Apparently, the online world refers to it as a blood sport.

Like many things in academia, that sounds somewhat overwrought, but there is no question that these conflicts can become very bruising and end academic relationships.

It’s tricky to list an even remotely comprehensive list of the sources of conflict:

• Author order

• Who gets to be first or corresponding author

• Failure to contribute

• Failure by the first/corresponding author to act and contribute

• Disagreement over direction

• Incom…

Read more

Today, we have a guest piece by Omeghie Okoyomoh, one of the doctoral researchers I supervise, in which she shares the lessons she's learned over her three years of study. She discusses how to develop a healthy attitude towards the PhD and offers a counterweight to the doctoral drama that dominates social sites.

And imagine my relief when she says she didn't write from the perspective of a toxic supervisor (cheque’s in the post :-) ).

You don’t have to romanticise burnout to earn your degree.

It’s Day 1 of your PhD, and you’ve made it! Through the cold emails to supervisors, rewriting your writing sample, the scholarship applications (I finished mine between hair and nail appointments on the eve of my best friend’s wedding), and the endless admin involved in finally getting admitted. Or maybe, like I am, you’re already three years into the journey.

If you’re anything like me, you spend hours on r/PhD (Reddit community), follow a bunch of PhD influencers, and watch 2,400 TikToks a month about the PhD experience. Most tell you how your supervisor now owns your soul. Many creators wear their mental breakdowns like a badge of honour, while others are trying to sell you some tool that you absolutely must have to survive the next 3–8 years of your life.

Let me cut through the noise for you. Based on my personal experiences and countless conversations with other PhD students, both within and outside the UK, here are 10 no-nonsense tips for surviving your PhD.

1. This is a job, not your identity.

You must learn to compartmentalise and understand the difference between who you are and the work you’re doing. This ensures that every problematic stage of your research doesn’t begin to feel like a personal failure.

No, you’re not a bad PhD student because you’ve written seven versions of your literature review and there are still ninety comments. Sometimes you’re navigating a complex area, and it takes a little time. Don’t take the bad days personally. That way lies frustration and extreme burnout.

2. Embarrassment is a useless emotion. Let it go now.

Not everything you try will work. In fact, you’ll probably encounter more dead ends than successes. Shake it off and move on. Try a new theory. Build a different experiment. Rewrite the paper from scratch.

Having to do something over isn’t failure; it’s evidence that you’ve learnt something new. That theory you spent three months working on may not work for this paper, but it’s in your toolbox now. You’ve got a long career ahead of you and enough time to whip it out again.

3. Be intentional about enjoying your experience.

There is no reward for misery. You don’t get an award for being “the most intense PhD student”. Get out of the office and go touch grass.

Guilt around rest and recreation is such a common theme in conversations with PhD students, particularly when progress isn’t following the ‘efficient PhD’ timeline you’ve set for yourself.

I know it’s hard. I do it too. I spent half my holiday in Albania wondering whether I should have stayed behind to focus on that journal article due in a month. But being tired in the office isn’t going to get you to that deadline.

Before I left for my trip, I was ready to print my paper out and burn it in the bathtub. By the time I returned, I was clear-headed enough to try something else. It worked, and the paper is finally back on track.

4. Build the community that works for you.

Figure out who you need and actively work to find them. If you need accountability partners, go out and find them. If you need cheerleaders, do the same. Some people are lucky enough to find everything they need in their supervisors or their lab. Others need to be a little more intentional.

Don’t whine about it. Don’t pretend you don’t need anyone. Go out and find the people you need.

5. An idiot in motion will go further than a genius at rest.

I have a love-hate relationship with this axiom. But, boy, does it work!

The biggest mistake I keep making is waiting until everything makes sense before I start writing. It’s the perfect excuse to keep delaying that first word for months on end.

Write the nonsense draft. Even better, send it out for feedback. I’ve received some pretty hilarious comments on my writing drafts. I love them! And it’s incredibly satisfying when the next round of feedback addresses something else entirely. Previous issues fixed; on to the next. Progress!

Don’t be afraid to look idiotic. It’s better than having absolutely nothing to show.

6. Move on!

I’ve seen colleagues lose weeks to frustration because of roadblocks in their work. There’s a reason resilience is always on the list of skills a PhD is supposed to teach you.

So, things didn’t work out. Take a moment to acknowledge how much it hurts. Then show up again the next day and find another route. A friend spent half a year and a lot of money chasing data in an actual jungle that was not worth so much in the end. She sat with her supervisors; they re-strategised, and she’s moving forward.

7. Make use of all the resources available to you, and I mean as many as you need.

Go to the library for writing and research support. Join community groups and apply for mentorship schemes. My university offers a subscription to The PhD Lifecoach. I finally signed up in my third year. I should have done it in my first!

Find the resources available at your university and use them. Never do things the hard way if there’s an easier way.

8. Advocate for yourself!

I write from the perspective of someone who has never had to seek anonymous advice on how to survive a terrible supervisor or a toxic lab.

However, if this is your experience, please take advantage of the resources available at your university to advocate for yourself.

You do not deserve to suffer for years in pursuit of this degree.

9. DO NOT COMPARE!!!!

Just don’t.

10. Never lose sight of your why.

That mental breakdown everyone talks about? It seems to begin when you start questioning why you’re doing all of this in the first place.

Your undergraduate classmates now have ‘manager’ in front of their names. Someone just bought their first house, while another has sent you an invitation to a destination wedding in France. You can’t go because you can’t afford it. Also, you’re reading the sixtieth journal article on some vague theory, and your brain is glitching almost audibly. You’re in no mood to smile at old classmates and join a conga line.

This is where the difficulty hits hardest. It’s also where you need to remind yourself what a PhD is and why it matters.

In these moments, remember that when your training is complete, you’ll get to join a community of people whose work can, and often does, change society.

Every piece of research, in big or small ways, provides the intellectual foundation upon which we build society. You will stop being a PhD student soon enough, and whether you go into academia or industry, the skills you’ve learnt will form the tools that inform policy, education, development, healthcare, technology, and so much more.

Imagine a society where nobody does the work we do. Imagine how broken and uninformed it would likely be. Reconnect with your why and keep going. Your work matters!

Overall, your PhD is a deeply personal journey, and you get to design it. Many things will be out of your control, but for most of us, the journey is what we make it. So choose to enjoy your PhD. Choose to balance work and life. Choose to make the best of an intense experience.

It’s okay. You’re allowed to.

Hope you enjoyed that!

If you did, why don’t you check out Ome’s TikTok?

For full subscribers, some resources for doctoral researchers and their supervisors.

And, of course, hopefully some of the resources on History in Organizations are helpful, too.

Hope this helps!

Leave a comment

We are back with a new reading club video! If you want to watch previous instalments of our recorded webinars, check them out here:

• Natalya Vinokurova on her Strategic Management Journal article on establishing new categories

• Rohin Borpujari on his Organization Science article on secrecy in the Manhattan Project

• Chris Hartwell on his Journal of Management article on managing political networks under dictatorship

The discussion covered many interesting issues, but at some point the panellists noted that the business and management community in the 1980s and 1990s focused on improving research quality. Panellists agreed that this phase was over, and that quality was now very high - much higher than other disciplines. Gerard Hodgkinson reflected that someone he knew started studying history, and through this he found out that all historians do is root around in archives.

I kid you not:

The audience started to murmur.

Some people turned to look towards me (seated conveniently right in the middle).

I had planned to make a comment to Gerard after, but then I just went:

“But that’s not what the historians in the business school do, Gerard.”

And Gerard, bless him, went:

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

And while this is a lovely anecdote, I am also relaying it here because I think he is right. Being in the business school has really forced historical researchers to think more deeply about what we do and how we can make it transparent.

And the article I co-authored with Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki and Elena Giovannoni about historical imagination has been an important part of this journey for me.

So today is part 2 of my longer post about historical imagination.

In part 1, we looked at the three-step process of gleaning meaning from sources, through interpolation, interpretation, and understanding.

And yet, for the resulting narrative to be considered historically rigorous, there are four important standards that Collingwood set out.

The four standards

While we based this on Collingwood’s criteria for a rigorous historical narrative, these are somewhat adapted and brought up to date:

1. The narrative makes sense, and is continuous and coherent.

2. The narrative is localised in time and space.

3. The narrative is consistent with other historical accounts.

4. The narrative is based on evidence.

Some of these may look straightforward (sure, evidence), others have raised questions when we presented this (particularly 3). They go together with the three practices that form the basis of historical imagination.

For full subscribers:

A short, common-sense description how to implement this.

But the underlying article is available open access, so check it out!

• Our paper: Stephanie Decker, Elena Giovannoni and Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki, “A microhistory of architecture historical imagination and the Bauhaus”, Management & Organizational History 20 (4), 2024, 453-477.

In terms of the History in Organizations readership, three in ten of you are in the UK. Another two in ten are in the EU. The rest of you are spread across seventy-odd countries, with sizeable groups in the US, India, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Italy and South Africa. The funding landscape in our field is lopsidedly British and European, but for more generalist funders, you may have other national or institutional funders not listed here. Many of the funders below accept (collaborative) bids from international candidates.

But eligibility varies:

• UK only: you need a post at a UK institution, and usually UK residency.

• Europe-hosted: any nationality, but your host institution must be in the EU or an associated country. The UK counts here as an affiliated country (same for Switzerland, etc.).

• Open worldwide: no nationality or location bar, though you may have to travel.

Many competitions are annual or biennial (every two years) and fall in the same month each year, which means a deadline you miss is a date to put in next year’s calendar rather than a lost opportunity. Full subscribers can download a funding calendar at the end.

The one thing to read if you read nothing else

ESRC is permanently closing its three core applicant-led schemes on 4 November 2026. Responsive mode research grants, new investigator grants and secondary data analysis all shut that day and do not come back. This is not a round closing. It is the schemes ending.

Two replacements open the following morning, 5 November 2026, both with no closing date:

• Grow, £100,000 to £500,000 FEC, eighteen to sixty months, for people establishing research independence, pivoting into a new social science discipline, or building advanced methodological expertise. This is roughly where new investigator grants went, with a wider remit and a higher ceiling. ukri.org/opportunity/esrc-applicant-led-grow-awards

• Explore, £300,000 to £2 million FEC, up to sixty months, for curiosity-driven work that pushes disciplinary, methodological or conceptual boundaries. Individuals or teams of up to four core members. This is roughly where responsive mode research grants went. ukri.org/opportunity/esrc-applicant-led-explore-awards

• Challenge, £2 million to £10 million, follows in early 2027 for large collaborative programmes. ukri.org/opportunity/esrc-applicant-led-challenge-awards

Together with the React and Connect pilots already running, that makes five.

ESRC is running a virtual town hall on 30 September covering all three new calls. Town hall sign-up: ukri.org/events/economic-and-social-research-council-virtual-town-hall

Open now, with a deadline

Ordered by closing date.

Marketing Impact Research Grant 2026 · British Academy of Management and the Marketing Trust

Maximum £6,600 per project across up to three projects, one of which is ringfenced for an early career academic as lead applicant (early career defined as within five years of the doctorate). Open to researchers at any career stage. The remit is marketing broadly defined, including its interface with any other field of business and management: brand heritage, advertising, consumption and corporate communication. Members of the BAM Executive, the Marketing Trust Board and the awards committee are excluded. Deadline: Wednesday 23 September 2026, 14:00 UK. Institutional approvers have until 30 September, 17:00.

Nine days from publication, so this is the one to look at first. Applications go through BAM institutional approval, which in practice means a UK institution; BAM does not state this as a formal nationality rule, so ask if you are elsewhere. Cycle: annual, launching in June and closing in September.

bam.ac.uk/grants/marketing-impact-research-grant-2026.html

Postdoctoral Fellowships, Outline Stage 2026-27 · British Academy

Three years, starting autumn 2027, non-renewable. The Academy funds 80% of salary and directly allocated and indirect costs under FEC. Eligibility is narrow: your viva must fall between 1 April 2024 and 1 April 2027, and anyone who has ever held a permanent academic post is out. Success rate has rarely exceeded 10%. Nationality rules are a bit complex; make sure to check the website. Deadline: Wednesday 30 September 2026, 17:00 BST. UK-hosted, with nationality conditions. Cycle: annual, opening 1 July and closing 30 September, with an invited second stage the following January. Unsuccessful outline applicants cannot reapply unless invited.

thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/schemes/postdoctoral-fellowships

Pasold Research Project Grants · Pasold Research Fund

Between £751 and £2,500 for textile, dress and fashion history, including preliminary work towards a larger bid. Research expenses only, no salaries, no retrospective applications. Deadline: 1 October 2026. Open worldwide for research grants; workshop applications restricted to UK universities and museums. Cycle: twice a year, 1 March and 1 October. The Fund also runs MA, PhD, publication and Raine grants, plus Pasold Research Fellowships and the Neaverson Pasold Postdoctoral Fellowship.

pasold.co.uk/research-project-grants

Talent Development Awards 2026-27 · British Academy

Maximum £10,000 for skills acquisition rather than a research project: advanced quantitative methods, data science, digital humanities, languages. Around twenty-six awards expected. It will not fund a research project, time buy-out for the lead applicant, computer hardware, books, institutional overheads or payment in lieu of salary, and it will not fund activity that only applies skills you already have. Co-applicants may be based overseas. Deadline: 7 October 2026, 17:00 UK. UK only for the lead applicant, who must hold a long-term appointment at a UK HEI or IRO and be ordinarily resident in the UK. Cycle: annual, opening in July and closing in October.

thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/schemes/talent-development-awards

React Awards (pilot) · ESRC

Short, time-critical work of up to six months, assessed on a rolling basis with a target decision inside ten working days. Awards run £50,000 to £100,000 from a £1.5 million pot, at 80% FEC. Read the eligibility: you need a confirmed partnership with at least one public sector organisation that can use the outputs within six months, and the project must start within a month of funding confirmation. Deadline: 8 October 2026, 16:00 UK. UK only. Cycle: pilot, so no guarantee it repeats. The companion Connect pilot, £50,000 to £150,000 for testing novel ideas and building collaborations, closed on 10 June 2026.

ukri.org/opportunity/esrc-react-awards-pilot

ERC Starting Grant 2027 · European Research Council

€1.5 million over five years, with up to €1 million more available for relocation and equipment, rising to €2 million for researchers moving from a non-associated third country. Your PhD must have been defended no more than ten years before 1 January 2027, with no minimum; the ERC now counts from the certified date of the successful defence rather than the award date. The call opened 22 July 2026, earlier than its predecessors. Deadline: 14 October 2026, 17:00 Brussels. Europe-hosted, any nationality. Cycle: annual, though the calendar moves.

erc.europa.eu/apply-grant/starting-grant

Bursary for Business History Research · Business Archives Council

The annual fund is around £1,000 in total, awarded as one or more grants, for researchers who need to get to business or organisational archives in England and Wales and have no other way of paying for it. The BAC is explicit that it is aimed at people without permanent contracts and at widening who gets into the archives, and that the sums suit scoping and pilot work rather than a full project. Application is a Google Form, and the panel draws on academics at Essex, Newcastle and Henley. Deadline: midday, 16 October 2026. Open by archive location rather than by nationality: the archives must be in England or Wales. Cycle: annual, autumn.

businessarchivescouncil.org.uk/activitiesobjectives/bursary

Chandler Travel Grants for BHC 2027 annual meeting, call for papers · Business History Conference

Sheraton Mexico City Maria Isabel, 18 to 20 March 2027, on business history and political economy. The programme committee has flagged particular interest in corporations from emerging economies and in Latin American material, given the venue. Not funding as such, but the Chandler travel grants for graduate students and the postdoctoral travel awards both follow from acceptance, so this deadline is the gate. Deadline: 16 October 2026. Open worldwide. Cycle: annual, with the call closing in mid-October for a spring meeting.

thebhc.org/2027-bhc-call-papers

Exploratory and Henry Belin du Pont Research Grants · Hagley Museum and Library

Hagley holds one of the best business and technology history collections anywhere. Exploratory grants fund a one-week scoping visit at $400; du Pont grants run up to eight weeks. Anyone may apply, and Hagley encourages you to talk to library staff before you do. The stipends are modest, so most people pair them with other travel money. Deadline: 31 October 2026. Open worldwide, but you have to get to Delaware. Cycle: three times a year, 31 March, 30 June and 31 October. Decisions within 45 days of the deadline.

hagley.org/research/grants-fellowships

Carnevali Small Research Grants · Economic History Society

Up to £5,000, explicitly for pilot studies that seed larger applications, or small-scale work with a defined publication goal. It will not cover conference attendance, equipment, publication costs, subsistence, administration, salary buy-out or teaching cover, indirect costs, or room hire at your own institution. Successful applicants cannot reapply for three years. Decisions in six to eight weeks. Deadline: 1 November 2026. UK institution, and you must be an EHS member. Cycle: twice a year, 1 May and 1 November.

ehs.org.uk/award/carnevali-small-research-grants

Responsive mode, new investigator and secondary data analysis: final call · ESRC · UK only

See the section above for why this is the last one. All three close 4 November 2026, 16:00 UK, permanently. Research grants £350,000 to £1 million FEC over up to sixty months; new investigator grants £100,000 to £350,000, ruling you out if you hold a professorship or have previously led an ESRC or UKRI research grant, postdoctoral fellowships excepted; secondary data analysis up to £300,000. All at 80% FEC, all requiring social science to be more than half the research focus and effort, which an organisation studies framing carries comfortably even when the material is historical. Talk to your research office about their internal cut-off before you do anything else.

Research Fellowships · Leverhulme Trust

Tenable for three to twenty-four months, for experienced researchers who have been kept from a programme of original research by routine duties. Value up to £70,000. Deadline: 5 November 2026, 16:00. UK post and UK residency. Cycle: annual, autumn deadline.

leverhulme.ac.uk/research-fellowships

BAM and SIMA Collaborative Research Grant 2026 · UK lead, Italian partner

Maximum £4,000 for one project. At least one lead or co-applicant at a UK higher education institution and at least one at an Italian one, with the Italian applicant holding active SIMA membership in scientific sector ECON07/A. Register your application in the BAM Grants Portal now, deadline for applicants to submit applications in the BAM Grants Portal: Thursday 12th November 2026 at 16:00 (UK time). If you have an Italian collaborator, email BAM’s grants manager directly rather than working from any of those. Cycle: annual, intended. BAM has said equivalent schemes with ANZAM in Australasia and IAM in Ireland will launch in 2027.

bam.ac.uk/grants.html

Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History · Business History Conference

$500 and a plaque, for dissertations completed in the three calendar years before the annual meeting and written in English. You may submit only once, so choose your year. Nominations and self-nominations both accepted, consisting of a cover letter, the abstract and a CV. Finalists present at the annual meeting. Deadline: 14 November 2026. Open worldwide. Cycle: annual, 14 November.

thebhc.org/krooss

General research grants · Gerda Henkel Foundation

German foundation funding the historical humanities, naming history, history of science and history of law among its fields. Deadline: 20 November 2026. Committees meet in April 2027 and funding can start from May 2027 at the earliest, so build the lead time into your plans. Open worldwide. Cycle: twice a year. Worth knowing: the deadline does not apply to applications of €30,000 or less, which go through a simplified procedure, can be submitted at any time and are decided in roughly three to four months. Note also that the Foundation amended some funding regulations on 1 July 2026, so double-check the details.

gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/en/grants

Alfred D. Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar · Harvard Business School

Established business historians based outside the United States spend two to six months in residence at HBS. $7,000 stipend paid at the end of the visit, plus office space, computer, ID card and full library access. You must be in residence during the fall semester and participate in the Business History Seminar, which runs from late September through November. Application is a cover letter, CV, a two- to three-page proposal and two references via Interfolio. Of everything on this list, this is the one most precisely aimed at a mid-career or senior business historian outside the US, and it is not widely advertised in the UK. Deadline: 1 December, recurring. The page has shown 1 December 2025 since last winter and the current cycle is not posted, so treat December as the pattern and confirm before you write anything. Open worldwide except the United States. Cycle: annual, 1 December.

hbs.edu/businesshistory/fellowships

Thomas K. McCraw Fellowship in U.S. Business History · Harvard Business School

The sibling scheme. Established scholars from anywhere in the world whose primary interest is the business and economic history of the United States, in residence for a minimum of two months during the fall semester, researching in Baker Library or other Boston-area archives. $7,000 stipend and the same facilities. Deadline: 1 December, recurring, same caveat about the year shown. Open worldwide. Cycle: annual, 1 December.

hbs.edu/businesshistory/fellowships

ERC Consolidator Grant 2027 · European Research Council

€2 million over five years, with up to €1 million more in justified cases. PhD defended between five and fifteen years before 1 January 2027, counted from the certified defence date. Opens 24 September 2026. Deadline: 12 January 2027. Europe-hosted, any nationality. Cycle: annual.

erc.europa.eu/apply-grant/consolidator-grant

Coleman Prize · Association of Business Historians

£500, sponsored by Taylor & Francis, for a PhD dissertation in business history either on a British subject or completed at a British university. Dissertations completed in 2025 and 2026 are eligible for this round. The ABH reads business history broadly. Shortlisted finalists must present in person at the annual conference, and are entitled to apply for a Francesca Carnevali grant of up to £200 towards costs. The ABH site gives 19 February 2027 for nominations, 19 March 2027 for full dissertations from the longlist, and 7 May 2027 for finalist notification. Those dates went up before the formal 2027 call, so re-check when it appears. Open worldwide by subject or institution, not by nationality. Cycle: annual, February.

theabh.org/prizes-and-workshops

History at HBS Postdoctoral Fellowship · Harvard Business School

A twelve-month appointment running July to June, for a PhD completed within the past five years in business and economic history or cognate fields including political economy, economics, management and history. Residence required, with duties supporting the Business History Seminar series and possibly the Business History Review. Deadline: rolling, with early March the recurring point for full consideration. The 2026-27 round asked for applications by 8 March 2026; the 2027-28 date is not yet posted. Open worldwide. Cycle: annual, early March.

hbs.edu/businesshistory/fellowships

Alfred D. Chandler Jr. Travel Fellowships · Harvard Business School

$1,000 to $5,000 for library and archival research in business or economic history. Three categories of applicant, including graduate students or non-tenured faculty at any university, in the US or abroad, whose research requires travel to Baker Library and other Boston archives. Deadline: 15 March, recurring. The last stated date was 15 March 2026 and the 2027 date is not yet posted. Open worldwide, graduate students and non-tenured faculty. Cycle: annual, 15 March.

hbs.edu/businesshistory/fellowships

Open continuously, with no deadline at all

ESRC Explore and Grow · UKRI · UK only · Cycle: continuous, from 5 November 2026, 09:00

Explore £300,000 to £2 million FEC over up to sixty months, for curiosity-driven work pushing disciplinary, methodological or conceptual boundaries, from a project lead plus up to three co-leads. Grow £100,000 to £500,000 FEC over eighteen to sixty months, for establishing independence, pivoting into a new social science discipline, or building advanced methodological expertise. Both at 80% FEC, both requiring social science to be more than half the focus and effort, both assessed on a rolling basis with regular decision points. Challenge, £2 million to £10 million, follows in early 2027.

AHRC applicant-led mode · UKRI · UK only · Cycle: consecutive rounds, effectively continuous

Standard research grants £300,000 to £1.5 million at 80% FEC, requiring a project lead plus at least one co-lead, up to five years, with projects starting at least nine months after submission. AHRC runs these in consecutive rounds and the round numbering shifts, so check which round is live before you start writing, and check the Catalyst and Curiosity pages for their own terms. The standard grant opportunity carries a technical closing date of 22 September 2026 while AHRC updates its systems, after which a new application link goes up.

ukri.org/opportunity/ahrc-responsive-mode-standard-research-grant

Gerda Henkel small grants · Open worldwide · Cycle: continuous

Applications up to €30,000 sit outside the November and spring deadlines, go through a simplified procedure and can be submitted at any time, with a decision in roughly three to four months.

gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/en/grants

Between rounds, and when they return

ERC Advanced Grant · up to €2.5 million over five years · Europe-hosted, any nationality

The 2026 call closed on 27 August 2026. Up to €1 million more is available for relocation and equipment, rising to €2 million for researchers moving from non-associated third countries. There is no eligibility window, so career stage is judged on the record rather than years since PhD. You need to commit at least 30% of your working time to the project and spend at least half your working time in an EU member state or associated country. The 2027 round opens 27 May 2027 and closes 26 August 2027. Cycle: annual, one Advanced call per Work Programme.

erc.europa.eu/apply-grant/advanced-grant

Mid-Career Fellowship · British Academy · UK only

The 2026-27 round closed 26 August 2026, with awards starting between 1 September 2026 and 1 January 2027. Buys out up to 100% of your time for six to twelve months, to a maximum around £152,000 at 80% FEC. The guidance suggests applicants are usually within fifteen years of the doctorate, with allowance for career breaks, then makes clear this is not strictly enforced and that anyone who can justify mid-career status is welcome. Public engagement is weighted heavily alongside research quality. Previous holders cannot reapply. Cycle: annual, opening in June and closing in late August. Re-check the detailed terms against the 2027-28 guidance when it appears in June.

thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/schemes/mid-career-fellowships

Postdoctoral Fellowships · Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

The 2026 call closed 9 September 2026; the 2027 call should open around April and close in September. European Fellowships run twelve to twenty-four months and are open to any nationality. Global Fellowships, which send you outside Europe with a mandatory twelve-month return, carry additional nationality and long-term residence conditions. Up to eight years of research experience since the PhD. The 2026 call carried an indicative budget of €399 million and was expected to fund close to 1,600 projects. You apply jointly with a host. Cycle: annual, opening around April and closing in September.

marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu

Leverhulme Research Project Grants · up to £500,000 over up to five years · UK only

Open to Outline Applications from 21 September 2026 with no deadline. Detailed application deadline: 1 July 2026 (decision: Mid-October 2026), application deadline: 1 September 2026 (decision: Late-November 2026).

https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/research-project-grants

Later ERC calls · Europe-hosted · Cycle: annual, one call each per Work Programme

· Synergy 2027 opens 17 February, closes 11 May, up to €10 million for groups of two to four investigators.

· Advanced 2027 opens 27 May, closes 26 August.

· ERC Plus opens 1 June, closes 1 September.

Confirm all of these against the 2027 Work Programme when it is published rather than against this listing.

Cataloguing Grant · Business Archives Council · UK archives and organisations

It funds cataloguing work on business collections rather than a researcher’s own project, so the applicant is the repository. The 2026 round closed 5 August 2026 after an extension.

businessarchivescouncil.org.uk/news

BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants · up to £10,000 · UK lead, co-applicants anywhere

The 2026 round opened 8 April and closed 3 June. Cycle: annual, spring. A 2027 round has not been announced.

Postdoctoral Visiting Fellowships at the IHR · Economic History Society · early career, UK-affiliated

Up to three one-year fellowships in economic or social history, run with the Institute of Historical Research. Stipends were £22,780 outside London and £24,780 for London-based fellows in the 2026-27 round, which closed 31 January 2026 at 11:00. You need a recently completed doctorate, or a thesis to be submitted by 1 October of the fellowship year, plus an informal mentoring arrangement with a British university. Cycle: annual, January, with the exact 2027 date to follow.

ehs.org.uk/award/economic-history-society-fellowships

Arthur H. Cole grants-in-aid · Economic History Association · up to $5,000 · open worldwide, EHA members

For PhD holders, with preference to recent recipients. Higher amounts in exceptional cases. The 2026 round closed 1 March 2026. Cycle: annual, 1 March.

eh.net/arthur-h-cole-grants

Hoare’s Bank Research Grant · Economic History Society · up to £10,000 · EHS members

Funded by C. Hoare & Co. for work in the bank’s own archives on the economic and social history of finance, wealth, investment and consumption in Britain between 1860 and 1938. Narrow, and unusually well-funded for a learned society award. Tenable for up to two years. Same exclusions as the Carnevali grants, and you owe a 2,000-word report, a public presentation with a blog post, and an annotated outline of further research possibilities in the archive. Deadline: 1 May, annually, with outcomes in six to eight weeks.

ehs.org.uk/award/hoares-bank-research-grant

Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop and Francesca Carnevali Grant · Association of Business Historians · doctoral

The ABH site gives 26 March 2027 for the Slaven Workshop, issued alongside the main conference call, and 10 June 2027 for the Carnevali Grant, with £2,000 shared out at up to £200 a head and applicants required to be paid-up ABH members. Cycle: both annual.

theabh.org/prizes-and-workshops

Smaller and stranger

Small Grants Scheme · Newcomen Society · £500 to £10,000

For the history of engineering and technology. Read the eligibility carefully before you get excited: applicants must be registered charities, voluntary organisations or registered archives holding relevant collections, not individual academics or universities. Researchers can apply as a named collaborator on an application led by a partner archive, with the grant used as match funding. Applications start with an expression of interest by email, after which you are assigned a Trustee as a contact. Cycle: not annual, and no fixed deadline. It runs for one year from 25 February 2026 and is then under review, so do not assume there is a 2027 call.

newcomen.com/the-newcomen-society-small-grants-scheme

Henry Kaufman Financial History Fellowship · Business History Conference

Dissertation fellowships for PhD candidates and postdoctoral fellowships for those within five years of receipt of the degree. Multiple tracks, check websites for deadlines (normally three per year).

thebhc.org/grants

Not relevant for you?

Manage which type of content you receive from History in Organizations:

1. Go to substack.com/settings (on the app: tap your profile picture, then Settings).

2. Under Subscriptions, click on History in Organizations.

3. You’ll see a toggle next to each section. Switch off the ones you don’t want. Grey means off. You can change your mind any time.

There’s a shortcut, too: the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email will offer to unsubscribe you from individual sections rather than the whole newsletter.

The new archives were opened in a ceremony at Lever House by the CEO of Unilever, Fernando Fernandez, Chief of Global Business Services, Juan-Carlos Parada, and, of course, Claire Tunstall, the Global Head of Art, Archives and Records Management.

Apart from being a great event, all participants got a bespoke tour of the new archives, and the post today is largely images of the great stuff they have in Unilever’s corporate archives.

Check out the gallery below to get a sense of what the new archives space is like. Also spot the Colman’s Mustard Club advertising in there. Apparently they had 2,000 new applications every week when it ran in the newspapers and on the sides of buses.

But there were some special gems in there, and I’ve left those for the full subscribers as a special treat!

And don’t forget, companies like Unilever actually allow vetted researchers to access their archives by prior agreement. But even if not, it is always worthwhile checking out their website for information about the archives and seeing their digitised collections here: https://www.unilever.com/our-company/our-history-and-archives/.

For full subscribers, some highlights from the archives, and a reflection on the strategic narratives that Unilever is weaving around its archives and history.

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But how did the Bauhaus achieve this status of cultural signifier, and did people at the time, in 1923, view it in the same way? Unlikely.

What it was like to walk into the most significant part of the exhibition, the Haus am Horn, in the summer of 1923, and find a house with no hallway, rooms opening straight into other rooms, and a central skylight. Did that feel like the future, or like being informed that your own home was wrong?

Historians work mostly from documents, and also images. But these immediate experiences are never written down. People, of course, reflected on and wrote about the exhibition. Somewhat later. And those whose words found their way into newspapers were clearly elite voices. There was no social media then – though we all know that social media does not capture the immediacy of experience, as people avidly curate their public personas online.

So how can we research the historical experience of aesthetic innovations, of novelty, or realisation or new insights?

You may argue it is not relevant, but delight, wonder, shock and rejection are important for business and management research, too.

Understanding how things appeared in a different context is central to historical methods. While not as well-known and widely rehearsed as source criticism, there have been, admittedly somewhat disjointed, discussions of how historical researchers develop this understanding.

In a recent article, we outlined these practices as historical imagination. I will break down what that means in two posts. Today, we focus on the three practical steps you set out in the methods section, transparently linking your evidence to your interpretation. In the second part, we will focus on the standards that constrain historical imagination, differentiating historical narratives from novels and other forms of imaginative fiction. Yep, that is actually more straightforward than people claim.

Imagination has a bad name

Imagination is more often anathema to methods training sessions than a part of it. Research is supposed to be the opposite of it. Disciplined imagination may just about be allowed when it comes to theorising, according to the late Karl Weick.

Let’s challenge the organization theorists with one very influential historical theorist: R. G. Collingwood. His well-known book The Idea of History (1946) includes a chapter on the historical imagination. The thing you are researching does not exist anymore, which means you cannot observe it (like ethnographers), interview it (like social scientists), or run it a second time under different conditions (like an experimental researcher).

In management & organizational history, we have been over this – Gabie Durepos and co-authors have reframed this as the “ontological inaccessibility of the past”. Part of our working toolkit are key concepts like the past (everything that happened but can no longer be observed) and history (what we reconstruct about the past from traces of past occurrences).

But how do we reconstruct it? Collingwood, as a writer, likes visuals and metaphors, and he uses them to describe that historical narrative is “a web of imaginative construction stretched between certain fixed points provided by the statements of his authorities”.

And the fixed points are your sources. Authorities can also be historiography, but we get to this in part two. The web is provided by historical imagination.

E. H. Carr, another influential historical theorist, spoke more about the flesh on the bone, or the edible bit of a fruit, separate from the core.

Collingwood’s more famous comparison is the detective, who “is thinking exactly like an historian when, from indications of the most varied kinds, he constructs an imaginary picture of how a crime was committed, and by whom”. Carlo Ginzburg used the same idea decades later.

This is, of course, very engaging, and why I wanted to use a film noir gumshoe as a key character in “The Research Detective” series. Comparing historical practice to detectives at a crime scene has quite a long lineage.

That’s fun, but it won’t directly help you write your methods section. In our paper, we drew on Collingwood to develop three distinct steps that provide you with an auditable framework that helps your readers, who may not be historically trained, see how you interpreted your sources.

1. Interpolation: joining up what you already have

Small and simple: You have information that does not run continuously, it has gaps that are quite straightforward and you connect it.

Collingwood’s version: the sources put Caesar in Rome on one date and in Gaul on a later one, they say nothing whatever about the journey, “but we interpolate this with a perfectly good conscience”. Ours: in a business archive you find a letter sent by the managing director from Spain, and a later letter from the same person in Belgium. She travelled. A normal thing to do for someone in that position.

You may not say that she travelled by sea, that she enjoyed it, or that she stopped in Lyon on the way. (Unless you have evidence for any of this, of course.)

Most interpolation is quite mundane.

In the case of the Bauhaus, this seems not overly relevant, as the school is one of the most heavily documented organisations of the twentieth century. Still, as Trouillot has pointed out, it is simply impossible to record EVERYTHING. And the Bauhaus has been extensively documented as an artistic enterprise and as a school, in terms of its political battles and its key figures. As a business, not so much… other than that, we know it was not that commercially viable. Artists were interested in art, not accounting.

Most archival collections have gaps, even when they are very rich. Some are very, very “gappy”. It helps to be clear on that, and to outline how leaning on interpolation allows you to develop a preliminary narrative or outline of the case.

2. Interpretation: making the sources speak

Interpretation means assessing the plausibility of your evidence and putting people, their choices and the events they experienced back into their own time and context.

Take the 1923 exhibition. With hindsight it reads as the moment the Bauhaus arrived: the Haus am Horn, commissions from industry, thousands through the door, and the poster that ends up on a restaurant wall in Dublin ninety-six years later.

But what did the same event mean in its own moment?

After the paywall, how you use historiography to provide context, how understanding goes beyond interpretation, and some examples of the types of sources that really help you achieve this. Also, a curated list of interesting online reading and debate that are not rubbish (or botshit). ;-)

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I used to have that pinned on the wall in my office. It was a reminder that advice is plentiful, but whether you should always take it on board is a question worth asking. I have sought advice in the past, followed it, and realised it was totally wrong. Did that person know that? I don’t know, but I have thoughts.

Why do people give advice? It’s their job. It makes them feel needed and powerful. They were asked and wanted to maintain a relationship. They want to pass on advice they themselves received or gathered and found helpful.

Of course, advice-giving is part of professional role and identity, as supervisor, mentor etc. And once you are senior faculty, you are regularly asked to dispense advice, both formally and informally.

Other people may approach this differently, but when asked to give advice, I start by reflecting on what has been helpful for me over the years. And I have found the advice on how to write the genre of management research papers most helpful, largely because I was trained in a different discipline with genre conventions. Consequently, I got regularly battered by reviewers in my first submission. Nowadays, when I read deeply humanities-shaped writing, I often get annoyed: “What is your point? Stop setting up strawmen only to move on without developing the point! Oh, it was not the point, was is it then? OK, it is this … and … you are going to end it on an open question and only obliquely position yourself through linguistic subtext… right.”

So yes, I have fully transitioned my disciplinary identity by now when it comes to my academic writing and reading identity.

Needless to say, writing advice for and from management journals is plentiful. Some of it is even helpful, at least it has been for me. But I now suspect it was not aways helpful, and when I now pass it on to my doctoral students or teach it in workshops, I am not sure it is always helpful to them either.

Why?

How over what

Approaching the problem as one where a novice researcher-writer has to fit in with genre conventions redirects the focus away from what is actually helpful. Increasingly I have come to believe that it gets in the way of novice writers expressing their actual idea and idiosyncratic perspective. And isn’t this what ultimately adding value through novel perspectives?

Novice researchers need to develop the skills at balancing the many different elements of a paper, and the many different types of knowledge that they are developing. Making connections between these different building blocks is complex, but becomes easier with practice. Distracting them from this process by an obsession with the peculiar genre expectations of management journals — maybe that is not always helpful…

I am not saying teaching genre does not matter. With journals overwhelmed, learning how to write “properly” for these outlets can no longer be the sole job of the reviewers and editors.

But it quickly turns into a toxic cocktail that revolves around the standard recipe for early career researchers, which goes like this:

• Write up your thesis as papers

• Publish as much and as quickly as possible in top journals

• Write for the top journals, follow what other successful researchers have done

• Start from the theory

• Do whatever the reviewers tell you

Not all of this is wrong; some of it surely is.

I’ve learned to ask people how they feel about the standard strategies. Are they happy to shape their research into papers? Do they feel comfortable sending their first paper to an intimidating top journal or would they prefer something less challenging to gain confidence? I don’t think they need to start from the theory (though it helps if the presentation does, which does not need to follow their process), and you should definitely not do EVERYTHING the reviewers tell you.

But you do need to write to journal, and I give that advice because it is a hygiene factor that every writer has control over. Now, though, I wonder … with all that advice on how to write and structure, does something get lost?

What are we writing about

We focus on getting the theoretical contribution, the structure and the style right – does that mean that management publishing does not care about the substance? What is it we want to say with our research? What are we demonstrating? What lens and approach are we promoting by showing how it offers a better, more novel approach?

In the last month, I started to wonder when working through an article draft with a doctoral researcher. So much was about the different building blocks of a paper – the methods, the theories, the data, the way to set out the problem and question – and what was lost was what she actually wanted to say with her research. Halfway through the revisions, I don’t think she knew anymore. All the well-meant advice had not clarified the message, but maybe buried it further.

It happens to more experienced researchers. After a few rounds of reviews, you did what was asked, and now you cannot remember why you wanted to write that paper in the first place. (Which is why you should never unquestionably do what the reviewers want. You cannot ignore it – but engaging with it should enhance and clarify your thinking, not bury it under the desires of other people.)

Last week I came back to a co-authored paper that I had worked on last year after a rejection, which made us rethink what we wanted it to do. Both co-authors got side-tracked by more urgent things. When I read the draft of that Frankenstein paper, half old, half revised, generally still in that half-baked state, I started to wonder what the damn thing is actually about.

My advice to the doctoral researcher was to work through some of these templates to finding the point in the pointless paper:

I loaned, copied and developed these when I needed them, mid-career and perpetually stuck between the demands of two different disciplines. They genuinely helped me figure out what some of my papers were about and what type of journal (business history? management?) they needed to go to.

But this time I decided not to take my own advice.

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Catch-up service:

• Historical analysis and AI – what the spreadsheet tells us about AI and work (recent post)

• Publication Strategy for QS Quacquarelli-Symonds World University Rankings (recent post)

• Publishing in Business History (now free)

• Publishing Strategies

Sorry, the video is for full subscribers only, but you get a free tester post, and you can use it here.

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So, if you do not know the QS ranking, you might be in a country and at a university that are not reliant on overseas students. But if you work in the UK or Australia, you are guaranteed to know what it is and why it is important: it is the single most important determinant in recruiting Chinese students.

As the story goes, Sheffield dropped out of the QS100 one year, and its international student recruitment cratered, only to recover in the next year, when the university rejoined the top 100.

If that still sounds absurd to you because you are somewhere where this does not matter, this statement is probably only slightly exaggerated: Being in the QS100 makes the difference between another round of redundancies (possibly not the voluntary kind) and no redundancies for universities in the UK and Australia.

And yes, we also have the REF, but it is not annual, and that is increasingly the signal, not the money.

That’s all grand, but why am I writing about it on History in Organizations? Because business school academics who can publish in historical journals (and get cited, important caveat!) have literally just hit the jackpot.

And this is super-secret, not widely known at all, knowledge, so the rest is behind a paywall and will stay there.

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This piece is a bit of a first for the Reading Club — the first quantitative article we are reading here. My ignorance on the finer points of quants technique shall be offset in the webinar by a very knowledgeable discussant, Ms Hailin (Helen) Lu, one of my doctoral students, who knows her quantitative tools.

And it is a first in a different way — the piece positions itself as methodologically abductive. More on that later.

After the paywall, the detailed review — for the true aficionados of History in Organization. ;-)

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After last week’s free post, I thought I would create a bit of a list and resource of which Friday posts are now available for free.

Catch-up service:

• The Guide to Historical Methods in Management, of course

• The Vibecoding Historian

• Is AI taking over Social Science Part 1 (Part 2 is mostly free as well)

• Rohin’s great talk about his Organization Science article

• Paula’s excellent post on research dissemination, also mentioned below.

There’s more, but I am running out of time and will provide a full list soon.

I teach strategy, so I have taught the value chain and related frameworks to students for years. When I was still an early-career scholar, I found myself in a position that many doctoral students might recognise: so many things seemed possible, and it was genuinely difficult to know what to do first or how much time to give to any of it.

At some point, I decided to try one of the strategy models I teach and apply it to my activities and career. So I asked myself: What does a value chain look like for an individual?

It turned out to be quite a fun exercise (yes, really). Not because the result was perfect, but because it forced me to look at the pieces, think about how they fit together, and be honest about the trade-offs. I have a tendency to say yes to everything, and it helped me see why that was not working.

This is what I talked about at the BAM Doctoral Fridays session last week. One of these things I like to say yes to. And, actually, rarely regret.

The value chain of a researcher

Porter’s value chain is a tool for understanding how an organisation creates value: what comes in, what gets processed, what gets delivered to market, and what support functions underpin it all. It was designed for firms. Turns out it works okay for academic careers, which is either reassuring or alarming, depending on your disposition.

My version looks roughly like this: On the research side — inbound resources (reading, data, ideas, networks), operations (writing articles, preparing grant applications), and delivery (submitting, navigating peer review, publication). Teaching sits alongside this as a parallel track: preparation, delivery, assessment. And then the key element at the end, which is frequently overlooked: visibility. Which is something that most of us ignore – but if you spent a lot of time and effort on creating the best work possible, you want it to be visible in your community, sure?

Self-promotion always seemed to be more warmly embraced by our American colleagues (sorry guys), at least that was my impression during the PhD, so many years ago. These days, social media has changed the playing field. Paula de la Cruz-Fernandez and I are planning a small, affordable e-Book that brings together blogs and broader practice in dissemination as a guide. And in the meantime, LinkedIn has emerged as the academic marketplace of ideas that some say Twitter once was (I was not so involved in social media at the time).

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But back to the value chain exercise. What are the equivalent support functions for an academic career? Procurement means finding opportunities, securing funding and securing protected time within your institution. Continuous development means investing in your knowledge of literature, identifying training opportunities and expanding your skills. Building your infrastructure: reference management, databases, AI tools, whatever your digital setup looks like – and if you need help with that, check out the “Tech Stack” section on this blog.

Doing this exercise was a useful audit that made me feel more confident about balancing the different demands and opportunities in an academic career. Yours might look different; that’s kind of the point with these diagnostic business models. I immediately noticed that I was putting almost no energy into visibility — the part where people actually discover your work. Conferences, LinkedIn, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, a blog. As you can see, I have now taken care of these, and I even blogged about your essential and optional to-dos. Also worthwhile drawing on Anne-Wil Harzing’s resources; her blog and YouTube channel are worth checking out if this is not something you have already sorted out.

The other thing the exercise clarifies is trade-offs. A primarily research-focused academic will have a very different value chain from a teacher-scholar. But ultimately, all of us have kind of portfolio careers, which means facing a wide range of choices that need to be balanced.

The ikigai of scholarly publishing

There is a Japanese concept, ikigai — roughly “life value” or “a sense of purpose.” In its popular form, it describes the overlap of four things: what you love, what the world needs, what you are good at, and what you can be paid for. You have probably seen the diagram. It’s cute, and a good way to dig a little deeper into what motivates you. And there is no part of an academic career where you need to be more motivated than scholarly publishing. Sadly.

For scholarly publishing, I think the four circles should be: what you love to write about, what the world needs to read, what gets recognised by your peers, and what gets published in the journals that count in your field.

The overlaps are perhaps more interesting:

• Editors of prestigious journals will tell you they publish what the world needs. Read a few issues of any of them and form your own view on that.

• What you love to write and what your peers recognise sometimes coincide – but often not, and the gap can feel like a personal failing when it is actually a structural feature of the field.

• The full four-way overlap – the thing you love, that matters, that is recognised, and that high-status journals will publish – does exist. It just tends to belong to a fairly small number of people at the top of the distribution.

Most of the time, you are navigating trade-offs between these four things. Knowing where you are willing to make these trade-offs should be a central part of your research strategy. And if a research career does not actually appeal once you think it through clearly, that is important information too. Maybe teaching, or more impact-oriented work with practitioners, or indeed management, is what you end up finding more appealing. That is fine. Strategy is mostly about what you are NOT going to do.

After the paywall, we look at practical ways to manage your time (which is not actually possible, more on that later), some systems that I found to work well, and some resources that help you figure out what might work for you.

Also, the usual collated list of reading suggestions from media and blogosphere, and a completely gratuitous picture of a lovely Venetian craft shop (that you should totally visit if you are there) if you scroll all the way to the bottom :-)

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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.

Read more

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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Join us for our next MBH webinar on publishing historical research in top journals in management and business history in June!

We will be joined by Prof Christopher Hartwell, who is investigating how firms do business in autocratic states. His article in the Journal of Management is available open access here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01492063251359201

Please read the article in advance of the webinar for an in-depth discussion with the author and other participants!

Chris Hartwell on Business under Dictatorship

1 June 2026, 12.00-13:30 British Standard Time

Online, register here.

This interactive event will feature scholars who share their experiences of successfully positioning their historical work for key journals. Participants will have the opportunity to learn more about how to develop approaches and strategies for publishing in top journals and build knowledge and skills around how to position historical research in management and business history journals.

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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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Borpujari, R. (2025). Adaptive Secrecy in the Making of the Atomic Bomb: Toward a Process View of Secretive Innovation. Organization Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17687

It’s a long one. Because this is quite a big article. Enjoy!

Keeping innovations secret

It seems obvious that you want to keep a new product idea secret until it is fully developed. But that presupposes you know exactly what’s required and hold all the resources and knowledge in-house. The reality is that pathbreaking innovations exist in knowledge ecosystems that thrive on the free exchange of ideas. Again, this seems obvious, but that ultimately highlights the paradoxical nature of organizational secrecy in the innovation process.

This is the central theoretical puzzle for Rohin’s study of the Manhattan Project. While he does reflect at the end of the article about the contemporary relevance of these issues for innovations, for example, in the AI industry, or potentially for quantum computing, this piece seems driven more strongly by its theoretical focus.

Not that the historical case of the Manhattan Project is not covered in reasonable detail, but rather, it is more clearly shaped by secondary historical literature. As a well-known, historically significant, widely researched case, it presented a logical choice as an empirical context for secrecy in an innovation context.

For subscribers, we go through the template structure of a US-American management journal (again, as it is the secret sauce of panda kung-fu), the methodological moves and how the theoretical contributions are constructed.

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