While literature reviews play an increasingly important role in theory development, understanding how they contribute to the process of theorizing is lacking. This article develops the metaphor of a miner-prospector continuum, which allows review scholars to identify approaches taken in literature reviews to develop theory. We identify eight strategies located on a continuum ranging from miners—who position their contributions within a bounded and established domain of study alongside other researchers—to prospectors, who are more likely to step outside disciplinary boundaries, introducing novel perspectives and venture beyond knowledge silos. We explore the pathways between miner and prospector in terms of strategies followed, choices made, risks borne, and benefits gained. We identify the roles to be played by different stakeholders in balancing the mix between miners and prospectors. While respecting the need for both miner and prospector approaches, we suggest that collective efforts toward encouraging prospector reviews could assist management research in tackling, through reviews, the complex challenges facing organizations and society today.

The ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic is having a profound impact on organizations across the world, as businesses and societies face their greatest challenges for many decades. Over the past 20 years, the International Journal of Management Reviews ( IJMR ) has published many reviews of research that bring together the key findings across important bodies of research relevant to understanding how organizations might confront grand challenges such as these. Reflecting on this work, we have chosen a number of recent reviews published in the journal which have relevance both for practitioners and scholars in the current crisis. We invited the authors of these papers to offer some comments, which we have drawn from in the discussion below.

The International Journal of Management Reviews (IJMR) is proud to offer a special section for articles that address methods and methodologies associated with undertaking literature reviews. In this editorial, we share our goals and aspirations for this special section. Drawing upon the motivations and objectives set out in 2020 and 2021 IJMR editorials, this editorial first discusses what potential benefits such an ongoing special section can bring to management and organization research in the longer term. In the next two sections, we detail what editors expect to see in the submissions we receive, and we also elaborate on some general and specific publication criteria as to how editors and reviewers will assess submissions related to methodology discussion. We hope this editorial will help authors avoid the disappointment of a rejection and encourage them to develop rigorous, innovative and impactful methodological advances and discussion.

A number of more contextual and process-oriented approaches have been followed recently in entrepreneurial research, including the cognitive approach, the learning approach and the evolutionary approach. This paper reviews the evolutionary approach to the study of entrepreneurship. This includes an overview of evolutionary theory and the arguments behind its relevance to the study of socio-economics systems, as well as a review of the application of evolutionary theory to the study of entrepreneurship at both the population level (population ecology) and the organizational level (strategic choice). The reconciliation of these two perspectives is discussed, and comparisons are made with the cognition-based and learning-based approaches. It is argued in this paper that an evolutionary approach to the study of entrepreneurship leads to more theory-driven research with a strong focus on process and context. In addition, it offers more than both the cognition-based and learningbased approaches because it allows for multi-level analyses of the new venture creation process, encompassing both the population ecology (population level) and strategic choice (organizational level) perspective, and the resultant interactions between both hierarchies, giving valuable insight into the same overall evolutionary process.

Since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, a number of scholars have explored the possibility of expanding Darwinism beyond the domain of biology to fields of study as diverse as language, psychology, economics, behaviour and culture. In the last half century, some of these scholars have generalized Darwinian principles to study socioeconomic change, with developments being made in the study of technological innovation, organizational diversity, multi-level co-evolution, memetics and organizational change. However, these developments have been hampered not only by disagreement between the scholars themselves, but more broadly by criticisms from a diverse range of established scientific traditions within economics and organization science. In light of these developments, the aim of this paper is to provide a timely critical review of the use of the Generalized Darwinist approach to the study of socio-economic change. In the process, key disagreements between the different conceptual and empirical approaches taken by scholars, and key criticisms against using a Generalized Darwinist approach are highlighted. Building on this review, the paper outlines some key challenges and opportunities facing the Generalized Darwinist approach in the study of technological innovation, organizational change and multi-level co-evolution. The paper concludes with outlines for future research, and in particular further conceptual and empirical developments.