‘The difference between us is that I am an optimist and you are a pessimist.’ An autoethnographic study on suppression of critical scholarship

Critical scholarship constitutes an important part of business and management research, including related fields such as work psychology. However, critical work is also often met with resistance from colleagues and gatekeepers within the discipline. Yet, there is little insight into how this resistance manifests in daily academic practice. This autoethnographic study by multiple critical scholars in work and organizational psychology analyzed 34 events whereby their critical work was suppressed and silenced. Thematic analysis of the events revealed ten different mechanisms through which critical work is suppressed, which could be ordered within four sequential stages of suppression: closing space, discrediting work, discrediting research(-ers), and disciplinary control. Jointly, these stages represent an escalating process of how alternative perspectives, including critical work, are suppressed and silenced in hegemonic fields. The paper contributes to existing critical scholarship by being the first to empirically elucidate how and through which strategies critical work is silenced. The study has important implications not only for the development of critical perspectives within scientific fields, but also for academia more widely, as political and societal forces that undermine academic freedom call for a better understanding of how critical work is suppressed, and how it could be nurtured for a more dignified, equal, and democratic society.