Myopia Versus Pluralism as the Basis for Responsible Management Research: A Comment on Zhang and Chen

In a recent essay in Management and Organization Review, Zhang and Chen (2024) relay how, as management researchers, they ventured into doing medical research on symptoms of mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.Based on their experience, they offer reflections on the disciplinary standards, research practices, and publishing models in medicine, which, on balance, succeed better, they argue, than management research in supporting credible and responsible research with an obvious and immediate public impact.Zhang and Chen (2024), in turn, throw down the gauntlet and elaborate a simple provocation: what if management research, as a discipline, would be in its scientific aims, research practices, standards, and publishing model more like medicine?This provocation comes, as a thought experiment, at an opportune time.Management research is still reeling from its own credibility crisis, triggered by the high proportion of singular hypotheses that have been proven weak or even groundless in replications and further tests (e.g., Cornelissen, 2025).Once again, the field is debating how to rigorously produce more relevant and useful knowledge for managers and other stakeholders in society (e.g., Wickert, Post, Doh, Prescott, & Prencipe, 2021).The solutions, standards, and prescriptions proposed so far inevitably reflect the inter-disciplinary character of management research.While some scholars find inspiration in medicine (Zhang & Chen, 2024), others look, for example, at sociology (e.g., methods of public sociology and real utopias; Gmsay & Reinecke, 2024), or at economics (e.g., econometrics and causal identification; Cornelissen & Kaandorp, 2023).When methods, practices, or techniques drawn in from adjacent disciplines lead to methodological improvements, incorporating and mainstreaming them might directly strengthen management research, just as it has done in the past (see, e.g., Lupton's (1956) import of ethnographic research methods; or Simon's (1969) mainstreaming of methods drawn from engineering and the 'design sciences').However, to the extent that any such comparisons move beyond specific techniques to methodology in general or to prescribing models of scientific research (Pfeffer, 1993;Van Maanen, 1995), there is at the same time a risk that any such broader comparisons become one-sided proclamations, with management research being redescribed in the image of the other discipline and with prescriptions being derived in an unmediated form from that source (Pfeffer, 1993).The risk, in other words, is one where any such comparisons, whilst potentially informative, turn into self-standing arguments that simply reflect themselves, marginalize other approaches (Agarwal & Hoetker, 2007), and inevitably give rise to crude oppositions and trade-offs such as theory versus evidence (Davis, 2024), explanation versus prediction (Tsang, 2025), and objectivity versus subjective insight (Meyer, 2025).