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

Abstract

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 article, the author shows that the most cited management journals have barely published an article on the topic. Similarly, low numbers of articles appear in the prestigious journals in economics, sociology, and political science. Why have the top journals failed to respond? The author proposes five possible explanations. Among these five explanations, the author emphasize the existence of an undesirable delay between ideas appearing first in peripheral publications and then in the elite journals.