Maybe you begin to realise that it is not as good a choice as you thought. (Welcome to the club.) I have known many colleagues and students who changed their minds about wanting to be a part of academia. Exit is fine.

After the jump, what do you need to know if you want to play journal game … for paid subscribers, or you can redeem one free read. Also, you’ll get a reading list of useful articles written by experienced academics and editors that have published pieces seeking to de-mystify the academic publishing process.

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Catch-up service:

• Wanna be an Academic? Embrace Rejection

• BBC Archives Campaign update

• Is AI taking over Social Science? Part 1 & Part 2

The first is clearly not true — academics hire other academics. And if they are obsessed with simplistic metrics, perhaps consider whether that will be a good workplace. But what then is a good publishing strategy for historical researchers in management?

We’ll look at why to publish, and why “to get a job” is not enough. In this post, we will look at how to find the right journal for you, prepare your research for publication by thinking about your audience, and, crucially, provide pointers for your editor. How do you work with journal lists? What do you need to look out for if you are planning an international career? Finally, how do you target business history AND management journals?

Paid subscribers also get a journal list with international rankings. And more curated readings - blogosphere, journalism and podcasts.

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I think I may have promised a post on publishing strategy for a while, and that is nearly ready. Then I realised this post is going out on Good Friday, and whether you are of this religion or not, it is definitely a Bank Holiday in many places. So it feels a bit too much like work to write about publishing strategy.

Instead, this is a bit of a reflection on rejections, rituals and authenticity as the important wayposts of academic life.

Embrace rejection

One of the best bosses I ever had (Nigel Driffield, now at Warwick) said one lunchtime, a long, long time ago: “If you are not getting rejected, what have you been doing?!”

When I told one of our PR people, many years later, that yes, we all get rejected, it is not a problem, he went all charming and said, oh no, of course not, you do not get rejected!

Well, I was genuinely nonplussed. Rejection is normal in academic work. It makes for good battle stories to share over a drink.

After the jump, some more reflections on why rejection is one of the most important ingredients of an academic, or possibly any, career.

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Digital publishing changes the scale and direction of the reach of our ideas.

The question is not whether to be visible, but how to do it in a way that reflects the quality and seriousness of the research itself.

Your Research Needs to Be Found - So Make it Public

Not all research needs a viral moment. But all research matters (or should matter) socially — I agree with the authors of the new book Social Media for Research Impact: How Scholars Can Share Ideas, Build Networks, and Make a Difference that researchers “are doing research because they want their work to have an impact on the world,” and so it also should be findable.

Since the late 2010s, attention has shifted towards the digital space. In the US, in 2018, social media outpaced newspapers as a source of news for the first time. This also means that both the public and information providers have sought to have a presence, resulting in information overload and uneven verification standards, alongside evidence for declining trust and growing news and information saturation.

So when sharing research briefs, findings, visual abstracts, or videos online, we translate rigorous evidence-based research and findings into accessible, digestible formats. In doing so, we contribute to the body of knowledge that is available to the public. That translation, as researchers, is part of our responsibility.

The Network Is Still Everything — But It’s Bigger Now

Conferences remain the heart of academic life, providing essential space for networking, collaboration, and feedback. In fact, that was the reason I applied years ago to be the Web editor of the Business History Conference; I wanted to stay in the loop even though I was not following a traditional academic track.

Peer review is equally indispensable; I highly recommend the article “Revise and resubmit? Peer reviewing business historical research,” by leading figures in business history, to understand where the field stands in this regard. Your peers know the literature, think about your topic daily, and teach it. Hopefully, the speed and often unchecked engagement of the internet will never replace the depth of intellectual engagement in the peer review process.

However, digital platforms can effectively extend that physical network. It doesn’t take much effort to start, and they are one of the few direct channels you control. It’s important, however, to reflect on your goals behind publishing your research online. Used intentionally, they become your opening to a wider intellectual community.

For starters, and for all researchers -

Keep your digital profiles up to date, as noted in the post The Newly Published Researcher’s Toolkit, that includes ORCID, ResearchGate, and your university profile.

If you choose to be on LinkedIn, where there is enough space to write, cite generously and strategically. Don’t make your online presence purely self-promotional. Cite an influential scholar; their network will notice. Reference the publications and outlets you read to appear on their radar. Doors often open from there.

Publish about your work, but also, build your group; find three to five scholars whose work complements yours. Share each other’s publications and tag one another.

Campaign kindly; Prof. Anne-Wil Harzing calls it “positive academia” for a reason. Make digital publishing work for you, and for the public good. I would add kind to this – there is no need to criticize someone publicly if you cannot do so kindly and constructively. If the feedback is sensitive or personal, DM or email.

Always include the full DOI permanent link to your publication; help everyone access your piece directly.

Leverage Google Scholar alerts; when you receive a notification that someone has cited your work, use it as a moment to connect. Thank them, share their piece, and start a conversation.

Update Wikipedia: AI models are fed articles from the encyclopedia as well as other freely accessible content. Identify Wikipedia articles related to your expertise, edit them, and add accurate references.

Curate via hashtags; it is a great way to organize and track discussion around a specific topic on LinkedIn especially. Use the same hashtag every time you post about that theme. Over time, it becomes a simple indexing system. Click on the hashtag, and you get a curated feed of posts connected to that topic - your own and others’. It also creates a public archive that shows how your thinking evolves.

Engage on ResearchGate by following peers and recommending papers on the platform. Every time you do, not only is the author notified, but your followers also see the recommendation.

Publish your research or personal website; this is a step further, but your digital footprint becomes a record over time of what you worked on, what you cared about, who you engaged with, and how your ideas circulated. People will search your name or your topic. When they do, you want them to find a clear and accurate account of your work. After nearly a decade working in this space, I can say that it is still surprisingly difficult to find basic, reliable information about some scholars’ research.

Think intentionally where to show up; there are dozens of platforms, but building a digital identity doesn’t require doing everything at once. Maybe you just commit to LinkedIn. Maybe you launch a Substack. Or, reach further, pitch op-eds to public or private outlets: The Conversation, Slate, Sage Perspectives, and publisher blogs (Taylor & Francis, for example) all offer pathways to reach readers beyond academia.

These are different from peer review, but they create new outlets 🚪 for your ideas — and they matter for impact. After one comes another.

You Don’t Need To Be Everywhere. But You Should Be Somewhere With Intention 🚀

Not every paper needs the same campaign. But every publication benefits from a little strategic effort. Here are some things to do in the days and weeks after an academic article comes out:

1. Assemble a short list of scholars who would genuinely find the work relevant. Email them directly with a brief summary — not your abstract, but a conversational note about why you think they’d find it interesting. In that email, consider asking whether they’d recommend it on ResearchGate.

2. Identify organizations that might care. Think beyond your department. Policy institutes, NGOs, professional associations, and media outlets may all have reason to share or engage with your findings.

3. Think about media outlets that might be interested in the real-world issue you are ultimately talking about. See, for example, the latest case study by business historian Prof Shane Hamilton for the Urban Institute: https://www.urban.org/author/shane-hamilton.

4. Write one social media post — even just one — that frames the work for a general audience. What’s the real-world question it addresses? Frame it as: Is this progress? And how do we know? Create a visual or video that’s on social platforms, and your publisher might even welcome the idea of publishing the visual as part of your publication.

5. Use links and tags. This is how search engine optimization works. Link to the journal, tag co-authors and relevant scholars, cite the outlet. Every link is a thread connecting your work to a wider web. Do your research from your profile’s activity. Check, for example, on LinkedIn, what posts have you liked in the last 2 months?

6. Don’t obsess about immediate results. And this is important! Digital visibility compounds over time. A post that gets three likes today may surface in someone’s search six months from now. Consistency matters more than any single viral moment.

It can be quite straightforward, but it does take (lots of) time and planning. Regardless of your article sitting behind a paywall or open access, share key findings, a short summary, a visual, or a thread that explains why the results matter. This way the research becomes more visible and usable beyond its original publication.

There are some tools that help you track and document that reach. Platforms like SAGE Policy Profiles and Altmetric allow you to see where your research has been cited, mentioned in policy documents, or discussed publicly. Also, you can contact me to work on your digital profile or for campaigns about your work.

I may need to take Stephanie’s advice and take writing a book more seriously. A step-by-step checklist for promoting a new book or article might be a useful resource.

And I can also work directly with you to plan a structured digital strategy tailored to your profile and long-term goals. (Thanks to Stephanie for giving me the space to write here. Together with Neil Rollings, she hired me as Social Media Editor of Business History 🙏✨.)

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But what about when you have climbed that mountain and come through on the other side? For the first time!

You now know how to manage the many intricacies of Manuscript Central, Wiley’s ReX, Elsevier’s Editorial Manager, and whatever T&F call their new system (don’t get me started, they know why) and what at least one of them requires in terms of getting a submission (and several resubmissions) ready.

What happens after the acceptance email?

For full subscribers, we go through proofs and open access, and we also discuss what you want to do now that you are a published author.

After I published my first article, a helpful colleague gave me the academic “advice” (I put this in quotation marks advisedly) that nobody would ever read it. Now let me tell you that is not true, and you can make sure of that by doing a few things first.

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The session will clarify what constitutes an archive, address common misconceptions, and illustrate how theory building can emerge from primary archival sources and historical accounts.

Speakers:
• Professor Stephanie Decker (FAcSS, FBAM) (Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham)
• Dr. Bareerah Hafeez Hoorani (Radboud University)
• Professor Eriikka Paavilainen-Mäntymäki (Turun yliopisto - University of Turku)

Moderator: Professor Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki (University of Vienna)

📅 11 February 2026, 13:30 UTC
🎓 Hosts: AIB Research Methods Shared Interest Group
🔗 Register here: https://lnkd.in/dhPqvYEN

This session is ideal for scholars exploring qualitative, historical, or contextual approaches in IB research.

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NARTI/LUBS Online Training & Development

Successful Qualitative Research Masterclass with Professor David Silverman

3-5 March 2026 (10.00-12.30 UK time, each day)

Online via Zoom

REGISTER HERE

Course Content:

Qualitative researchers often try to do the same as quantitative research but with smaller samples. This interactive master-class is relevant to PhD students and early career researchers who want to do qualitative research and to write it up rigorously and effectively. It offers lectures and data workshops covering the latest approaches to key areas of qualitative research. The workshop will consist of 5.5 hours of lectures, each followed by a Q&A and a concluding session where you are invited to raise questions about your own research in the light of this course. The topics covered are:

• Foundations of Qualitative Research:

Majority versus minority conceptions of qualitative research. The value of naturalistic data. Meanings versus practices. Discovering the ‘black box’ of how social phenomena are constructed. Naturalism vs Constructionism.

• Theorising with Qualitative Data

Why your theoretical contribution is a concern. Inducing theories. How theories derive from research models. The case of organizations. Positivism, Naturalism and Constructionism. Grounded Theory. Avoiding overblown theories.

• Being credible

Why many qualitative research findings are not credible. What makes data reliable. Intensive and extensive data analysis. Using simple tabulations. Discovering deviant cases. Sequences vs instances in data analysis.

• Mixed methods research

Two kinds of mixed methods: quant plus qual versus multiple qualitative methods. Two conventional assumptions: beginning with quant and using qual to ‘go deeper’. How to begin with qual to find a phenomenon, then moving to quant to find variance.

• Impactful Qualitative Research

Our various stakeholders. Overcoming suspicions about qualitative research. Discovering relevance vs beginning with a social problem.

Prior viewing:

Please watch a recent Sage webinar where David introduces his latest book Qualitative Research 6th edition and explains how he reimagines qualitative research:

Schedule:

The course will be taught over three consecutive mornings with the following timetable:

March 3

10.00 Lecture 1 Foundations of Qualitative Research

10.45-11.00 Q&A

11.00-11.15 Short break

11.15-12.15 Lecture 2 Theorising with Qualitative Data

12.15-12.30 Q&A

March 4

10.00 Lecture 3 Being credible

10.45-11.00 Q&A

11.00-11.15 Short break

11.15-12.15 Lecture 4 Mixed Methods

12.15-12.30 Q&A

March 5

10.00-11.00 Lecture 5 Impactful qualitative research

11.00-11.15 Q&A

11.15-11.30 Short break

11.30-12.30 Q&A about your own research in the light of this course.

About the course leader:

Prof David Silverman is Visiting Emeritus Professor at Leeds Business School, Professor Emeritus in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College, London Visiting Professor in the King’s College Business School, University of London and the Business School, University of Technology, Sydney as well as Adjunct Professor at QUT, Faculty of Education. He has authored 15 books and over 60 journal articles on qualitative research, ethnography and conversation analysis. Thirty of his students have successfully completed their PhD and three are now full Professors.

His bestselling textbook Doing Qualitative Research [now in its 6^th edition] is a manual for writing a qualitative PhD. Uniquely, it is based on conversations he has had with hundreds of social science research students in five continents.

Further readings:

1. A primer for writing up a qualitative PhD based on my responses to students’ queries:

2. Chapters by world-renowned scholars on how to analyse qualitative data

3. A provocative version of my kind of qualitative research:

   

We talked to Dr Marie Huber, who was awarded €2m last year, which a large grant from the European Research Council. Marie is a business historian working Africa. In our BAM Business History webinar, she shares how you can achieve grant success even if you have a non-standard career, how to think about gaining funding strategically, and career breaks for mothers and carers are recognised.

If you are a member of the BAM MBH SIG and not a paying subscriber to OHN, email me a screenshot of your membership number and SIG selection, and I’ll give you access to this post.

And even if you are not, the monthly subscription is only £5 and you can cancel any time. Also, you get a free gift post as a free subscriber, so why not make it this one?

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Making a Contribution to Theory

With Professor Roy Suddaby

Tuesday 3^rd February 2026 (14.00-17.00 BST)

Online via Zoom

REGISTER HERE

(Note: your school may need to be a NARTI member for you to participate)

Summary:

One of the most challenging issues in publishing research in top management journals is demonstrating that your study makes a “contribution to theory”. It is the most commonly stated reason for rejection by reviewers and editors, and yet it remains a vaguely defined standard based on tacit rather than explicit knowledge. That is, it is a standard that is easier to demonstrate through “hands on” experience than it is to articulate “a priori”. Like US Supreme Court Justice Stewart’s famous statement on obscenity, a contribution to theory is hard to define in advance, but one “knows it when s/he sees it”.

The intent of this workshop is to give junior and mid-career scholars and third year PhD students an opportunity to see how reviewers and editors construct their assessment of a contribution to theory. The process used to accomplish this is to give participants a rare “behind the scenes” view of how reviewers, editors and successful authors engage in the debate about what constitutes a contribution to theory. The key learning objective of this session is to make the somewhat elusive concept of a “contribution to theory” more accessible by working through an actual set of reviews. We hope that, by the end of the session, participants will have a working knowledge of what the concept involves and how it can be articulated both in the manuscript and in the interaction between authors and editors/reviewers.

Date/Time: Tuesday 3^rd February 2026 (14.00-17.00 BST)

Location: Online (Zoom details to follow)

Audience: PGRs, ECRs and all faculty

Advanced Preparation:

Participants will be given a paper to review three weeks in advance of the session (The paper will be a theory paper previously published in Academy of Management Review. Participants should read the paper and draft a review in advance of the session. The review should assess the major flaws in the paper with a view to determining if the paper makes a “contribution to theory”. Prior to the session, the reviews will be collated and the organizers will aggregate reviewer attention to the component categories that, cumulatively, construct a contribution to theory.

Speaker bio:

Roy is the Winspear Chair of Management at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business at the University of Victoria, Canada and Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Carson College of Business, Washington State University. He is a past editor of the Academy of Management Review, past Associate Editor at Academy of Management Perspectives, and currently serves as Associate Editor for the Academy of Management Collections and the Human Resources Management Journal. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and the Irish Academy of Management.

If you would like to join the workshop and can fully commit to participating, please register via the link at the top of the page.

Regards, Jo

Jo Garrick

Researcher Training and Development Manager

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My most recent discovery here is Ibrat Djabbarov (Imperial), who has compiled an impressive list of talks by some key scholars in the field:

https://www.youtube.com/@NewScholars

I’ve said it before and I say it again, I really like Mark Saunders’ research methods channel. Mark is, of course, a Birmingham and British Academy of Management colleague who recently retired. Mostly he is famous for his “research onion”, which represents research design choices in layers. His channel offers more good resources, and I like to use clips in lectures:

https://www.youtube.com/@MarkSaundersOnResearchMethods

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Generally speaking, as history is in the past, it seems obvious that there isn’t. But that’s very reductive, and there are some good examples of business and management historians who are excellent at making the past relevant. Michael Weatherburn’s Project Hindsight is a great example of such an approach.

But what about your average Joe, who has not put any great effort into policy impact beyond perhaps the occasional The Conversation piece? Like me, for example? After the paywall (sorry guys), I’ll tell you where you can find out, like I did, that you may well have had some citations in big and small policy corners you never knew about.

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Maybe you have even done some piecemeal revisions at different points, and now you are faced with a truly Frankensteinian body of chopped-off, sutured-together parts (yes, I just saw the new Frankenstein in the cinema — did I mention the monster is quite hench?). Is it more than one paper, or just not enough for one?

So how do you work through this? I personally tend to take a step back and try to consider what I now want to do. To be fair, I have a lot of papers that have never seen the light of day, and sometimes it is fine to conclude that maybe this is not worth continuing with.

But there’s also no need to give up too soon. Over the years, I have used Pat Thompson’s excellent blog Patter a lot for advice and inspiration. Still hosted on WordPress (which means she is actually paying money to bring you a free resource), I remain a huge fan. Below is a distillation of some of her advice and the excellent questions she poses across many of her blogs, which I have found useful as exercises that get me back on track.

Questions about audience and message

Now this is a really basic exercise — answer these questions on the basis of your paper, and see what it tells you:

• What is my raw material?

• What is the message, and for whom?

• What is the contribution to knowledge?

• What to write for what academic reader and journal?

• What do these readers already know?

• What might these readers be most interested in?

• What are the possible angles we might take to frame up our small contribution? And what big international picture might we help to illuminate?

• What theoretical resources might we use to make our case?

• Can we sum up the point we want to make in a title?

These questions are really useful because they make you focus on the audience and what you actually have to tell them. Sometimes, the best insight you can take from this exercise is that you may not be going for the right journal/audience, and that you need to be realistic about where your contribution will be deemed insightful or not.

Here are some more questions, prompts and suggestions after the paywall…

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This week, I spoke at an online research seminar at Kent University, hosted jointly with the British Academy of Management’s Special Interest Group on Management and Business History. The aim was to demystify archival research and share crucial insights on why understanding the distinction between history and memory, archives and libraries, is essential for any researcher investigating the past.

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Key Definitions: Building a Shared Language

Before diving into methodology, it’s worth clarifying the terms that historians use, since they can differ significantly from how other academic disciplines approach the past.

The Past refers to events that occurred chronologically before the present and are now ontologically inaccessible—we cannot directly observe them. This is the fundamental challenge historians face: unlike social scientists, who can observe events as they unfold, historians must work with traces.

History is knowledge of the past based on those traces left behind. These might be documents, but they could equally be videos, audio recordings, images, archaeological ruins, or even human remains. Importantly, history is not the past itself but rather a constructed representation of it—one that can change over time and often coexists with rival interpretations.

Historiography is the philosophy, theory, and method of writing history. It encompasses how historical knowledge is constructed and challenged, making it useful for understanding not just what happened, but how our understanding has evolved.

Memory, by contrast, is collectively shared representations of the past—the lived understanding that remains relevant in the present. It appears in national holidays, memorials, historical fiction, and cultural narratives.

Key Takeaway: History ≠ Past

History is Not the Past

One of the most important takeaways from the discussion is this: history is not the past. It’s a representation of the past—a carefully constructed narrative based on available traces and evidence. This distinction matters because it fundamentally shapes how we research.

So here comes the paywall, in case you haven’t subscribed yet. ☺️

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If you would like to join the event, get in touch with Maxim Potepkin via LinkedIn.

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Historical methods can seem intimidating or "too different" from traditional management research methods, so my colleagues Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki and Mark Saunders discussed myths about historical research in IB, and how historical methods fit with wider qualitative research (respectively).

Historical research offers some really interesting opportunities for management scholars — but like many interdisciplinary endeavours, it comes with its own set of methodological choices and trade-offs that are worth understanding upfront.

The Methodological Landscape: More Than Just Archives

When most people hear "historical research," they seem to picture someone hunched over dusty documents in an archive (on behalf of archivists everywhere: a good archive is not dusty!). While archival work is certainly part of the historical toolkit, it's far from the whole story.

A few years ago, we published the Handbook of Historical Methods specifically for management researchers, partly to address this misconception. (The paperback and e-book versions are quite affordable; make sure you become an “Elgar member” to get a discount.) The handbook situates historical approaches within the qualitative research landscape in business and management.

And, as Mark pointed out in his talk, archival research has always been part of the many options of his famous "Research Onion".

What's particularly exciting is how historical approaches align with process studies. Think about it: how long would you need to follow a process through if you were observing it directly? Months? Years? Historical research offers a way to lengthen the processes you're examining in a more time-efficient manner, using the data traces that already exist.

Navigating the Terminology: Past vs History (Yes, They're Different)

One of the first hurdles when diving into historical research is the terminology. Historians have developed theoretical concepts that are not always familiar to management researchers, and understanding these distinctions helps with research design.

Take the difference between "the past" and "history." This might sound pedantic, but it's actually quite useful. Think Magritte: the picture of an apple is not the apple. Similarly, the history you read is never the past itself — it's one possible account of the data you have available. You're examining how well your narrative fits the data you hold.

This should sound familiar to qualitative researchers. We're always concerned with data-method fit, and historical research operates on similar principles.

Then there's "historiography" — essentially, historical theory that covers different approaches and methods. It's worth knowing about, but don't let it intimidate you.

History vs Memory: Different Lenses on the Past

Perhaps more important for management researchers is understanding the difference between history and memory as approaches to the past. Both are valuable, but they serve different purposes depending on your research question.

History is about archives, traces, and detective work. It's associated with learning through intellectual inquiry — you're trying to find out something you didn't know before. The past is distinct and separate; you need to make an effort to reconstruct it from the records and archives that provide access to something that's no longer directly observable.

Memory, on the other hand, is about what people carry from their past into the present. It's more emotional, more identity-focused. This is the past that's always present — sometimes traumatic, sometimes uplifting, often socially constructed through rituals and shared narratives. In organisational studies, you'll see plenty of work on rhetorical history, uses of the past, and memory in organisational settings.

The relationship between history and memory isn't either/or. You can do historical work that examines memory in the past, or use oral history approaches that reconstruct missing historical narratives through people's memories. The key is being explicit about how you're conceptualising the past within your broader research design.

Practical Approaches: Your Methodological Toolkit

Archival Methods: The Classic Approach

Archival methods involve looking at traces from the past, with heavy emphasis on verification and triangulation — skills that should feel familiar from other qualitative work. What's particularly valuable here is source analysis.

There's a great piece by Schaefer and Alvesson (2020) arguing that the critical attitude inherent in source analysis is relevant for all qualitative researchers, even when analysing interview transcripts. This critical approach forces you to ask: Who created this material? Who decided what goes in and what doesn't? What are they telling you, what aren't they telling you, and why?

These are questions we should always ask of our data, but source analysis makes this criticality systematic and rigorous.

Digital Sources: The Underexplored Goldmine

We have access to an enormous amount of digital source material in organisational studies, yet we see surprisingly few papers making use of it. The same critical attitude you'd apply to traditional archives is essential for digital materials: Who created this? Why did they put it online? What was their agenda?

Retrospective Methods: When Accuracy Isn't Everything

Sometimes accuracy isn't your primary concern. Sometimes the interesting question is: How are people telling this story from their current position? Retrospective methods offer different accounts that you can even juxtapose with archival material — the differences might tell you quite a lot.

This includes oral history collections that are often deposited in archives and publicly available. It's another form of data that's widely accessible but relatively underused in management research.

The Theorisation Challenge: It's Not Just You

Here's where many researchers get stuck. Most people doing historical research feel it's incredibly difficult to theorise from their findings. You spend ages explaining the historical context, and reviewers respond with: "Yeah, so what? How does this matter in terms of the theories we have?"

This challenge isn't unique to historical research — it happens with many alternative approaches. But there are some specific reasons why historical work faces particular hurdles:

1. The uniqueness problem: Reviewers sometimes argue that historical cases are "too unique" to generalise from.

2. Lack of templates: Unlike other methodological approaches, there aren't many clear templates for integrating historical evidence into management theory traditions.

3. Disciplinary tensions: Historians want detailed, nuanced accounts of unique events. Management theorists want parsimonious, generalisable insights. These requirements are contradictory.

The Theory Trade-Offs: You Can't Have It All

Recently, Andrew Carton (2025) published what might be the most insightful piece I've seen on this challenge. He argues that theory has three dimensions — generality, simplicity, and accuracy — and you can never do all three well simultaneously. At best, you can achieve two, and even that isn't easy.

This framework brilliantly captures what many interdisciplinary researchers come up against:

• You can do something general and simple (high theory that journals love)

• You can do something general and accurate (but it will be complex and hard to digest)

• You can do something simple and accurate (actionable insights close to the phenomenon)

The key insight? If you want to do all three, you're probably looking at three different papers, not one. For interdisciplinary researchers, this framework helps explain why the work feels so challenging — and why the trade-offs are tricky.

Publication Strategies: Different Outlets, Different Contributions

If you're interested in historical research, you have multiple publication options, each with different expectations:

Management journals typically seek theoretical contributions with historical evidence, but prefer less detailed historical accounts.

Business history journals welcome empirical contributions that provide insights into the past, or historiographical pieces that present new explanations of past phenomena (Decker et al., 2024).

Interdisciplinary outlets might be interested in conceptual frameworks that help understand past phenomena, even if they require less historical detail.

The key is deciding which audience you want to speak to — just like any interdisciplinary work.

Making It Work: Practical Integration Strategies

Here's my practical advice for integrating historical research into your work:

1. Consider your audience first: Different outlets have different expectations. Match your approach accordingly.

2. Think beyond archives: Historical methodology isn't just about documents. The critical source analysis approach can enhance all your qualitative work.

3. Look for the historical element: Most organisational phenomena have historical dimensions. These can become additional papers or strengthen your main contribution.

4. Embrace the digital: We're underusing the wealth of naturally occurring digital data available to us. Historical methodology offers tools for approaching this material critically.

5. Accept the trade-offs: Interdisciplinary work always involves trade-offs. Understanding them upfront helps you make better strategic choices.

The Bottom Line

Historical research offers significant opportunities for management scholars, but like all interdisciplinary work, it requires navigating methodological choices and trade-offs. The key is understanding these challenges upfront rather than discovering them halfway through your project.

Whether you're looking to add historical depth to your process studies, explore organisational memory, or simply bring a more critical analytical approach to your qualitative work, historical methods have something to offer. The field is growing, the opportunities are there, and the methodological tools are becoming more accessible.

Most importantly, don't let the terminology or the perceived difficulty put you off. Like any methodological approach, it's learnable — and the insights it can provide are often worth the additional complexity.

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So, I spend a lot of my time reading. From students, varying levels of AI slop, ranging from complete incoherence in suspiciously competent English prose to actually some much-improved engagement with research design and philosophy. From journals and funding agencies, I have been sent to review a wide variety of projects – some really engaging and interesting, even if some of them did not make it through the review, some that left me cold, and others that made my blood boil.

On Bullshit

Whilst I normally try to restrain myself, given that I still have to send out review letters as a guest editor with several journals, pretty much the sole reason why I own a copy of Harry Frankfurt’s marvellous little book On Bullshit, is because I review for management and organisation studies journals. Yep, that’s pretty much why I bought it. That’s why I keep going back to it. Does it help? – You may ask. Well, a little – I’d respond. I used to have a little print-out of the following quote on the pinboard in my office:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. (Harry Frankfurt, not me)

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There’s too much to read!

Most students don’t know that reading academic texts strategically will help them speed up their reviewing — and that AI is not necessarily quicker, or indeed better.

So here is the advice I give students — and which I received as an undergraduate at the University of Cologne, back in the days where the library catalogue was still on paper…

• Don’t read from start to finish — academic books and articles are not novels

• Start with the abstract, followed by the introduction and conclusion (if the abstract seemed relevant)

• Once you have read these sections, you decide whether to read the article or if you are only reading some sections

• The same applies to books, which may not have an abstract, but certainly have an introduction and a conclusion (most of the time…)

• Learn to speed-read, and only read closely when you have identified something relevant

But, while that is all well and good, how to remember all the relevant sections, and integrate them into a coherent review?

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How to take notes on your reading

The rest of the blog looks at a range of note-taking techniques, including resources and templates for the well-known Cornell method, which uses three different sections: the main notes, the “cues”, and the summary.

Referencing software, which is pretty essential in my view, also has note-taking functions, and depending on which one you use, you can combine approaches quite easily.

If you need something more systematic, the post includes a structured Excel template for you to download, which provides a clear approach to summarising a large body of literature.

Finally, some tips and tricks to put all these notes together into a coherent and convincing literature review that’s easy to follow and that sets up your ideas and contributions just so.

The Cornell note-taking method

This is a somewhat elaborate approach, but useful for those important pieces you may use again and again. It’s also a good option for students, as it helps them to synthesise and categorise, because it promotes active engagement with the reading.

Basically, it consists of a page with three sections (other than the citation on top):

1. A column on the left to highlight topics or most important insights

2. The main note-taking area on the right, occupying most of the page

3. A summary section at the bottom

Designed to work for both note-taking in lessons and while reading, it can be adapted to help prepare for writing the literature review. It helps to get a sense of what they were designed for, and Cornell Learning Resources has some useful guidance available.

And while research shows that handwriting works best in terms of retention, there are plenty of paperless options available:

• Template for Evernote

• Make your own template in Word

Or perhaps you use a Remarkable or Kindle Scribe, in which case all you do is draw an I on the page and get started!

Referencing software

Referencing software is great IMHO, even though this means you spend some time maintaining your collection. There are normally note-taking options available in all the different options, so it comes down to personal preference to some extent.

I tend to tell students to start using a referencing software at the beginning of their project, because it does several things:

1. Save time when it comes to formatting at the end

2. Provide a central place to log all reading and literature searched

3. Stores notes and serves as a reminder

As an academic, working with various co-authors can be tricky if everyone uses a different referencing software, so we normally get one author to take over referencing.

Like many people, I started with EndNote, for which universities usually hold a group subscription. Truthfully, I find it clunky and haven’t used it for years. Then a colleague suggested Mendeley, which was great for many years, but since they went through a major update, it became buggy and difficult to manage.

I switched to Zotero, which over the years has become really good, and has lots of good ways to include notes either directly in Zotero or attach notes made in documents. But always happy to hear about other tools that work well.

Some colleagues tell me they just reformatted their references with AI — which sounds like a great option. When I tried it, I was not so impressed: too many references missed, and the inconsistencies meant I still had to go through and check all of them manually… which is precisely the kind of time-consuming, mind-numbing work I’d like to avoid by using AI.

What do you use? Let me know in the comments, and why you like it!

Summarising the literature through a dedicated template

Using a template to review, compare and contrast the literature can be very helpful, especially where there is a range of articles in an area that is new to you and you need to get a handle on.

The template below, other than the obvious identifiers for the article or book (author, year, title, journal), features column headings that are generally relevant in social science research:

• Topic or theme

• Theory employed

• Method adopted

• (I hid “sampling” and “sources of data,” as they were not so relevant for these examples)

• Contribution

• Key concepts

• Context

• Limitations/future directions

• General notes (anything not picked up earlier)

Click on the button below to download an example spreadsheet — it’s a normal Excel file, and you can adjust the rows as well as the headings to what is relevant to your research approach.

Example Template

Interestingly, you can use Elicit.ai to generate similar spreadsheets where the tool extracts information from PDFs uploaded. In my experience, the tool is geared towards scientific and medical research — if you ask it to extract information on social scientific concepts or categories by yourself, it is less useful.

But more on AI tools and how to use them to support literature reviewing soon - there are some interesting options out there that can really help speed up the review process.

How to structure your literature review

Now, you are ready to write up your notes!

Sometimes it helps to go back to basics and set aside your readings and notes for a moment to focus on what you want to say. I like focusing exercises to get me back on track to achieve what I wanted to say.

Focus exercise (10 minutes)

Set a timer and take a piece of paper. Use the writing prompts to start thinking about how to structure your literature review.

• My research question is … (50 words)

• Researchers who have looked at this subject are … (50 words)

• They argue that … (50 words)

• Debate centres on the issue of … (25 words)

• There is work to be done on … (25 words)

• My research is closest to that of X in that … (50 words)

• My contribution will be … (50 words)

After the focus exercise, think of the structure

Literature reviews are complex; it helps to make the structure simpler and more logical. Invariably, I find it impossible to deal with more than three major topics per literature review — two is even better.

These topics can represent theories or subjects and the diagram below shows them as big circles. However, beyond signalling that you know and understand these fields, these are not the focus of your review.

The focus should on the areas where the circles overlap.

At the centre of this Venn diagram should be your research question. And if you imagine this with four or five circles, it is immediately clear that you are overloading your review.

Conversely, with two circles, the overlap is much easier to define… So unsurprisingly, interdisciplinary researchers and those who seek to contribute or bring together fairly fragmented fields encounter much greater challenges in writing a convincing review.

There is also the concept of the “funnel”, the idea that you structure a literature by going from the general to the specific. With three general topics, this is clearly not a straightforward process. (Much easier, again, if you can focus on two areas of literature.)

The Venn diagram can be helpful thinking through how you want to structure your literature review, and whether this structure would represent a logical order that allows you to take your reader through a sensible progression of your argument.

The example below represents a structure that usually works:

• Introduce the first topic, then the second

• Then discuss the area of overlap relevant to your research question

• Then introduce the third area of interest

• Followed by a discussion of how it is relevant to topics 1 and 2

• And at this point, your research question should derive from the areas you discussed.

Writing the review

Contrary to current assumptions, AI tools do not deliver perfectly formed and well-argued literature reviews. They can be great tools to support your work, but you need to be competent to work with and improve the outputs of the tools.

If you find yourself falling into the laundry list approach to writing, which goes somewhat like this: “he said/argued/proposed ... she said/argued/proposed ... and then they said…”, then it is time to invest some time in your ability to write.

AI tools can fix your writing style, but they do not really help you clarify your thinking. They can be a crutch, but a crutch is less useful if you do not know how to walk!

Taking away the opportunity to struggle with how you want to express your thinking also takes away an important cognitive practice that supports thinking: writing. While you might think this is about your ability to express your thoughts on the literature, I’d advise you to look at this really short and practical book:

Graff & Birkenstein (2018) They say / I say: The moves that matter in academic writing (4th ed.)

Not only does it give you the phrases and rhetorical moves, it also makes it clear that setting up those rhetorical moves is part of you constructing your argument.

Further readings and suggestions

Hopefully, this two-parter was useful, and it helped you with coming to grips with the literature review. There is more good stuff out there that really informed my practice, and below is a selection of resources you might like:

• Pat Thompson (University of Nottingham) has a handy blog, where she outlines why literature reviews can be such hard work: Part 1 and Part 2, both worth reading.

• Here are some useful tips from Patter on how to prepare for writing about the literature.

Chris Hart has written two helpful books:

• Doing your Masters Dissertation

• Doing a Literature Review

If you are struggling with finding a research question, these two books have some good ideas on how to get started:

• Booth, Colomb & Williams (2016) The Craft of Research (4th ed) Ch. 3

• Patrick White (2017) Developing Research Questions (2nd ed)

Good luck with your next literature review!!

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Like so many things in life, your own practice improves when you have to teach these skills. Right now, we are starting the annual cycle of Master’s Dissertations, so I am back to explaining literature reviews to my students. For these students, dissertations are often the first time that they are confronted with the tasks of independent research. Because in many higher education systems abroad, dissertations are not necessarily required at the undergraduate level.

Even more problematic is that many students don’t really like to read, or at least not academic literature. And while some seem to believe that AI can just do it for them, the reality is that it is difficult to write decent prompts and adequately assess AI output if you don’t know what you are looking for.

So, at the end of the day, AI tools can assist students in comprehending the literature, but they will still need to understand how to review the literature critically and present this clearly. But more on this some other time.

How to help students with literature reviews

In my experience, this starts with clarifying what we mean by literature, as opposed to data. Many students have only written essays and reports at this point, and often do not see the difference between types of documents.

It also helps to highlight that referencing other people's work in their research actually makes their research look better, because it allows them to demonstrate what they know and that they are able to build on it.

So when I teach this, I teach both basic steps and fundamental techniques — some of which I have found helpful for my own research and publishing. We don’t often talk about these basics, but the fundamental practices of research are actually very useful in my view.

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What this post and next will cover:

• What is a literature review? And what does a good one do?

• Finding academic literature — and why snowballing is still the best approach in my book

• Why and how to reference other people’s work — especially if you are an interdisciplinary researcher!

• How to read academic work effectively (Part 2)

• How to take notes — sounds basic, but is very important (Part 2)

• How to structure the literature review (Part 2)

• Some further reading suggestions and other resources. (Part 2)

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