Interdisciplinarity with Accountability: Advancing Management Theory by Demarginalizing the Knowledge Pipeline

Interdisciplinary research is increasingly positioned as a route to relevance and theoretical renewal in management scholarship, especially as grand challenges demand integration across domains, methods, and epistemic communities. Yet “interdisciplinarity” often becomes a label rather than a disciplined practice: integration can be superficial, while the knowledge and people most affected by the phenomena under study remain marginal to theory building. Building on recent editorial arguments about the promises and pitfalls of interdisciplinary theory development and on calls to demarginalize the production pipeline that defines what counts as legitimate knowledge, this editorial advances a program for accountable interdisciplinarity in management research.