Current publication practices in the scholarly Business and Management community are overwhelmingly anti-Popperian, which fundamentally frustrates the production of scientific progress. No one is really interested in replicating anything. Indeed, only a tiny fraction of published studies involve a replication effort. Moreover, journal authors, editors, reviewers and readers are not interested in seeing nulls and negatives in print. This replication defect and publication bias crisis implies that Popper’s critical falsification principle is actually thrown into the scientific community’s dustbin. Behind the façade of all these so-called new discoveries, false positives abound, as do questionable research practices meant to produce all this allegedly cutting-edge and groundbreaking significant findings. In the attached Manifesto, I extensively argue what I believe is wrong, why that is so, and what we might do about this:

What Happened to Popperian Falsification?

The attached Manifesto is primarily, but not exclusively, directed at the worldwide Business and Management scholarly community. However, clearly, Business and Management is not the only discipline in crisis – quite the contrary. But the least we can do is to try to clean up our own mess. Of course, I do not claim to be the beholder of all truth. However, if you share the worries, by and large, expressed in the attached Manifesto, I would highly appreciate if you could explicitly signal your support. For that purpose, I opened this petition webpage, which can be signed, and used to start exchanging ideas. To kick-start this dialogue, I provide a tentative suggestion regarding a new way of publishing, for now referred to as Scientific Wikipedia, in the attached Manifesto’s Appendix. My hope is that by initiating this dialogue, a few of the measures suggested in the attached Manifesto will indeed be implemented, and others – perhaps far more effective ones – will be added in due course. The time is right to start organizing collective action to improve the state of our beautiful and wonderful Business and Management scientific community.