Critical essay: Blinding faith - Paradoxes and pathologies of opacity in peer review

Willmott, Hugh ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1321-7041 2022. Critical essay: Blinding faith - Paradoxes and pathologies of opacity in peer review. Human Relations 75 (9) , pp. 1741-1769. 10.1177/00187267211016752

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Abstract

The standing and progress of science depends upon confidence in the evaluation of knowledge claims. This essay affirms the value of peer review as a ‘gold standard’ but argues that its efficacy for scientific progress is, on balance, diminished by blinding. It reflects critically upon the anomaly between an ethos of openness that is widely held to define scientific work, and the opacity institutionalized in reviewing and editorial processes, with specific reference to the field of management and organization studies. The anomaly is attributed to the operation of asymmetrical relations of power in the establishment and reproduction of evaluation processes. The proposed means of mitigating the anomaly, and thereby improving manuscript evaluation, is movement in the direction of more open peer review.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Business (Including Economics)
Additional Information:	This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
ISSN:	0018-7267
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	31 January 2022
Date of Acceptance:	24 April 2021
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 11:18
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/147092

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