When the Academy of Management (AOM) announced last May that it would be holding its future annual conferences outside the US, the response across much of the management research community was relief and applause. Scholars who had been foreseeing visa refusals, travel bans and processing delays ahead of this August’s Philadelphia meeting finally felt seen and heard.

The AOM has been long seen as a predominantly North American institution, and its flagship conference has been held almost exclusively within that continent for nine decades. So this decision to hold at least the outside the US appeared to be a bold and empowering move. But is it really?

First, let us be honest about what drove this decision. The organisation has said that it was responding to calls and open letters about inclusivity and diversity, but its president, Tammy Madsen, with admirable candour, conceded that the AOM board’s move was “grounded in…submission data, visa wait times from select countries and the record-setting success of Copenhagen”. This suggests a more mundane rationale, namely attendance numbers and, by association, revenue generation.

When Copenhagen hosted the first-ever European AOM meeting last year, a record 14,000 delegates attended. Philadelphia, by contrast, was projecting attendances closer to 8,000, and �������Dz��� AOM suggested that 10,000 scholars had attended, without providing much detail. Scholars from Canada, Europe and beyond have been signalling for months that they either cannot or will not travel to the US under current political conditions.

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And at $550 (£410) per registration tag, it is not hard to see the attraction to the AOM of significantly boosting its revenue over the coming years.

Second, the lesser overall appeal of US-based conferences is a trend that long predates the current geopolitical frictions. A combination of relatively high prices and poor public infrastructure (among other things) are the fundamental problems.

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As a regular attendee of the Academy of International Business (AIB) world conference, which usually alternates between the US and other countries, I have observed that non-US conferences do better on average than US ones, especially when political tensions are present. And the official figures, although smaller than the AOM’s conference, support this intuition.

Third, the proportion of AOM membership made up of Americans is declining, suggesting that its growth and future will be in other markets. Because business schools are a US invention, the development of the discipline has been heavily anchored in that geographic context. Today, however, about 60 per cent of AOM members come from outside the US, and reputable international rankings place several European and Asian business schools among the world’s elite.

Consequently, it is only rational for the AOM to look for membership growth outside the US. One of the best ways to do that is to hold its flagship conference in other countries and tap into the local pools of potential members.

Yet the decision to reassign host cities from the US to Europe is hardly the most salient action when it comes to fulfilling the AOM’s language on diversity and internationalisation. There are many Asian cities (Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul) that would fit the bill, yet none is listed. Why?

The only answer I can think of is uncertainty avoidance – not least over revenues. Given its massive size, the conference has traditionally used the infrastructure requirements (sufficient hotel rooms, restaurants, public transport to accommodate 10,000 or more participants) as a rationale for rotating between the same cities even within the US.

I remember having conversations with colleagues at Copenhagen Business School about how the conference would work out last year, given that European cities are much more dispersed than the downtown and convention centre settings typical in the US.

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But Europe is much more closer culturally and geographically to the US than elsewhere in the world, so it is the path of least resistance to internationalisation – even if it does not guarantee the best outcome even in narrowly economic terms.

Moreover, when it comes to “access” for scholars based in Lagos, Dhaka, Nairobi or Jakarta, a Schengen visa application is no simple administrative step: European embassies impose their own bureaucratic processes and financial proof requirements. So this will not move much the needle in that respect.

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The gap between warm rhetoric and harsh reality becomes even starker when you examine the membership of the AOM’s executive committee, across its divisions and interest groups. While roughly of AOM members now come from outside the US, that majority commands only 38 per cent of recorded leadership positions. North America holds 62 per cent of affiliations, and Europe (including the UK) a further 26 per cent. Not a single leadership position is held by a scholar based in Africa, and the broader Global South is represented almost entirely by wealthy or upper-middle-income economies in the Asia-Pacific: China, with three leaders, and Singapore, with two. The only exceptions are Costa Rica and Chile, which have one each.

A future meeting in Cape Town, Buenos Aires or Bangkok would really test whether the AOM’s stated commitment to inclusivity is durable or merely geopolitically or financially convenient.

In addition, for the European and Canadian conferences, the association should offer practical, proactive support for scholars from high-rejection-rate countries who want to attend, such as advising on immigration documentation. This would be a modest cost relative to registration revenue.

Last, the hybrid and asynchronous offer should be expanded for those for whom, even with this support, European visas and travel remain out of reach. But this remote participation track should be a genuine scholarly experience – not be a degraded relic from the Covid-19 era.

The association should also make available to its members disaggregated data on conference submission rates, registration numbers and visa rejections by region. Transparency about who is and is not participating, and why, is the precondition for fixing it.

The management research community has spent decades studying how organisations respond to institutional pressure with symbolic action rather than structural change. It would be a particular kind of irony if one of its flagship institutions did precisely that.

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is professor of strategy and international business at the University of Southampton.