‘Hypocritical’ journal walkout ‘left junior researchers in lurch’

Feminist academics who led a mass walkout from the world’s leading women’s studies journal have been accused of hypocrisy and “white privilege” for failing to consider its likely impact on early career researchers.

In March 2024, hundreds of scholars signed a resignation letter accusing US publisher Wiley of “sabotaging 30 years of world-class scholarship” by appointing a trio of what they described as business academics specialising in entrepreneurship and marketing to run the journal Gender, Work & Organization (GWO).

Claiming the journal was “moving away from its long-established critical gender and feminist roots” towards publishing “high-volume, low-quality and mainstream management papers”, current and former editors and reviewers urged others to boycott the journal, including withdrawing papers already submitted to what bibliographic group Scimago rated as the world’s most highly ranked gender journal.

While the letter was widely praised on social media – eventually gaining more than 550 signatures – the boycott has now been heavily criticised in a paper published in the journal Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, which highlights the “unintended negative consequences” of the walkout, in particular the career damage caused to early career researchers.

Drawing on interviews with staff of all levels connected to the journal, its authors argue that many senior signatories of the letter had been rewarded from their “moral entrepreneurship” with editorial roles at similarly lofty journals – a case of “converting moral credits associated with the mass resignation to move on and up”.

In contrast, more junior signatories “have not experienced the same benefits and career mobility after the outset of the academic boycott”, with some potentially missing out on jobs after withdrawing submissions, claims the paper, titled “Anatomy of a mass resignation: moral entrepreneurship and academic outsiders within”.

“If you publish a paper in this journal, you’re much more likely to get an academic job. But many early career researchers were explicitly encouraged to withdraw their papers from GWO,” Mustafa Ozbilgin, professor of organisational behaviour at Brunel University of London, who co-authored the study with New York University Abu Dhabi researcher Milena Tekeste, explained to Times Higher Education.

“Those behind the boycott were often professors, deans or academics with secure contracts – they looked amazing for their moral entrepreneurship, but they already had a lot of social capital, often being based at elite institutions.

“Nine months later many of these early career researchers still don’t have jobs and I don’t see anyone from this protest employing them.

“There is also an element of white privilege here too as minority ethnic scholars were encouraged to join this protest,” he continued, saying it was important to acknowledge the “winners and losers” of these protests.

“It has a sinister side – in these protests, some can accumulate social assets – namely they look like they’re changing the system – but others incur [career] damage,” he said, with his paper claiming it would be “career-ending” for junior researchers to publish in the fledgling journal which the GWO defectors hoped to create given its lack of standing.

Resources for early career researchers

On the “polarising impact” of the boycott, those who stuck with GWO might also be “marked as anti-protest” and face stigma from defectors as a result, said Ozbilgin.

Those sentiments are reflected by many of the scholars cited in the study – one of whom called the boycott “one-sided and simplistic”, seeing a “divide between those who would be the ‘good gender scholars’ and the ill-intentioned others”.

Another explained how the schism had led to a “bitter choice…between cutting ties to the journal or being ostracised and marginalised by a powerful group of established scholars and by a horde of followers. It is sad, but we are all losing,” they said.

Suggesting that “virtue signalling through the academic boycott of a single journal” was “ineffective” in striking a blow against a wider commercial publishing system and “hypocritical” in its lack of “feminist care and solidarity” for junior researchers, the paper calls on would-be boycotters to consider how such protests are “are harming the most vulnerable in attempts to fight superstructures like the publishing system”.

A representative of those behind the walkout approached by THE declined to comment on the critique, referring back to the group’s previous statements.

Acknowledging the importance of principled protest, Ozbilgin said: “The reasons for this boycott are commendable but we need to look across the whole system when we drag minority groups into a protest where they will come out much worse than those leading these efforts.”

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