Authorship inequality and elite dominance in management and organizational research: A review of six decades

Ideally, scholarly publishing should be fair, meritocratic, and inclusive of diverse groupsof researchers. However, many disciplines, including management and organizational research(MOR), remain far from this ideal. We investigate the extent of authorship concentration in threeclosely related MOR subfields: Management (MNGT), Human Resource Management (HRM),and Industrial-Organizational Psychology (IOP), by analyzing 60-year publication trends across42 top-tier journals, covering over 60,000 publications. The findings reveal growing authorshipinequalities and a more noticeable dominance of a scientific elite. At the individual level, a smallgroup of researchers has accumulated disproportionate influence over time. IOP, in particular,shows more skewed disparities, with its most productive scholars publishing significantly morethan those in MNGT and HRM. Moreover, IOP shows a higher recurrence of the same authors inthe top-10 most-published lists across journals, indicating more pronounced elite dominance.Network analyses further reveal that IOP is characterized by a large, densely interconnectedcomponent, with many authors linked to the same tightly knit collaborative networks, unlikeMNGT and HRM. This suggests that publishing success in IOP is more strongly associated withcollaboration within a small scientific elite. We conclude by proposing changes to thetheorization of diversity across research, policy, and practice to address rising inequalities andensure a more inclusive research environment