Why Have the Leading Journals in Management (and Other Social Sciences) Failed to Respond to Climate Change? – Journal of Management Inquiry

The effect of climate change on business is likely to be substantial. It might be expected, therefore, that the scholarly field of business and management would be centrally engaged with the challenges that global warming will bring. Yet in this paper I show that the most-cited management journals have barely published an article on the topic. Similarly low numbers of papers appear in the prestigious journals in economics, sociology, and political science. Why have the top journals failed to respond? I propose five possible explanations. Among these five, I emphasize the existence of an undesirable delay between ideas appearing first in peripheral publications and then in the elite journals.