Geographical diversity of management and organization research

Management and organization studies have been born over one hundred years ago as primarily a North American discipline. The current study, based on articles published in 88 quality journals between 1980 and 2020 aims at discovering whether the level of internalization of management scholarship changed over the last four decades. I find that the geographical concentration of authorships remains extremely high (Gini coefficient 0.89 for 1980 vs 0.87 for 2020), despite the number of participating countries increasing from 35 to 91. Most of the world (Asia, Africa, South America and Eastern Europe) inhabited by 6.8 billion people is still strongly underrepresented in the management literature, while the most productive nations increased their output. The growth of publications by non-North American authors was to a large extent driven by cooperation with North American scholars, especially in the case of Asia. The use of English as the native language explains most of the variance in national output, with use of a different language associated with 78% drop in the number of published papers, controlling for GDP per capita and population size. However, the analysis of citation rates for papers co-authored and not co-authored by North American scholars shows that the rates converge for all types of cooperation, controlling for authors count, affiliations count, and Journal Impact Factor. I conclude that management research becomes more internationalized, but it remains predominantly a North American enterprise, which brings about a number of challenges.