Centers and peripheries: research styles and publication patterns in 'top' US journals and their European alternatives, 1960-2010

In view of recent literature, suggesting a growing international ascendancy of US-style scholarship but also a decreasing US dominance in journal publications, I ask two questions with regard to management and organization studies: (1) whether there has been an increasing convergence towards US-style research and (2) whether the purported decline in the relative amount of US publications has been uniform across leading journals based in US and Europe. In addressing these questions, I take a historical perspective and draw upon the center-periphery model of international scholarship, arguing that convergence or fragmentation in styles of research and variations in publication patterns have evolved through the interplay between processes of influence by the center (i.e., the US) and imitative or competitive responses by the periphery. Empirically, the study spans the period 1960-2010 and is confined to ‘top’ US-based journals and their main European alternatives. The findings answer the first question with a ‘no, other than a greater tendency towards the US-style when educational or collaborative ties to the US are involved and by the recently emerging parts of the periphery’. The second question again is answered with a ‘no, the decline has been much less in “top” US journals relative to the ones based in Europe’.