What I see happening is that these types of manuscripts are less likely to receive the detailed, nittygritty feedback that is needed to help the authors develop their ideas to the degree necessary for acceptance in any high-quality journal. Instead, the reviewers tend to focus on very general concerns because the manuscripts are so general in the first place. Typical reviewer comments include the following: "The research question is unclear," "The motivation is not established," "The concepts are not defined clearly," "The hypotheses are not linked with the theory," "The study does not provide a fair test of the hypotheses," "There are alternative explanations of the study findings," and "The discussion does not make theoretical sense of the findings," to name but a few. Certainly, comments like these are important, but they are not the kind of specific criticism needed to strengthen an author's ideas (Bergh, 2002: 634)
References
Bergh, D. 2002. From the editors. Deriving greater benefit from the reviewing process. Academy of Management Journal, 45, 633-636.
