Elitist journal lists undermine the social purpose of business schools

Last week, the Financial Times announced the first update in a decade to the list of 50 journals used for its annual rankings of MBA programmes globally, known as the FT50. To those outside business schools, this may appear to be a minor administrative adjustment. For many inside, it reignited long‑running debates about the purpose, value and integrity of business education and research.

Why would university scholars care about a newspaper’s judgement on which journals publish “high‑quality research”? The answer lies less in scholarship itself than in the system of global academic capitalism in which such rankings are embedded.

Business schools have long pursued competitive ranking systems as a route to financial advantage and institutional security. Higher rankings translate into the ability to charge premium fees, attract wealthy students and donors, secure institutional investment and consolidate market position in an increasingly complex and competitive international education industry.

However, when research quality is defined through market competition and reputation‑based hierarchies, scholarship is rewarded for conformity rather than purpose and innovation. This raises fundamental questions about whose knowledge counts and what business schools are ultimately for.

The number of publications that business schools’ academic staff produce in FT50 journals directly feeds into the research component of the FT’s MBA rankings. And how is the journal list compiled? The elite universities that participate in the rankings are polled on which journals they believe “count” as high quality.

The circularity is striking. Those institutions that benefit most from the rankings are given decisive influence over the standards used to reproduce them. Unsurprisingly, the North American universities that dominate the rankings (accounting for 39 of the 100 places in this year’s best full-time MBA ranking) have selected a journal list dominated by North American‑based outlets, an imbalance that has intensified with the announcement of the revised list.

At a global scale, this concentration of epistemic authority is not merely a matter of academic preference or methodological fashion. It reflects the deeper colonial legacies that still dominate global knowledge production. Standards set in the US – and, to a lesser extent, Europe, whose schools accounted for another 41 places in the MBA ranking – are being universalised and treated as neutral benchmarks, conferring durable economic advantages on metropolitan centres. Meanwhile, alternative traditions, shaped by different political economies, histories of colonialism or democratic struggles, are in effect dismissed as marginal, parochial or insufficiently rigorous.

In the 2026 revision, three journals were removed: Organization Studies, Human Relations and The Journal of Business Ethics. Collectively these well-established journals are widely recognised for publishing critical, qualitative and heterodox research engaging with the social, political and ethical dimensions of business and organising.

They were replaced by The Academy of Management Annals, The American Sociological Review and Psychological Science. All three are journals of US-based scholarly associations, with the last two not even dedicated to business research.   

These changes reflect a narrowing of acceptable scholarship in favour of conservatism, elitism and the preservation of an American‑centred status quo. Notably, two of the removed journals are European in intellectual heritage. Human Relations emerged from the Tavistock tradition of critical applied social science, while Organization Studies is the house journal of the European Group for Organizational Studies.

This is not a neutral exercise in quality assurance. It is power reviewing itself. The danger is that as business schools face growing public pressure to demonstrate their moral purpose and social relevance, the FT50 locks their research into an intellectual monoculture that serves institutional status and the geopolitical order more reliably than it serves society.

Rather than encouraging intellectual openness, normative debate and engagement with urgent economic and democratic challenges globally, the revised FT50 will reinforce the narrowing of research – particularly that conducted outside the dominant academic centres – to align with dominant hierarchies and entrenched methodological norms. Work that interrogates power, inequality, corporate responsibility and the broader social consequence of business is rendered riskier to pursue, less valuable to publish and easier to marginalise.

A business school that cannot defend the social purpose of the knowledge it produces ceases to function as a public institution and becomes little more than an instrument for the reproduction of academic and economic power.

Rankings that equate excellence with conformity must be resisted.

Carl Rhodes is professor of business and society and former dean at the UTS Business School at the University of Technology Sydney. Alison Pullen is professor of feminism and organisation at Macquarie Business School, Sydney. Their book, The Good Business School: The Political Imperative of Management Education in the 21st Century, will be published by Bristol University Press later this year.