This triptyque symbolizes research papers that underwent a hypothetical review process that forced the authors to standardize and oversimplify their content. Our work borrows from the art form of Erasure Poetry to create a new text from an existing research paper in Management Science. We obscured most of the paper’s content to isolate selected words that form a sentence whose meaning is absent from the original text.
The purpose of our piece is to raise awareness as to the institutional pressure faced by aspiring researchers to produce research work that strictly relies on a limited set of methodologies – Gioia method, CAPM and Structural Equation Models, in the present case. These institutional constraints on researchers considerably reduce the variety of possible research fields. A significant portion of the paper space was patiently redacted in black, signifying the refusal of the reviewer to allow for any word outside the standards. The isolated words sum up the rigid research standards that weigh on aspiring researchers.