When Journals Are ‘Disappeared’: The Authoritarian Capture Of Business School Knowledge

In late April 2026, the Financial Times quietly updated its influential FT50 list, a ranking of fifty journals used to assess research quality at the world’s leading business schools. Three journals were removed: Human Relations, Journal of Business Ethics, and Organization Studies. In their place came Academy of Management Annals, American Sociological Review, and Psychological Science; publications oriented toward quantitative, positivist, and discipline-centered research.

This may sound like an arcane administrative reshuffling but let us not be fooled. It is a symptom of something far larger and more treacherous: the slow, systematic erosion of critical thinking from institutions that once prided themselves on nurturing it.

THE FT50 AND THE CIRCULAR LOGIC OF PRESTIGE

Most people outside academia have never heard of the FT50, yet it quietly governs many academic careers worldwide. In most business schools, publishing in FT50 journals is an important factor in tenure decisions and is rewarded with special bonuses. The list shapes what gets researched, what gets funded, and ultimately what ideas circulate in management and in society at large.

The mechanism is strikingly self-referential. Those elite universities that benefit most from the FT rankings are given decisive influence over the standards used to reproduce them, polled on which journals they believe actually count. Unsurprisingly, the result is a list long dominated by North American and Anglo-American outlets, with a strong bias toward quantitative methods, positivist and mainstream economic paradigms over constructivist, interpretivist, or critical approaches to research.

The three journals now removed are not peripheral. Human Relations, founded in 1947, is one of the oldest and most cited journals in organizational science. Organization Studies is the flagship outlet of the European Group for Organizational Studies. Journal of Business Ethics has for decades been the primary venue for research on corporate responsibility, sustainability, and the moral philosophy of management and is now headed by non-US scholars. What unites them, and what apparently marked them for removal, is their openness to qualitative research, interdisciplinary methods, and critical perspectives that question the assumptions underpinning mainstream management theory.

As ESCP Business School’s UK dean Marie Taillard warned, the move “goes far beyond a mere administrative adjustment,” and will push researchers toward other journals, reshaping career incentives across the field.

A PATTERN, NOT AN ACCIDENT

The FT50 decision does not occur in a vacuum. It is part, first, of what Carl Rhodes and Alison Pullen refer to as a “concentration of epistemic authority” reflecting the “deeper colonial legacies that still dominate global knowledge production.” On a global scale, it is a recognizable pattern of institutional retreat in the face of authoritarian pressure, a pattern that has accelerated sharply since 2016.

In February 2025, the AACSB, the world’s most powerful business school accreditor whose seal of approval shapes institutional identity from Lyon to Lagos, quietly removed “diversity and inclusion” from its guiding principles. The AACSB replaced that language with “community and connectedness,” citing a rapidly shifting legal and regulatory landscape under the Trump administration. An accreditor governing schools on six continents altered its foundational language because of executive orders issued in Washington, D.C. The message to the rest of the world was unmistakable: American political winds now govern international academic norms.

The chill continues to spread through institutional behavior more broadly. This year, many European academics boycotted or quietly bypassed the Academy of Management’s annual meeting held in Philadelphia, citing concerns over data privacy, travel bans, and the political climate. The AOM’s response has been even more striking: it has pulled its annual conference out of the United States post this years’, till at least 2031, relocating to Vienna, Toronto, Frankfurt, and London; a historic departure for an organization that spent nearly nine decades meeting exclusively in North America. When the world’s largest gathering of management scholars effectively goes into self-imposed exile from its founding country, the signal is impossible to ignore.

HAUNTED BY THE GHOST UNIVERSITY …

The late Peter Fleming, one of the most incisive critics of the neoliberal university, anticipated precisely this dynamic. In his essay “The Ghost University: Academe From the Ruins” and his book Dark Academia: How Universities Die (Pluto Press, 2021), Fleming described a higher education system in which universities have taken an authoritarian turn whereby top-down management hierarchies have replaced academic collegiality, and staff are managed through KPIs, performance metrics, and individual incentive structures. The result, in his memorable formulation, is a “ghost university”: an institution that performs the outward gestures of intellectual life while evacuating its substance. Metrics proliferate; critical thinking recedes, and the form of quality assessment survives without its original content.

The FT50 revision is a textbook case of this dynamic. The list grows more sophisticated in its methodology even as it becomes less hospitable to the scholarship most likely to ask uncomfortable questions about power, inequalities, and the human consequences of business decisions made by accreditors, rankings organizations, and universities.

THE COLONIAL DIMENSION

There is a further dimension that rarely surfaces in these debates: the post-colonial and neo-colonial nature of the decision to remove the three journals in question. The FT50, the AACSB, AMBA, and EQUIS are not neutral arbiters of academic quality, but predominantly Anglo-American institutions who get to set global standards, ones that scholars, deans, and institutions worldwide must satisfy in order to be considered legitimate.

This concentration of epistemic authority is not merely a matter of academic preference but part of a “winners-take-it-all” approach that may be beginning to backfire. The FT50 does reinforce the narrowing of research scope and topics, particularly when conducted outside dominant academic centers, to align with, and ultimately mimic, entrenched methodological norms and existing hierarchies. Colonial mimicry, as theorized by Homi Bhabha, is alive and well, in other words.

For an academic in France, Lebanon, Brazil, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, this is not abstract. Career advancement, institutional accreditation, and grant funding depend on publishing in journals that reflect an epistemological worldview shaped largely in Chicago or Cambridge. The three journals now removed were among the few FT50 outlets genuinely hospitable to non-Anglo-American scholarly traditions, to postcolonial perspectives, to feminist organizational theory, and to research conducted in contexts beyond the Anglosphere.

Their removal tightens the epistemic monoculture further. Work that interrogates power, inequality, and the broader social consequences of business is rendered riskier to pursue, less valuable to publish, and easier to marginalize.

WHAT’S AT STAKE

As Oxford Saïd Business School dean Mette Morsing put it plainly: “This moment in history is not the time to narrow our intellectual lens.” She is right, and the moment she describes is a global one. In authoritarian and populist political contexts across multiple continents, the pattern is consistent: defund dissent, narrow what counts as legitimate knowledge, and reward conformity with metrics.

Business schools are not immune to these currents; they are particularly vulnerable given their structural dependence on rankings, accreditations, and the goodwill of corporate and governmental actors.

The removal of three journals from a ranking list may seem trivial. But as Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa reminds us, it’s not small at all if we recognize how democracy dies by a thousand cuts.

Rankings determine careers, careers determine what gets researched, and research determines what society knows about itself. When the infrastructure of knowledge production quietly removes the scholarly voices most likely to ask those irritatingly inconvenient questions, it is not a question of bureaucratic control. It is a form of epistemic foreclosure that occurs incrementally, bureaucratically, and is justified by metrics. This makes it all the more insidious.

Peter Fleming tragically left this world too early, not long after the FT50 revision. He would not have been surprised. He knew that dark academia feeds on precisely this: decisions that each seem defensible in isolation, and that together constitute the slow erasure of intellectual life. The question now is whether those of us still inside these institutions will name it for what it is.

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Michelle Mielly is a Senior Professor and researcher on postcolonial organization at emlyon Business School’s OCE Research Centre. She works on organizational studies, decolonial theory, and work in Global South contexts, and holds editorial roles Career Development International and Feminism & Organization.

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