How should we deal with submissions from the Global South? An Editorial
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How should we deal with submissions from the Global South? An Editorial Thomas W. Guenther1 Accepted: 8 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
The structure of submissions to the Journal of Management Control has changed tremendously during the last 5 years. Similar to other academic journals, we receive an increasing number of submissions from the so-called Global South; that is, from Africa, South America and South and South East Asia. Literature reviews show that publications from North America, Europe and Australia/New Zealand dominate our research areas. This is, however, changing with the higher education institutions in the Global South developing strongly and producing talented and ambitious scholars who enter the market. The Journal of Management Control, like other journals, has received hundreds of submissions over the last few years, many from the Global South. These papers very often contain good data, address interesting and innovative topics as well as use adequate or up-to-date statistical methods, but are ultimately not published. They are rejected after being peer-reviewed or almost immediately desk-rejected by the editors without even sending the submissions out for review. As the managing editor of the Journal of Management Control, I personally find this unsatisfactory and disappointing, because the outcome seems to be at least partially predictable. To make it perfectly clear: each submission has to fulfil the same, high quality publication standards without any reference to the papers or their authors’ country of origin. The double-blind review process allows us to focus on relevance for practice and research, but also on the scholarly rigor representing the complex and multifacetted standards of high quality publications. What are rejected papers’ major shortcomings? These papers often do not meet an academic journal’s scope, which, in the Journal of Management Control’s case, is management accounting and management control as well as their interfaces with other research fields. Many papers are too short, often only 15–20 pages, which does not allow to reveal the presented research’s quality. The literature reviews in these papers are often biased in favour of local authors and often do not consider the field’s worldwide knowledge, which is required to make a contribution to the (worldwide) literature. All too often, hypotheses are presented, but not derived from * Thomas W. Guenther thomas.guenther@tu‑dresden.de 1
Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany
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the theoretical or empirical literature. Even when advanced empirical methods, such as structural equation modelling or fsQCA, are used, the papers often lack robustness checks, alternative models or detail levels. Conclusion sections simply summarize the results without discussing how they reflect or differ from the theoretical foundations or other empirical evidence. Reviewers are usually very sceptical when faced with such shortcomings and tend to reject such papers, reflecting our jo
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