What are the reasons for a desk reject?

The most common reason is that the paper doesn’t fit with the mission of the journal. Manuscripts may be desk rejected because they don’t offer new theories or theoretical perspectives, are literature reviews, contain empirical data, fall outside the field of management, are descriptive editorials, or are aimed at practitioner audiences. In some cases the manuscript is on the right track but is theoretically underdeveloped. In such cases, the editor may send the paper back to the authors with the hope that they can address this problem. Authors are able to resubmit these types of desk-rejected manuscripts because their papers have not gone through the peer review process.