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

Abstract Ideally, scholarly publishing should be fair, meritocratic, and inclusive of diverse groups of researchers. However, many disciplines, including management and organizational research (MOR), remain far from this ideal. We investigate the extent of authorship concentration across three closely related MOR subfields: Management (MNGT), Human Resource Management (HRM), and Industrial-Organizational Psychology (IOP), by analyzing 60-year publication trends across 42 top-tier journals, covering over 60,000 publications. The findings reveal growing authorship inequalities and a more pronounced dominance of a scientific elite. Specifically, a small group of researchers has accumulated disproportionate influence over time. IOP, in particular, exhibits more skewed disparities, with its most prolific scholars publishing significantly more than their counterparts in MNGT and HRM. Moreover, IOP shows greater recurrence of the same authors across journals’ top 10 most-published lists, indicating stronger elite dominance. Network analyses further reveal that IOP is characterized by a large, densely interconnected component, with many authors linked to the same tightly knit collaborative networks, unlike MNGT and HRM, which suggests that publishing success in IOP is more strongly associated with collaboration within a small scientific elite. We conclude by proposing changes in how diversity theorized across research, policy, and practice to address rising inequalities and promote a more inclusive research environment.