Making a Niche: The Marketization of Management Research and the Rise of ‘Knowledge Branding’

In this essay, we discuss an underexplored and consequential aspect of management scholarship that we term ‘Knowledge Branding’. Knowledge Branding refers to forms of market-oriented work undertaken when creating, maintaining and developing niches of research. We consider some of the conditions and consequences of Knowledge Branding in the formation and expansion of management research sub-fields, and then suggest how its more damaging effects...