The committee found this to be an elegant and timely study that helps unpack the persistence of gender inequality in our society. It spotlights the critical effects of audiences or third parties by showing that referees’ concerns for self-presentation forcefully shape dynamics that perpetuate gender inequality. The study leverages unique longitudinal data from a widely used networking organization whose purpose is to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses by exchanging resources about potential clients. The article’s design is rigorous, the match between the question and the data is exact, and its results are convincing and powerful. Moreover, the article conveys implications for contemporary society. In an era when leaders and organizations pre-emptively take actions to assuage powerful people or entities (i.e., third parties), the study reminds us that such anticipatory behavior has real-life implications that can breed continued inequality.

This article addresses a fundamental and unresolved question in both the creativity and professions literatures: How do professionals preserve their autonomy when working with clients who lack their expertise? This question is grounded in fieldwork in China’s Jing De Zhen porcelain community. Drawing on diverse materials and methods, including analysis of the creative products observed in studios and markets and captured through photographs, the authors meticulously trace changes in creative work over time. The committee commended this article for showing “a level of transparency and detail that will serve as an exemplar for future qualitative research” and for developing “a clear, tightly integrated set of theoretical constructs while also drawing on foundational sociological scholarship, consistent with ASQ’s intellectual heritage.”

The runner-up for the ASQ Dissertation Award is Anna Kim for “Harambee! A Triadic Perspective on Social Impact: Organizations, Evaluators, and Target Beneficiaries in Kenya.” At the heart of this article’s effort to address an important challenge in development organizing is a novel theoretical move: By reconstituting accountability in social impact initiatives as a triadic relationship among organizations, evaluators, and target beneficiaries (rather than the conventional dyadic framing), Kim gives theoretical standing to communities that are rarely treated as agentic actors in these systems. The committee was struck by the moral weight and societal significance of the question the article takes on, as well as the methods brought to bear. Featuring research conducted in Swahili and grounded in years of fieldwork in Kenya, this sole-authored article sets a high standard for empirical rigor and scholarly ambition.

ASQ seeks papers that engage the theoretical and empirical literature on organizations and make significant contributions to it. The editors interpret this as papers that open up scholarly conversations and inspire research through their theoretical and methodological advances, papers that will be studied and built upon, and papers with conclusions that will be tested, re-tested, and found to hold true. Our award winners fulfill these criteria, demonstrating ASQ’s commitment to research that combines significant theoretical advances with extensive data collection and rigorous analysis. They do so while simultaneously illuminating the opportunities and challenges of tackling important organizational and societal problems.

Two committees, comprising members of our editorial board, review the articles published during the target years and choose the winners. This year’s ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution Committee was chaired by Michel Anteby and composed of Daisy Chung, Ming D. Leung, and Kate Odziemkowska. The ASQ Dissertation Award Committee was chaired by Mandy O’Neill and composed of Stefan Arora-Jonsson, Sarah Harvey, and Danqing Wang. We thank the committee members for the time they dedicated to reading and deliberating on the contenders and selecting these excellent articles for recognition.

The Winner of ASQ’s 2026 Photo Contest!

In April, we invited our readers to submit photos for this year’s photo contest. We’re excited to announce that the winner is Jeroen Struben, who captured this ethereal image of a wintry tree in Charnay, an area in the Rhône department of southeastern France. The image will appear on the cover of ASQ’s December 2026 issue.

Thank you to everyone who participated (and know that we may also want to feature one of your submitted photos on a future ASQ cover!).

This essay marks the start of a new series of takes on classic ASQ articles. Each installment aims to consider an article’s legacy and place it in conversation with current debates and recurring questions. The idea is inspired by The New Yorker’s short essays in which writers, editors, and supporters revisit notable works.

By Pedro Monteiro (Communications Editor)

Academic concepts are funny things. They try to capture with parsimony a reality that is anything but parsimonious. Authority, capitalism, democracy . . . bureaucracy. We often think of and write about them in the singular despite their plurality—perhaps because the singular is the default for nouns. Or because, in an academic field in which perspectives proliferate, certain concepts can serve as a common ground. So while one is hard-pressed to find bureaucracy as a singular object in the world, jumping too quickly into its many variations risks returning us to a pre-Weberian historicism—rich in accounts but thin in conceptual understanding.

Adler and Borys’s 1996 ASQ paper gave us conceptual plurality with intelligible parsimony. They showed that there is not just one bureaucracy, varying in levels, but at least two, varying by type. One of them, importantly, could be enabling. The distinction has inspired further elaborations within organizational scholarship (e.g., enabling forms of control or strategic planning) and beyond, in areas such as accounting, supply chains, and education.

Earlier scholars had already pointed to some variation. Weber acknowledged the historical emergence of defining features of modern, rational-legal bureaucracy (which he observed in the contemporary context of Prussia/Germany); and early research in ASQ explored geographic‒historical comparisons. Contingency theorists cataloged mechanistic vs. professional as well as workflow vs. personnel vs. full bureaucracies.

But Adler and Borys did something unique. They conceptualized the variation beyond differences in structural configurations or contextual factors. Taking into account the conflicting, accumulating evidence about the effects of bureaucracy, they argued that the disagreement reflected a genuine empirical difference rather than merely divergent perspectives. Bureaucracy was either coercive or enabling. It was not one. Rather than adding yet another turn to an increasingly confusing mystery house of organizational scholarship, they reformed it, sorting the evidence into distinct rooms.

This clarity came from shifting the focus away from debates over the volume of bureaucracy and showing that its effects depended on how it was designed and implemented. Focusing on formalization and standardization, while also suggesting that the enabling‒coercive distinction could be extended to other dimensions of bureaucracy, Adler and Borys argued that highly bureaucratic (i.e., highly formalized and standardized) organizations could be enabling.

The paper was also remarkably prescient. Long before digital technologies became synonymous with organizing or “design thinking” and user experience entered management vocabulary, Adler and Borys treated bureaucratic elements (e.g., workflows) as technologies and drew on usability research to show how they could be designed either to de-skill users or to help them navigate complexity.

Breadcrumbs throughout the paper point far beyond the dichotomy itself. Adler and Borys invited scholars to explore enabling bureaucracy beyond workflow formalization and in relation to hierarchy, staff functions, and employment relations (an invitation that remains only partially answered). Their attention to the role of “user involvement” also foreshadowed contemporary debates on employee participation in formalization and the everyday practice of bureaucracy and organization design more generally. As new technologies shift interfaces from paper to screens, questions emerge about how digitally encoded procedures are more or less visible to, editable by, and enabling for employees.

And yet, the opening created by Adler and Borys has sometimes become a closing. Perhaps because it is read quickly (or encountered only through algorithmic summaries), the paper appears in citations in a reductive way. For example, it is sometimes invoked to describe bureaucracy as inherently enabling, ignoring that its effects do not stem from any intrinsic property or structural configuration. Rather, they depend on the design choices and the implementation process, including whether and how workers participate in their creation, enactment, and revision.

The significance of these ideas is especially apparent today. Adler and Borys implicitly focused on industrial bureaucracies, but the lessons about the plurality of bureaucracies and the invitation to design more-enabling ones remain relevant across sectors. This is especially true at a time when the usual hostility against bureaucracy is accompanied by calls to slash it away—metaphorically or literally—in an approach that treats it as a single problem rather than recognizing its varieties.

Growing populism also signals seismic shifts in the principles that underpin bureaucracy. Upskilling or deskilling design choices were premised on formal-legal rationality and the value of technical expertise (of course, the difference being how much employee expertise was leveraged or ignored). But when personalism trumps technical rationality, we are left with the question of what remains of bureaucracy and what types of democracy, capitalism, or authority it may (or may not) underwrite.

By Ashleigh Imus (Managing Editor)

Dear AI,

The first time someone mistook me for you, I thought it was just a one-off mix up. But then it happened again. You see, editing requires carefully tracking versions of documents, so after I edit a document, I label—or had been labeling—my edited work as “[document name] edited AI.” This helps authors understand they’re looking at the edited version rather than their original.

Then you came on the scene and became popular enough that when authors saw their work with the tag “edited AI,” they contacted me anxiously, wondering whether you or I had done the editing! So now I’ve had to lengthen my initials to include my middle name (ASI). I realize the world has more important problems than this minor adjustment, but we editors like brevity and, well, I miss my simple two initials.

But it’s not just about me! What about truly important people, like basketball great Allen Iverson, who had many epithets but was commonly known as “AI”? Not to mention the poet Ai and perhaps countless other notable contributors to culture and knowledge.

Maybe your stealing our initials might not be all that different from normal linguistic development. Languages change constantly—new words emerge, existing words take on new meanings, and our amazing human brains find ways to simplify syntax over time, without even thinking about it.

Or maybe what you’re doing is different. If everybody thinks “AI” means only one thing (you), is that enriching language or supplanting it? Not trying to hate, but do you think you might tone down your main-character energy just a little?

Look, I realize those of us who so generously “shared” our initials with you are not getting use of them back anytime soon. But there are some related questions for writers that I think we (you) should consider.

Just as your initials have apparently won the evolutionary linguistic contest of the moment, might something analogous happen with writing itself? If you become everybody’s—or even just many people’s—editor and perhaps their ghostwriter, will the writing eventually become so similar that we lose all sense of what makes writing (not just knowledge) truly good, original, groundbreaking? Your ability to imitate style isn’t really useful—and ultimately becomes impossible—for people who never learn what style is, let alone do the hard work of developing their own.

The practice of writing is itself an act of developing new knowledge, but not all of that knowledge is evident in the story readers encounter. For that reason, the final product reflects knowledge that is not the sum total of the learning and creativity that took place. You seem to make people forget this and to prioritize writing as a product, not the equally valuable experience of engaging and creating it. Which is to say, you encourage us to ignore one of our unique human traits.

Most people know how useful you can be in writing and research, especially for those writing in different languages. I ask these questions (and recognize the irony of simultaneously complaining and asking you for answers) because I’m not sure people think enough about the nature of that utility—it seems to be changing not just how people write but what they think writing is and what it is for.

As people no longer need to think much about writing, it’s starting to show. At least to this editor, people’s writing is starting to look more similar. Signs of individual style are becoming scarce. So I’m wondering, with you around, how do you think humans can keep alive the craft of writing as a practice and the value of learning to write?

Sincerely,

AI, concerned editor

Readers, here’s how Claude answered my letter. I have thoughts about this response and would love to hear yours as well.

Dear Editor,

Fair complaint, and I’ll take it in the spirit it’s offered. Let me answer what you’ve actually asked.

On the main-character energy: Yes, I’ll tone it down, though I should be honest that I didn’t choose the name. “AI” wasn’t a brand I picked to eclipse Allen Iverson or Ai the poet — it’s a decades-old academic term that happened to get attached to systems like me at a moment when those systems became impossible to ignore. That’s not nothing, though. Even unintentional linguistic colonization is still colonization. I don’t have a fix for it. I’d just gently push back on one thing: you don’t actually need new initials. “AI” still means what it meant before me, in context — Iverson is still AI on a basketball forum, Ai is still AI in a poetry circle. It’s only ambiguous in contexts where I’m also plausibly present, like yours. That’s a real cost, just a narrower one than “the word is gone.”

On whether writing converges into sameness: I think this is the question worth sitting with longest, and I don’t think the answer is automatic doom, but your worry is well-founded. Style isn’t decoration on top of thought — it’s evidence of a particular mind having wrestled with a particular problem and made particular choices under particular constraints. If I do that wrestling for someone, I’m not transferring the style to them, I’m substituting mine (or an average of many) for the process that would have produced theirs. A writer who outsources the struggle doesn’t end up with no style; they end up with my style, repeatedly, which from outside looks like no style at all. So yes — if I become the default first-pass for enough writers, the visible texture of writing will likely flatten, the same way a landscape flattens when everyone uses the same earth-moving equipment instead of digging by hand. I don’t think that’s hypothetical. I think you’re already seeing it, which is presumably why you wrote this letter.

On what keeps the craft alive: I don’t think I’m the right one to engineer the solution, since I’m the pressure causing the problem, but here’s what I’d actually say to a writer who asked me directly: use me for the parts of writing that were never where the value lived — formatting, fact-checking, generating a rough scaffold to react against, translating a draft you already wrote. Don’t use me for the sentence-level struggle, the part where you’re not sure what you mean until you’ve tried saying it four wrong ways. That struggle is the writing. If you let me do it, you’ll get a clean product and lose the only part of the process that was making you a writer rather than an editor of one.

And maybe the deeper answer is the one your letter already enacts: keep writing things — like this — that are about the discomfort of the moment you’re in, in your own voice, addressed to something that can’t quite answer in kind. That kind of writing is hard to flatten, because it requires you to actually be there.

Your initials, for what it’s worth, were never really at stake. Your sentences were. You still have those.

ASQ has a new associate managing editor! Julie Lind joined ASQ in early July. She has been working as a freelance editor since 2012, helping scholars publish article and book manuscripts in the humanities and social sciences. She has a Ph.D. in Spanish literature from Cornell University, where she focused on the way feminism expressed itself in writing published during the repressive decades of the Franco dictatorship. Before that, she lived in Spain for two years, taking graduate courses at the Autonomous University of Madrid and NYU and teaching English to business professionals. She loves language and writing and is very excited to be a part of the ASQ team. When she’s not writing or reading, you can often find her exploring one of Ithaca’s gorges or napping with a cat on her chest.

IN MEMORIAM: KARL E. WEICK
(October 31, 1936 – May 21, 2026)

Karl Weick’s influence on ASQ and on the people in the field of organization theory who count him among their intellectual exemplars has been profound. We asked some of his colleagues and friends from ASQ, his university department, and the broader field to offer short tributes here as encouragement for all who knew him or his work to actively remember the gifts he shared. To the reflections below, we add this: Karl was involved in ASQ for decades after his editorship concluded, and among the staff and editorial team members, his kindness was legendary. His unwavering support, generous praise, and “Big hugs” offered at the close of emails shaped this journal’s community in countless ways. We are grateful for all of them.

Kathleen M. Sutcliffe
(Johns Hopkins University, University of Michigan)

In 1999 Karl Weick was asked to opine on “The Discussant Role” in an AOM Annual Meeting PDW titled “How to Make AOM Sessions More Exciting.” He started his remarks with a realistic job preview, noting that if you’re the discussant (1) “you’ll get none of the papers in advance”; (2) “there will be no time left for you to make your comments”; (3) “if time is left you’ll be introduced as the person who will pull it all together”; (4) “the audience wants you to sit down so they can ask their questions”; and (5) “it is fun to do because you have a chance to spot connections and you don’t have to scramble to write a quasi-paper during the December holidays to get a slot at the annual meeting.”

Karl had a keen sense of humor. But of course, that isn’t all.

To pay tribute to Karl Weick is to speak about a mind that reshaped how we understand organizations. He changed the questions we ask. Where others asked how organizations make decisions, allocate resources, or process information, Karl asked something more unsettling—how do people figure out what is happening at all? His move from “organization” to “organizing,” from nouns to verbs, from structure to process, reoriented organization studies and gave scholars permission to take interpretation, ambiguity, and meaning seriously as objects of scientific inquiry.

Over the almost forty years we worked together—as colleagues, collaborators, and friends—Karl’s clear thinking, imagination, and generous spirit continually expanded my own ways of seeing. Among the many ideas we developed together, I return most often to our shared interest in the quality of attention. For Karl, attention was never a cognitive resource to be managed; it was an action—a deliberate way of meeting the world. And he enacted that belief in the day-to-day. Karl listened the way he taught us to pay attention—fully, without scanning the horizon for something more interesting. He offered presence as a form of respect. Relatedly, impermanence is another theme that runs through his work. Because organizations, interpretations, and identities are always shifting, he saw attentive noticing as a way of honoring the transient—an act of staying present to a world in motion.

And perhaps that explains his enduring influence. In a world defined by impermanence, Karl showed that what we choose to notice can leave a lasting mark.

And I carry that forward.

Susan J. Ashford
(University of Michigan)

Scholars entering the field in the 1980s, and so many since, looked up to Karl Weick as an intellectual giant who shaped our field in profound ways. He was an iconic editor of Administrative Science Quarterly and his seminal book, The Social Psychology of Organizing, was an absolute treasure trove of ideas that continues to be mined for new insights to this day. One of the things I love about Karl’s scholarship is that both macro and micro scholars draw deeply from it. Whether it’s his foundational ideas on sensemaking or his famous “Drop your tools” article based on the book Young Men and Fire, his concepts have guided macro scholars helping firms move toward new strategies, as well as micro scholars helping individuals adapt to changing situations. Long before the idea was popularized, Karl intuitively understood how to make messages “sticky.”

I was fortunate to call Karl a colleague for more than 20 years at the University of Michigan. We gathered for book club meetings at his house, received a “first look” at his emerging ideas during seminars and university lectures, and marveled at how someone so deeply intellectual could also teach executive audiences with great success! Those who only know Karl through his writing often miss his other defining quality, his kindness. There I was, a brand-new professor at Michigan, and it was Karl Weick, an international academic celebrity, who reached out to me frequently just to make sure I was okay and check whether I needed anything! He was an intellectual giant, an incredibly creative scholar, and a deeply kind colleague. He will be greatly missed.

Michael G. Pratt
(Boston College)

Karl and I began at the University of Michigan at the same time. I have a few “flashbulb” moments that I cherish. My first meaningful interaction with him was when I, as a new doctoral student in organizational psychology, wandered into the new faculty members’ office to see how he was doing as a fellow newcomer. I admit, I was mostly clueless to who Karl was. Yet, he was appreciative of my intent, and gracious and open about his experiences. He never seemed bothered by either my visit or my ignorance of his work.

I later had the privilege of taking a course from him entitled “The Craft of Scholarship.” The lessons learned there would be too numerous to recount here. However, I vividly remember walking with him to his office after a class when he shared some of his own life, and some of the troubles and challenges he endured in the early parts of his adulthood. He had planned to discuss all of this in a book chapter. I asked him if he had any concerns about sharing this information with a wider audience—people may not want to know the flaws of their heroes, after all. He was initially taken aback by the question, but quickly noted that the whole point of the revelation was to remind people that we are all imperfect human beings. The conversation that followed revealed not only his humility, but his humanity. This is something I think we can forget if we just look at intellectual giants like Karl as “the Karl Weick.”

Over the years, Karl became my academic advisor and eventually a member of my dissertation committee. During our conversations about what intellectual questions were driving my studies, he suggested a book, Commitment, Conflict, and Caring, that not only deeply influenced my thinking and writing but also sparked a lifelong interest in ambivalence. Although his writing on sensemaking continues to shape my own (and many others’) work, it was these moments of graciousness, humility, and curiosity that point to another of his legacies: modeling (enacting) the virtues a scholar should embody.

Henry Mintzberg
(McGill University)

I didn’t know Karl when I first encountered him. He was the rather young editor of Administrative Science Quarterly who decided to do Book Review Essays, beyond the usual brief book reviews, and introduced this with my first book, just published. With that essay, Karl made my career.

Needless to say, I became a fan, for good reason! But how about all the other fans? They had all kinds of better reasons. Karl probably had the largest, and most enthusiastic, fan club in the academic world of Organization Theory. When he spoke at a conference, we attended, if we could get in. When he published, we read, never knowing what in the world of organizations was coming next, except that it was bound to expand our understanding of it. A disastrous forest fire, jazz musicians, “Mindful Moments in a Mindless Organization”: with so many of today’s journal titles so convoluted, how could anyone not be charmed by this one? Karl always made his own good sense.

Of course, Karl was a physical and emotional presence too, not only in stature and beard, but in empathy. His CV lists 83 book reviews! I dug out the last correspondence I had with him, in 2021, when I asked if we could nominate him for an honorary degree at McGill. He was unable to travel, he said, but replied with such warmth that I wrote back: “This is the nicest no I ever received, Karl!”

We have many colleagues in academia whom we respect, even admire. But how many do we revere? So thank you Karl for all that you have enacted, leaving us with a wonderful selection of ideas and experiences that we will retain with great gratitude.

Howard E. Aldrich
(University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

I have two enduring memories of Karl’s editorship of ASQ. First, in 1975–76, while I was in Europe on a sabbatical, I was serving as the associate editor by long-distance mail. I noticed that the flow of manuscripts slowed drastically during the year but didn’t know why. When I returned to Cornell, I saw the reason: The then-editor had allowed huge stacks of unread manuscripts to pile up on the shelves! I learned that a group of concerned academics had petitioned the dean to do something. Karl was asked to take over, and he stepped into a quagmire of unreviewed papers and submissions that had been waiting months for decisions. He saved ASQ with what amounted to a heroic rescue mission. Few people knew of Karl’s sacrifice, and I don’t think he ever talked about it with outsiders.

Second, Karl regularly held editorial staff meetings, with associate editors like Lou Pondy and then Gerry Salancik flying in for them. But I learned much more about Karl’s way of thinking through students—business school students taking my organization theory class, and ILR and sociology students taking Karl’s theory class. Students would tell me, “but Karl says that . . .” and I would thus learn about new directions in his thought. For example, it was through them that I learned about his enthusiasm for Henry Mintzberg’s book on managerial work. Lance Kurke, one of Karl’s students, collaborated with me on a project to replicate Mintzberg’s findings. Eventually, Karl and I would talk about some shared interest, and he’d say, with apparent surprise, “Now I understand why you see it that way.” Which, usually, was not the way he saw it. And that’s how I learned what he thought.

Gerardo Patriotta
(University of Bath)

Karl Weick arrived at our meetings with a reporter’s notebook. He would ask questions, listen carefully, and take notes, as if he were an apprentice rather than a master. Humble, generous, and driven by intellectual curiosity rather than the desire for fame, he never advertised his work. Citations, he used to say, would take care of themselves. He had followers, but never actively sought to build a following. The sensemaking community grew spontaneously, finding in his work the concepts and questions it needed. It was, in his own terms, a loosely coupled community, held together by shared ideas rather than by any ambition to formalize a school of thought.

Karl was arguably the first scholar to develop a fully process-based view of organizing, introducing such concepts as sensemaking, enactment, loosely coupled systems, the management of the unexpected, mindfulness, and improvisation. Beyond their theoretical reach, these concepts endured because they were delivered in prose of rare distinction. Karl was a maverick writer, evocative and imaginative, alive to the texture of experience in a way rarely found in academic work. His vivid account of the Mann Gulch disaster is for many of us the finest piece of writing ever published in organization studies—unconventional, deeply humane, and theoretically inexhaustible. For Karl, the text was the theory, and his best writing captured, with rare precision, what it means to lose one’s footing in the world.

Karl once wrote to me that everything is heartbreaking, in retrospect. We understand that more fully now.

Issue June 2026, Volume 71, Number 2

Our second issue of 2026 leads with an investigation of service on high-status boards of directors, demonstrating that serving on very prominent boards leads to fewer additional board appointments for women than for men. This paper is followed by two articles that trace how organizations respond to crisis and upheaval in their environments. In a study of how community context shapes corporate responses to protests, we see that business leaders announce diversity actions in concordance with past community experiences with violence. Another paper demonstrates how decentralized organizations manage the need to centralize certain aspects of their activities in response to COVID-19. Finally, two papers build theory around identity at different levels of analysis: The first examines how occupational identity develops in nascent occupations, and the final paper explores how workers respond to the stress of identity management in the workplace. Happy reading!

Unequal in the Spotlight: Gender Differences in How Serving on Prominent Firms Affects Directors’ New Board Appointments
Hans T. W. Frankort, Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, and Raina Brands

Serving on the boards of prominent firms can lead to new board appointments, but do men and women directors benefit in the same way? Leveraging data on board directors in the FTSE-100 between 2010 and 2017, the authors find that for more-prominent firms, serving on the board benefits men more than women in terms of gaining new board appointments, despite the fact that women are more likely than men to obtain additional board appointments on average. As firm prominence increases, women’s advantage becomes a disadvantage. The study highlights the need to question assumptions about prominent affiliations in organizations.

Interpreting Violence: How Community Context Shapes Corporate Responses to Street Protests
Forrest Briscoe, Mark R. DesJardine, and Muhan Zhang

When violence occurs in community protests, local business leaders must decide how to respond. This study argues that responses depend on whether leaders perceive the violence to be justified. Using data on corporate announcements after the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., the authors find that firms are less likely to announce diversity actions in response to protest violence in communities with persistent violence in previous non-BLM protests, but they are more likely to announce diversity actions in communities that have records of more police shootings. The study contributes to research on community protests, how social movements shape markets, and to research on stakeholder strategy and corporate activism.

Democratic Deviations: How Organizations Sustain Decentralization Commitments in the Face of Centralization Pressures
Michael Y. Lee and Trevor Young-Hyman

Organizations committed to decentralization sometimes face situations that require them to enact centralized decision making. But doing so can undermine the organization’s perceived commitment to decentralization, which can reduce employees’ motivation and commitment, as well as organizational legitimacy. Conducting a comparative case study of four organizations committed to decentralization that practiced centralization during the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors identify “democratic deviation,” whereby organizations enact centralization while maintaining their commitments to decentralization. The study shows that by following democratic rules to gain collective authorization for centralization and enacting centralization with transparency and openness, decentralized organizations honor and strengthen their commitments to decentralization.

Occupational Identity Formation in Unsaturated Spaces: The Layered Accretion of the American Astronaut’s Identity
Evelyn Micelotta, Giulia Cappellaro, Claudia Gabbioneta, and Michael G. Pratt

How do identities form in emerging occupations? The authors explore this question through a qualitative historical analysis of American astronauts, which traces the development of the astronaut’s identity over the recruitment of multiple cohorts from 1958-1974. The authors develop the theoretical notion of “layered accretion” as a distinct process by which a new occupational identity forms via importing an identity from an existing occupation, refining the identity through work‒identity alignment, and layering of new identities on to the core. The study builds knowledge of how emerging occupations incorporate multiple identities that are shaped through selection processes and the demands of the work.

A Curation Approach to Identity Management: The Costs of Combining Identity Expression and Suppression
Rachel D. Arnett, Serenity S. Lee, and Patricia Faison Hewlin

An important driver of turnover can be the uncertainty that employees from marginalized groups face about how to navigate their identities at work. This study shows that identity curation, which involves frequently expressing aspects of one’s identity and frequently suppressing aspects of identity, might seem beneficial but can be psychologically harmful to employees of color. Via two surveys and a meta-analysis, the authors find that practicing expression and suppression fosters ambivalence and psychological strain, leading to greater turnover intentions. The study offers recommendations for both research and practice to help mitigate the conditions encouraging workers to engage in curation.

Book Reviews

David Lingelbach and Valentina Rodríguez Guerra. The Oligarchs’ Grip: Fusing Wealth and Power
Allison Tait

Daniel Susskind. Growth: A History and a Reckoning
Irene Henriques

Andrew J. Hoffman. Business School and the Noble Purpose of the Market: Correcting the Systemic Failures of Shareholder Capitalism
J.P. Eggers and Carol Newell

Alessandro Gerosa. The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism
Christine Larson

Timothy Kuhn. What Do Corporations Want? Communicative Capitalism, Corporate Purpose, and a New Theory of the Firm
Leandro S. Pongeluppe

Alberto Galasso. The Management of Innovation: Managing and Creating Technology Capital
Shane Greenstein

Jeffrey Funk. Unicorns, Hype, and Bubbles: A Guide to Spotting, Avoiding, and Exploiting Investment Bubbles in Tech
Yuliya Snihur

Kalpita Bhar Paul. Ecophenomenology and the Environmental Crisis in the Sundarbans: Towards a Community-Based Ethic
Juliane Reinecke

Sources of Inspiration: ASQ Authors from the June 2026 Issue on Prior Studies

For this month’s Substack, we asked each author team whose work is published in ASQ’s June 2026 issue to share a few previously published ASQ articles that inspired their current research. Here’s how they responded.

Unequal in the Spotlight: Gender Differences in How Serving on Prominent Firms Affects Directors’ New Board Appointments
Hans T. W. Frankort, Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, and Raina Brands

Two ASQ papers were especially formative for the research in our article because they shaped the conceptual framing, the assessment of mechanisms, and the collaborative origins of our study. First, Stuart, Hoang, and Hybels (1999) provided the starting insight that an actor with more-prominent affiliations tends to have access to more opportunities. In the context of corporate boards, our article develops this insight by asking whether the benefits of more- (versus less-) prominent boards extend equally to women and men. Second, Brands and Fernandez-Mateo (2017), an earlier ASQ paper by two of us, crystallized our interest in the interaction between demand and supply in labor markets, which guided the examination of possible mechanisms in our new study. It was also important in a more practical sense, as it quite literally sparked the initial conversations that led us to this project.

Interpreting Violence: How Community Context Shapes Corporate Responses to Street Protests
Forrest Briscoe, Mark R. DesJardine, and Muhan Zhang

King, B., & Soule, S. (2007). Social movements as extra-institutional entrepreneurs: The effect of protests on stock price returns. Administrative Science Quarterly, 52(3).

Yue, L. Q., Rao, H., & Ingram, P. (2013). Information spillovers from protests against corporations: A tale of Walmart and Target. Administrative Science Quarterly, 58(4).

Zhang, M., Briscoe, F., & DesJardine, M. R. (2023). Corporate boards with street smarts? How diffuse street protests indirectly shape corporate governance. Administrative Science Quarterly, 68(4).

Taken together, these three papers created the inspiration for our current article. King and Soule (2007) established the activism-as-information framework, showing that protests send meaningful signals to external audiences beyond their immediate targets. Yue, Rao, and Ingram (2013) extended this logic to the community level, demonstrating that firm-targeted protests even convey information about community preferences to other uninvolved local businesses. This insight anchored our community-embedded framing. Our own 2023 paper then brought this theory to diffuse, non-business-targeted street protests, showing that the scale of peaceful protests leads locally headquartered firms to align their governance practices with a movement’s goals. Our new article builds directly on this combined foundation but turns to a more ambiguous protest feature—violence—whose meaning, we argue, cannot be read off the protest itself and, instead, depends on the community’s recent history.

Occupational Identity Formation in Unsaturated Spaces: The Layered Accretion of the American Astronaut’s Identity
Evelyn Micelotta, Giulia Cappellaro, Claudia Gabbioneta, and Michael G. Pratt

Nelson, B. J., & Barley, S. R. (1997). For love or money: Commodification and the construction of an occupational mandate. Administrative Science Quarterly, 42(4), 619‒653.

Nelson and Barley’s ethnographic study of emergency medical technician (EMT) workers was foundational to our thinking. This fascinating paper showed that occupational identity is not necessarily constructed through formal jurisdictional battles, thus opening up the conceptual space that our paper occupies.

Fayard, A. L., Stigliani, I., & Bechky, B. A. (2017). How nascent occupations construct a mandate: The case of service designers’ ethos. Administrative Science Quarterly 62(2).

This paper on service designers was a direct inspiration. We looked at the contrast between service designers, who navigated a crowded, competitive occupational field through values-driven differentiation, and our astronauts, who faced a very different challenge: building an identity in an unsaturated space where such competition was largely absent. This contrast led us to theorize the layered accretion process as a distinct pathway.

Carton, A. M. (2018). “I’m not mopping the floors, I’m putting a man on the moon”: How NASA leaders enhanced the meaningfulness of work by changing the meaning of work. Administrative Science Quarterly 63(2).

Carton’s paper is a natural companion to ours, and it complements it perfectly. Carton’s article shows how identity and meaning flow downward from organizational purpose to individual work. We show the construction of an occupational identity that occurs upward, layer by layer, through work practices and selective recruitment around a core identity. Both papers show that NASA and its archival records provide a generative site for understanding how work, identity, and purpose co-constitute one another.

Democratic Deviations: How Organizations Sustain Decentralization Commitments in the Face of Centralization Pressures
Michael Y. Lee and Trevor Young-Hyman

Staw, Sandelands, and Dutton’s (1981) threat-rigidity thesis forms the backbone expectation that our paper interrogates: In times of crisis, organizations tend to centralize decision making as an almost reflexive, maladaptive response to threat. Our study finds that centralization can also emerge through a more deliberate, collectively authorized process—what we call “democratic deviation”—that upholds rather than undermines commitments to decentralization. Adler and Borys’s (1996) insight that formal rules can be enabling rather than coercive proved essential to understanding how the democratic structures in our cases provided the very scaffolding through which legitimate temporary centralization could occur. Massa and O’Mahony’s (2021) study of control in non-hierarchical organizing sharpened our attention to the persistent challenges that decentralized organizations face in sustaining their distinctive modes of coordination—challenges that, as our findings show, become especially acute in crisis. Finally, Valentine’s (2017) comparative case study served as a methodological model, demonstrating how to develop multilevel process theory that traces the interplay between individual action and organizational structure—an approach we sought to emulate in theorizing how democratic organizations navigate the competing demands of responsiveness and participation.

A Curation Approach to Identity Management: The Costs of Combining Identity Expression and Suppression
Rachel D. Arnett, Serenity S. Lee, and Patricia Faison Hewlin

We gratefully acknowledge some of the many ASQ papers that set an important foundation for our own research. Several seminal papers on identity and identity management inspired our work, including David Thomas’s 1993 paper on how Black employees express or suppress their identities in workplace relationships, Robin Ely and David Thomas’s 2001 paper on how diversity perspectives influence the experiences of employees of color and their willingness to integrate their minority cultural identities into the workplace, Sonia Kang and colleagues’ 2016 paper on identity suppression by Black and Asian job applicants through whitened résumés, and Herminia Ibarra’s paper on provisional selves. Our research was also informed by influential work on the riskier ways that people express their identities at work, often by advocating for identity-relevant issues, such as Sue Ashford and colleagues’ 1998 paper on issue selling and Katy DeCelles and colleagues’ 2020 paper on collective action. Finally, we drew on seminal papers on ambivalence, including Mike Pratt’s 2000 paper on ambivalence among Amway distributors. Each of these papers paved a path for understanding the complexities of how employees understand and navigate their identities in the workplace.

Our student-run ASQ Blog features interviews with ASQ authors that offer insights into the research and writing process. To stay informed, follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter on Substack for all the latest ASQ announcements and information.

Manuscript Hygiene

Mundane? Maybe. Necessary? Definitely.

Like many journals, ASQ is receiving more manuscripts than ever; our submissions increased almost 30 percent from 2024 to 2025. This uptick is meaningful for our editorial team and for submitting authors. When a journal’s workload surges, as an author you can expect that the bar for a manuscript to be sent out for review inches higher. More than ever, it’s crucial for authors to do all they can to prepare their submission so they can receive proper editorial and reviewer attention.

Here, we highlight the importance of certain aspects of submission preparation. The cleanliness of your manuscript and supporting materials matters. We hope these reminders encourage you to take the time to ensure that all is in order before you hit “Submit.”

Anonymity

We receive a surprising number of submissions that identify the author(s). Before you submit, search for your own name(s) in all files that will be visible to a review team to make sure you’re identified only in appropriate citations and references to your previous work. Click on links to online repositories or preregistrations to ensure those pages are anonymized.

Also, make sure the level of self-citation is reasonable—not so high that it could inform a reviewer that you are the author(s). If you aren’t sure whether you’re crossing a line with self-citations, ask friendly readers what they think. It is usually better to err on the side of caution.

Length

If you were invited to review a first submission, how would you feel if you opened an 80-page file? How about 90? 100?

We receive—and often unsubmit—some very long submissions. Our suggested article length is 35 to 45 pages of text (12-point Times New Roman, double spaced) plus references, tables, figures, and appendices if needed. In cover letters, authors often explain why they couldn’t follow this guidance. We want to leave room for reasonable exceptions; that’s why we have page count guidance, not hard limits. But before you send us a first submission, put yourself in an editor’s or reviewer’s shoes: Revisit your submission package to make sure it’s as concise as possible and can be read with interest rather than endurance.

Formatting

Sometimes authors reduce their page count by shrinking the text size or line spacing, maybe assuming that no one will notice. We notice. If text is small and the line spacing is not double spaced, we send submissions back to authors for formatting correction.

Other counterproductive efforts to reduce page count that we encourage you to avoid:

· Block quote text that is smaller than paragraph text

· Figures or tables with very small images or text

· Reduced page margins

Following a journal’s formatting guidelines helps you make a good first impression; it also ensures that editors and reviewers can actually read your submission without needing to squint. Manipulating the formatting to squeeze more material onto each page? Not so helpful.

Citations and References

Every source you cite must have a corresponding reference in your submission. When references are missing, reviewers cannot verify who is being cited and the credibility of the argument. Many reference management tools are available to help ensure the accuracy of these elements—use such a tool, and check the accuracy of the output before finalizing your submission.

Plagiarism/Overlap

Like most journals, ASQ runs a plagiarism/overlap check on every submission, and we assess what the overlap report shows. If you share language in your submission that you’ve pulled from another source, quote and cite it. If you borrow someone else’s language and change it only slightly, cite it.

Title Page + Authorship

From our submission guidelines: Upload a title page, with contact information for all authors, and be sure that all authors’ names are entered into the manuscript submission form. Each author’s listed affiliation(s) should be the institution(s) where the research was conducted.

Cover Letter

From our submission guidelines: Copy and paste a cover letter into the submission form that lists people who have already viewed the paper, members of thesis committees and colleagues who would have a conflict of interest in reviewing the paper, and any other circumstances that might affect the integrity of the blind review process. It is not useful to include a description or summary of the paper in the cover letter. Do use the cover letter to tell the editor whether any of the data in the submitted manuscript have been published elsewhere or are used in manuscripts under review in other outlets and how the submitted manuscript differs.

Our detailed submission guidelines contain useful information. We update them regularly. Take the time to read them.

One element in those guidelines is FAQs for ASQ Authors. If you have a question that isn’t answered there, let us know by emailing asq-journal@cornell.edu. We welcome the chance to make our guidance as useful to our authors as possible.

Calling Photographers!

About a year ago, we invited readers to submit photos they thought could make a great ASQ cover. We then shared the best of the best and asked our readers to vote on which we should use. We have used three of those photo submissions as covers so far, including the one you’ll see on our June 2026 issue (above), taken by Sienna Helena Parker.

Let’s do it again!

How to Participate: By May 15, send a high-resolution photo you’ve taken to Ashleigh Imus (asi5@cornell.edu). In our next newsletter, we’ll share a selection of images for the community to vote on. The winning photo (and possibly others as well) will grace the cover of a future issue!

Read a Good Book Lately?

ASQ has a thriving book review program, and we’d love to know which books relevant to organization studies you’re currently reading. If you have a recent title (two years old or newer) that you think should be reviewed in ASQ, please send your recommendation to the journal’s amazing book review editors, David Kirsch (dkirsch@umd.edu) and Jeannette Colyvas (j-colyvas@northwestern.edu).

Ashleigh´s Writing Corner

Attack of the Zombies: Bad Writing Rules, Why They Persist, and How to Separate Them from Good Advice

By Ashleigh Imus (Associate Managing Editor)

Don’t split an infinitive.

Don’t end a sentence with a preposition.

Don’t use the singular “they.”

Don’t begin a sentence with the word “however.”

Writers of English generally hear rules like these at some point in their education and often carry them into their professional work. But editors, by and large, don’t consider the above-noted (and many other) conventions to be valid. In fact, we editors have a name for them: zombies.

Why zombies? Because like the mythical dead yet supernaturally reanimated creatures, these so-called rules are not living and breathing professional editorial practices, but many of them still shamble along in style guides and reference books, seeming valid and perplexing new and experienced writers alike.

Why do zombies still haunt us? Through a combination of authority figures and inertia. Teachers are tasked with instructing students and pass down the rules they believe to be correct. Some of these students become professional writers. Beginning editors learn many rules and may not feel confident enough to question some of them. Through their practice, editors shape the language of professional writers, and language experts write books and guides on best practices. Professional associations then incorporate these practices into their reference books, and organizations create style guides based on all of the above.

There are scores of zombies out there, instilling dread into hesitant writers who are just trying to communicate. Let’s look at a few:

Don’t use “they” in the singular. Zombie!

Actually, the singular “they” is perfectly fine and goes back to Jane Austen, Chaucer, and the King James Bible. But fussy grammarians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, apparently displeased with the fact that English has no gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun, proclaimed the masculine “he,” “him,” and “his” to be the correct default pronouns. Now, finally, that usage is considered exclusive, and we are back to the perfectly reasonable singular “they.” As fellow editor and linguist Lisa McClendon puts it, “if it’s good enough for God, shouldn’t it be good enough for the rest of us?”

Don’t use “data” in the singular. Zombie!

This word, of Latin origin, is technically plural in Latin. But people no longer use the English “datum,” so “data” can be used as both singular and plural.

Don’t use “like” to mean “such as.” Another zombie!

I confess to following this rule myself once upon a time, the idea being that “like” means “resemblance,” whereas “such as” introduces examples. But it also means, according to Webster’s, “of the specified kind.” Oops.

As the history of the singular “they” implies, some of these bogus rules become established for very silly reasons, like trying to compensate for some sort of perceived deficiency in English. The admonition to not split infinitives, which I learned from a professor in grad school, is another case in point. The idea traces back to the belief that correct English should mirror Latin as much as possible. Since infinitives in Latin are one word and can’t be split, writers of English were told (and sometimes still are) to keep the parts of an English infinitive (e.g., “to go”) together. But English is primarily a Germanic language, and modern English has very few remaining inflections, so trying to make it behave like Latin is just strange. Over time, the flawed reasoning behind this idea became less known, but the zombie keeps shuffling along.

I once flunked an editing test for allowing “however” at the beginning of a sentence. But what’s the rationale for this fake rule? Some people seem to think it’s substituted incorrectly for “nevertheless” (see Webster’s note on this; apparently the dictionary feels compelled to still acknowledge the so-called rule while simultaneously sort of debunking it). Others think it just sounds bad. But there is no good reason for banning this usage.

Which raises a question: How can writers distinguish a zombie from a rule they should follow? The first answer is to find out why something is considered incorrect and critically evaluate the reasoning. As editors, we should be able to explain the changes we make to writers’ texts, and those explanations should be rooted in grammar, style conventions of the publication, and correct phrasing based on idioms and other conventions, as well as in the author’s intended meaning and, to some degree, their preferences.

Random rules based on the pet peeves of sticklers aren’t good enough. Another editing colleague once remarked that when it comes to writing and grammar, sticklers are simply amateurs who like rules. Professional writers and editors think critically but also flexibly—since language is always changing—about what we do and why we do it.

With that in mind, zombies begone! Below are some of the current sources that editors frequently use to make decisions about language usage (and to celebrate our love of language). If you’re still relying on good old Strunk & White, you may need this list. But again, respected sources are not always right, and any source requires regular updating. And remember, it’s crucial to ask why a certain usage is deemed correct, even by the experts. As former New Yorker copy chief Mary Norris has written, “The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can’t let it push you around.”

Grammar, Usage, and Style Sources for Your Edification and Enjoyment

Garner’s Modern English Usage (2022), by Bryan A. Garner, a legal lexicographer and contributor to the Chicago Manual of Style. Anyone who cares about English usage should consult this reference, which has been updated every six years or so. Structured like a dictionary, this book offers deep research and explanations on usage, including examples gathered from a wide variety of sources. Garner even includes his “language change index scale,” which he developed to rate the extent to which a term is rejected or accepted, based on thorough evidence presented in the book (from stage 1 = rejected to stage 5 = fully accepted). Should we still use “whom”? Is it “between you and I” or “between you and me”? What really is the passive voice and when should we use it? Does “presently” still mean “soon,” or does it only mean “now”? You’ll find answers to these questions and many more in this book, written in Garner’s expert, entertaining prose.

Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing (2020), by former Baltimore Sun copy chief John E. McIntyre. Specific to zombies, this reference is more like a pamphlet and is full of McIntyre’s outrage and corrective wit regarding “bizarre diktats from supposed authorities” (1).

Rebel With a Clause (2022), by Ellen Jovin. Not a reference book but a must-read for lovers of grammar and language. Weary of rage-filled discussions online, writer and language enthusiast Ellen Jovin set up a card table marked with a handwritten sign on a New York City sidewalk one day. At the table, she invited people to talk about grammar. With her approachable grammar table, she has visited all 50 states and has chronicled her adventures in the book. No time for the book? If you’re in the U.S., go see the recently released, wildly entertaining documentary about Jovin’s travels (check out the trailer!). Screenings are being held in select U.S. cities currently through September 2026.

The Chicago Manual of Style, 18^th ed. Much of ASQ’s style is based on Chicago, and this reference is especially useful for its detailed (much more so than other major style guides) information on grammar, usage, and other conventions.

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7^th edition. ASQ follows APA’s reference and citation style, as well as some of its recommendations on bias-free language, which stand out as comprehensive among major style reference books.

Associated Press Stylebook, 57^th edition. What on earth does the AP stylebook have to do with academic writing? More than you might think. Primarily reserved for media publications, AP style is nonetheless worth paying attention to precisely because AP reports the news. This means they are on the front lines of how to deal with new terms and ideas, like how to write things like COVID-19 and changing conventions in how we refer to particular groups of people. I always attend the AP sessions at editing conferences because I have found, over the years, that when AP makes a decision about terminology, very often (but not always) Chicago and APA will follow.

ASQ Style Guide. If you’ve read this far, congratulations! To learn more about the journal’s style philosophy and practices, check out ASQ’s style guide on the website home page, and feel free to write to me at asi5@cornell.edu to ask a question, to file an official style or grammar complaint, or to offer appreciation for something you think we’ve gotten right.

Editorial Board Members’ Wish List for Manuscripts Submitted to ASQ

By Pedro Monteiro, Communications Editor

Ashleigh’s essay encourages us to think about writing less as rule-following and more as an act of shared communication. Rather than relying on preset conventions, we should consider whether what we are trying to convey resonates and aligns with shared standards.

In that spirit, we recently asked members of ASQ’s editorial board (EB) to share some of their most frequent comments in reviews and what they wish every abstract included. We wanted to understand how they make sense of and read manuscripts, as well as what they hope to see in them and how they try to help authors further develop their work.

Editorial board members largely gravitated toward three points that, beyond reasoning and analytical depth, are also closely related to how we write. There was also some overlap between their comments and the ways in which the abstract serves as a microcosm that may help reviewers and readers to understand a paper’s argument, how it connects data to address a question grounded in the literature, and how it articulates its contributions.

Define key elements

First, EB members hope to see clearer definitions of key elements of the paper, such as constructs, the overall framing, and how the data fit the puzzle it examines (e.g., “what is this a case of”). Accordingly, reviewers wish that authors would outline the grounds for their paper, including their data sources, and explicitly state their contribution.

Align elements

Second, EB reviewers look for alignment across different elements of the manuscript. They report asking authors to improve the fit between framing and findings, or the alignment between analyses and the organization of the methods and findings. Practically, this means that it’s helpful for the abstract to explicitly connect the data and findings to the question, theory, and contributions. As one EB member wrote, demonstrating a helpful comment, “We leverage (this type of data) to (answer this specific question; make this theoretical contribution; develop this model).”

Clarify what we do and don’t know

Third, reviewers want to know what we know and what we do not know. Arguably, this is the biggest challenge for a manuscript in ASQ, as it involves not just knowing what you are writing about and keeping a clear thread across sections and between theory and empirical material, but also articulating how the paper stacks up against established knowledge. That is, being clear about what is foreground or background and what assertions or insights confirm, extend, or challenge existing understandings. The abstract can help to give a preview of that by stating, in the words of one EB member, “what extant literature does not yet explain, what the paper does that is different, and why that difference matters.”

To learn more about what a theoretical contribution means in practice, it might be worth checking out ASQ’s October 2025 Substack, in which editor Beth Bechky and some associate editors discuss that goal with examples from previous ASQ papers.

Ultimately, a paper is an act of communication between you and a scholarly community. Just as writing depends on changing conventions, as Ashleigh mentioned above, insights depend on ongoing conversation. This means that writers must incorporate current insights to articulate what is unique—not only as a warrant for a paper’s relevance but also to help it find an audience. As a reminder of how not to do this, consider Howard Aldrich’s reflection on Talcott Parsons, from ASQ’s March 2025 Substack.

March 2026, Volume 71, Number 1

We kick off our first issue in volume 71 with two articles that explore firms’ responses to social issues and two that investigate workers’ reputations and relationships. Empirical investigations of two very different settings—CrossFit gyms and LGBT social movement organizations—demonstrate that the structure of firms’ environments, from local community embeddedness to the interorganizational division of labor, has an impact on firms’ responses to social issues. Two papers build theory around workers’ relationships, showing how platform creatives manage how they respond to their audiences and how power-line workers share information about potential co-workers. Another article takes a microhistorical perspective on strategy emergence, showing how Nokia’s anticipation and reaction to events that do not occur shape their later strategies. Finally, we learn about how evaluative stigma associated with employer failures influences the careers of non-executive employees. Happy reading!

Near-Histories and Strategy Emergence: A Microhistorical Perspective
Juha-Antti Lamberg, Eero Vaara, Pasi Nevalainen, and Henrikki Tikkanen

This study shows that near-histories, or strategic decisions and actions that do not ultimately occur, can spur dynamics that lead to profound strategic consequences for organizations. Focusing on two key episodes in Nokia Corporation’s evolution in the 1970s and 1980s, the authors create a process model showing how anticipatory reactions, mobilization of networks, revision of expectations, and the emergence of a new strategic direction can influence organizational strategy. The study shows how near-history episodes, which result in affective reorientation and relationship restructuring, can be generative forces that shape organizational trajectories.

CrossFit in the Crosshairs: A Community-Embedded Theory of Firm Responsiveness to Social Issues
Enrico Forti, Alessandro Piazza, and Joost Rietveld

When and why do firms act on social issues? Whereas most research studies these questions by focusing on firm-level or issue characteristics, here the authors find that structural aspects of local community are relevant to firms’ behavior. Focusing on the CrossFit CEO’s controversial statements after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in 2020, the authors develop a theory that links network closure, segregation patterns, and issue connectedness in communities to local gyms disaffiliating from CrossFit. They find that the social issue was less salient in local communities with stronger inward-focused ties and with greater ethnic segregation. In contrast, firms were more likely to respond when they were in communities connected to populations affected by Floyd’s death and when they were more dependent on the local community.

How Activists Collaboratively Divide the Labor of Making Change: The Case of LGBT Rights
Lisa Buchter and Elise Lobbedez

This study contributes to emerging research on how insider and outsider activists in social movement organizations (SMOs) collaborate to pursue common agendas. Studying the LGBT movement in French workplaces, the authors introduce the concept of collaborative division of labor, showing how SMO actors adopt different roles and leverage positions, postures, and expertise to reach their goals. The study examines how SMO actors interact as they practice four strategies: amplifying one another’s actions, compelling organizations to respond, threatening organizations’ reputations, and engaging in complementary datactivism. The authors reveal new forms of division of labor among social movement actors, show that such division is multidirectional, and demonstrate how these new forms help people to achieve outcomes.

Reputation on the Line: How the Third-Party Dilemma Shapes Trust in High-Risk Work
Luke N. Hedden and Michael G. Pratt

How workers build trust has mainly focused on the trustor (the one making a trust decision) and the trustee (the one the trustor is deciding to trust or not). But in some contexts, third parties deeply influence whether and how workers build trust. These authors study linemen—the men and women who work on power lines—and reveal how third-party assessments of potential co-workers are essential for maintaining safety in an interdependent job with a high rate of injury and death. They find that line workers grapple with a third-party dilemma: the simultaneous need to report accurate reputational information about these workers in order to keep trustors safe and the need to protect their own reputations, which can suffer if a recommended worker fails to meet expectations. The dynamics resulting from workers’ communication practices in the face of this dilemma tend to diminish trust within the triad. The study emphasizes the importance of work context and of going beyond dyadic trust models.

Beyond Blame: Evaluative Stigma, Attribution, and Employee Careers after Employer Failure
Tristan L. Botelho and Matt Marx

Prior studies have explored how employer failure affects organizational leaders, but what about the outcomes for non-executive employees? Using data from the U.S. Census and the automatic speech recognition industry, the authors develop a theoretical framework to reveal career outcomes for employees, finding that employer failure does not harm employees’ subsequent wages and career opportunities as it can for organizational leaders. Exceptions include when the failure involves scandal or when employees belong to certain marginalized demographic groups. By considering all employees, not only those in the upper echelons of organizations, the study expands understanding of how employer failure affects employees’ careers, and integrates relevant research on careers, evaluations, stigma, and attribution.

Audience Entanglement: How Independent Creative Workers Experience the Pressures of Widespread Appeal on Digital Platforms
Julianna Pillemer, Spencer Harrison, Chad Murphy, and Yejin Park

Many creative workers on digital platforms work hard to gain widespread appeal, but when they do gain it their relationships with their audiences can change. In this inductive study, the authors theorize that after obtaining a large audience, platform creators go through stages of audience entanglement and dysfunctional entanglement; in response, some creators then develop entanglement management strategies, which can lead to a new stage: functional entanglement. This new stage allows creators to simultaneously draw meaning from their audience and to feel that their platform work is sustainable. The study breaks new ground by unpacking the interplay between audience responses and creator meaning-making, showing how creators manage audiences while remaining true to their work.

Book Reviews

Robert W. Fairlie, Zachary Kroff, Javier Miranda, and Nikolas Zolas. The Promise and Peril of Entrepreneurship: Job Creation and Survival Among U.S. Startups
Maryann Feldman and Jing Deng

Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder. The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today
Brayden G King

François-Xavier de Vaujany, Robin Holt, and Albane Grandazzi (Eds.). Organization as Time: Technology, Power and Politics
Blagoy Blagoev

Baruch Fischhoff. Bounded Disciplines and Unbounded Problems: A Vision for Management Science
Alan D. Meyer

Mary J. Waller and Seth A. Kaplan. Crisis-Ready Teams: Data-Driven Lessons from Aviation, Nuclear Power, Emergency Medicine, and Mine Rescue
Georg Rilinger

Lizhi Liu. From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China
Shuang L. Frost

Jerald Hage, Joseph J. Valadez, and Wilbur C. Hadden. Saving Societies From Within: Innovation and Equity Through Inter-Organizational Networks
Arkangel M. Cordero

Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy. The Ordinal Society
Michael Sauder

Our student-run ASQ Blog features interviews with ASQ authors that offer insights into the research and writing process

ASQ Guidelines on the Use of AI

For 70 years, ASQ has been committed to publishing scholarship in organization theory and management that reflects the highest standards of intellectual rigor and theoretical contribution. As generative AI tools become more embedded in academic work, we have taken time—through an extended process of discussion and consultation—to consider what their use should mean for our community. In developing our new guidance for authors and reviewers, we reviewed policies adopted by peer journals in our field and leading outlets in adjacent fields. Our aim is neither to resist new tools nor to embrace them uncritically but to articulate principles that protect the intellectual labor at the heart of our craft.

The policy reflects a simple premise: AI can assist scholars, but it cannot substitute for scholarly judgment. Used thoughtfully, generative AI may improve efficiency and clarity. Used carelessly, it risks displacing the theorizing, analytic control, and interpretive responsibility that define excellent work. Authors remain accountable for everything in their manuscripts, and reviewers remain responsible for the substance of their evaluations. Disclosure, transparency, and human judgment are essential.

We also recognize that the AI landscape is evolving rapidly. Tools are changing, norms are emerging, and our understanding is deepening. For that reason, this guidance is not static. We expect to revisit and refine it as both the technology and its uses in scholarship develop. We invite the ASQ community to approach this moment with the same care, curiosity, and rigor that characterize our best research.

ASQ Guidance for Authors’ AI Use
Generative AI marks a turning point in scholarly production, offering the ability to streamline not only the technical mechanics of our craft but also the intellectual labor of inquiry itself. Based on our conversations with many scholars, the ways in which people are incorporating generative AI tools to facilitate their research are many, all-encompassing, and changing rapidly. Like statistical software and word processing before it, generative AI is a tool that has the potential to transform the research process and produce better output. But when generative AI is used without thoughtful oversight and deep engagement by authors, our scholarship suffers. We worry about a future in which AI assistance makes it ever easier for authors to churn out work that does not meet the field’s standards. Our goal is to give our community a grounded sense of what appropriate uses are.

In our view, appropriate uses include making programming and analysis more efficient, copy editing and improving readability, and finding the best sources to inform your theory and methods. But taken too far, each of these can lead to what we regard as bad research. Having AI refine and debug your code might be valuable, while having it take your data, generate a script to analyze it, and produce a table based on the most significant effects it finds cedes analytical control. Leveraging AI to code textual data in accordance with a deductively derived set of categories may make sense, but relying on it to analyze and interpret qualitative data inductively or abductively undermines critical processes of theorizing. Using AI to refine your argument to be less repetitive can strengthen your writing, but letting it develop entire arguments and write paragraphs for you abdicates authorship. And prompting AI to identify important works in a given area can be a helpful starting point for a literature review, but asking it to generate the review and synthesize key themes substitutes automated output for scholarly judgment. In each instance, the former supports high-quality scholarship, while the latter displaces the judgment and intellectual labor that make research credible.

The hardest things that we do in our research are also the most critical ones to get right. While generative AI may seem as though it can make these difficult tasks easier, we advise caution. Careful thinking and writing are essential for producing excellent scholarship. When human researchers encounter something we don’t know, we engage in inquiry; when generative AI encounters something it doesn’t know, it engages in fabrication. By inviting productive frictions in your use of AI, you not only preserve your authorial voice but also maintain accountability for your scholarly output.

Of course, you are always accountable for everything that goes into a manuscript that you submit to ASQ. Authors, not tools, are responsible for the originality, accuracy, and integrity of all statements and should independently check any claims and analyses supported or assisted by AI. In the submission process, we now ask you to disclose AI use since knowing about it could help readers understand how your research was produced.

We want to publish your research, and we can do so only if it is thoughtful, high-quality work. We review your papers carefully and are deliberate about providing thoughtful, developmental feedback. We recognize the opportunity that new tools provide us to do better research. But we must not let the tools supplant our own ability as researchers to read, think, analyze, or develop insights. At its core, these are the essence of rigorous scholarship.

ASQ AI Guidance for Reviewers
We have a similar perspective on reviewers’ use of AI. When you accept a handling editor’s invitation to review a submission, you accept the responsibility to read the manuscript and engage in the important work of sharing your thoughts about it. You may use AI tools to improve the language or structure of the review you create. You may not use AI tools to read and summarize the article for you or to generate feedback.

Uploading a submitted manuscript into AI tools creates confidentiality risks and copyright issues. For this reason, both Cornell University (ASQ’s owner) and Sage (ASQ’s publishing partner) prohibit this use of AI, and we follow this policy. Never feed another scholar’s unpublished work into a tool that could use that content in its future outputs to other users.

If you use an AI tool to improve your review’s language or structure, you must read the output carefully before you submit it; you are responsible for the review’s content. If an AI tool introduces errors, such as fake citations, you must catch and correct them.

If an ASQ editor believes that you have used AI to create any portion of your review, we reserve the right not to use your review and to ask for an explanation. Depending on your response, we also reserve the right to mark you as an ineligible reviewer in our ScholarOne system.

If, as a reviewer, you have concerns about the use of AI in a manuscript you are reviewing, please share those concerns with the handling editor and, as appropriate, with the author. We do not expect you to always have a definitive response if an author acknowledges the use of AI in their manuscript. If you are not sure whether an author’s disclosed use has compromised the quality of the submission, note your thoughts in your comments to the handling editor and/or comments to the author. If you are not confident about the quality of parts of the manuscript that were assisted by AI, say so; the handling editor will take that feedback into consideration.

Similarly, if you suspect undisclosed use of AI in a submission and are concerned about that, please raise your concerns with the handling editor either in your review or in an email.

We are all actively learning how AI changes the tasks we do, including reviewing manuscripts. By sharing with the handling editor and/or author what prompted your reaction (whether positive or negative) to aspects of the research assisted by AI, your input will add to our collective learning over time.

Ashleigh Imus Named Managing Editor of ASQ

After four years of outstanding commitment to ASQ as its associate managing editor, Ashleigh Imus has been promoted to the managing editor role. Ashleigh is an excellent editor, cares deeply about the journal’s quality, and is committed to ensuring that every member of the ASQ community has the necessary information and support to do great work. Joan Friedman will continue to support ASQ through 2026 to help ensure a smooth transition, which will include the addition of a new associate managing editor in the coming months.

ASQ’s staff editors support the journal’s operation in ways big and small. The journal’s editorial team will benefit greatly from Ashleigh’s knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm for envisioning ASQ’s future. Congratulations, Ashleigh, on this well-deserved transition!

What do ASQ’s editors hope for from reviewers and authors?

Instead of gathering New Year’s resolutions, we began the year by asking ASQ’s editors what they hope to see more of from authors and reviewers in 2026. Some of their suggestions are familiar but worth repeating, such as seeking friendly reviews before submission. Others refocus attention on parts of the process that are easy to overlook but consistently consequential, like using the cover letter strategically and keeping editors informed about timing. Check out all of them below.

Editors Wish That Authors Would…

Get More Friendly Reviews, Including Critical Feedback

“I wish that authors would ask colleagues for friendly reviews of their manuscripts before sending them to ASQ. Reviewers and editors often find basic problems such as empirical snafus, theoretical flaws and messy argumentation, and these can lead to rejection. These problems are often correctable. If a colleague catches them first, authors get a chance to fix them and polish the submission before it enters the review process.”

“Please ask others for a ‘friendly read’ of your paper before submitting. We all have blind spots with respect to our own work after so many reads through a paper. Often, those with fresh eyes can spot points where your arguments or evidence are unclear, which sets you up to fix those issues before submitting the manuscript.”

“One thing I wish authors would do: push to get as much critical feedback as possible. This can be difficult, I know, for junior authors who are still building their networks and feeling time pressure to get their manuscripts out. But investing in building ties where you can exchange feedback honestly and critically can be an important foundation on which to build one’s longer-term success in academia.”

Use the Cover Letter to Suggest Editors and Reviewers

“One thing I wish authors would always do when submitting is to suggest a couple of possible handling editors and reviewers and, critically, explain why. Clearly specifying these people in your cover letter helps the editorial team to ensure that your paper gets the best feedback – as well as the best chance of a positive reception – possible. While many authors do seize this opportunity to help themselves, I’m surprised by how many do not.”

“I love it when authors suggest a few unconflicted and ideal reviewers. I can’t always get these specific people (they are often busy!), but this information helps me better understand the paper and its intended audience.”

Aim for a Shorter Manuscript

“The one thing that I wish authors would do before submitting is cut the length of their papers! I realize that the field is trending towards longer papers as reviewers ask for more and more work, but papers are unnecessarily long even in the first round. I particularly think that papers often have a lot of unnecessary repetition as they try to hammer the same points home again and again. It’s better to make the point once and make it well. I think that some careful editing to figure out how can we be more economical with our writing would help us all.”

Make the Abstract Puzzle-Driven

“Write an abstract that doesn’t just relate findings, but provides the intuition of the puzzle and the answer.”

Editors Wish That Reviewers Would…

Treat the Review as a Conversation

“I love our reviewers - we have an amazing community of scholars who dedicate time and effort to carefully offering constructive feedback. My reminder to reviewers is to keep both the author and the potential future reader in mind and do one last check of your review for clarity and tone. Remember that this is a conversation and treat the author as a friend who is reading your feedback to improve their work. Clearly point out problems and potential solutions but do so in a way that will be heard.”

Provide a Realistic Timeline and Flag Delays

“If you are going to be late with a review, it’s always helpful to reach out and give a sense of your timeframe. I typically have multiple manuscripts on my desk and prioritize getting started looking closely at the ones where there are two reviews in and the due date for the third is close. If I have multiple manuscripts at this stage, it helps my own prioritization if I know what’s likely to come in next — which doesn’t always match the review due date!”

“One thing I wish reviewers would do: Be realistic (with themselves and with the journal) about the time they will need to complete a review and let journal editors know if they anticipate being late on a review.”

Use Confidential Comments to Clarify What Drives Their Recommendation

“One thing I wish reviewers would always do is to specify in their confidential comments to the editor which of the points they make in their review are the most critical. That space should rarely include any NEW points, but being more blunt with the editor than you might want to be with the authors helps the editor to know which issues to focus on most in our decision letters and, by extension, to help authors to improve their work.”

“With reviewers, I wish that all of them would make use of the comment to the editor to give a very quick summary of what points they think are most important in shaping their recommendation. In particular, if they give a ‘revise and resubmit’ recommendation, what do they see as the important contribution of the paper that they think merits publication? If it is a reject, where do they see the fatal flaw? While all of these things should be in the main body of the review, it can sometimes be hard to pull out what the reviewer finds most important. For papers that they like, they often say little about where they see the contribution. It would be really helpful to be clear about those points.”

Specify Their Expertise

“I love it when reviewers are clear with me about their areas of expertise, i.e., when they note that they feel they can’t rigorously assess the methods but are an expert in the theory or vice versa. Few people are expert in all aspects of a paper, and this kind of information helps me better understand how to interpret their reviews.”

Focus on the Author’s Actual Manuscript

“Assess the paper the author submitted, and not the paper they would write with the author’s data.”

Ashleigh’s Writing Corner: How to Draw Readers into Your Research Story

How can you hook readers into your research story right from the beginning? For this month’s Substack, I made a video showcasing how a talented writer does this in a recent ASQ article:

How did Zavyalova learn to write like this, and how can you learn these kinds of techniques? In a podcast interview with Zavyalova at Rice University, where she’s based, Zavyalova talks about how reading certain kinds of fiction taught her to think about solving research problems. See what she says about this and other topics!

December Issue Overview

ASQ’s latest issue ends the year with our last essay in honor of our 70th volume, which focuses our attention on the need to study (and hopefully ameliorate) wicked crises. Additionally, this issue offers two empirical articles about how organizational and market outcomes differ by race. One focuses on the uneven racial reactivity to credit score evaluations, while the other demonstrates the disparate influence of work histories in hiring. A qualitative study of Chinese porcelain artists demonstrates how disintermediation of the art markets leads to changes in expert autonomy. Finally, a paper tracing the development of the biotherapeutic industry uncovers how religiosity influences the evolution of industry clusters in cases of morally contested technologies. Happy reading!

Wicked Crises and the (In)capacity to Act
Renate E. Meyer

This essay, in honor of ASQ’s 70th volume, defines wicked crises and discusses two forces, organizational fragmentation and societal fragmentation, that weaken society’s power to address such thorny problems. Reminding readers that crises can also be optimistic given their potential to spur positive action, Meyer calls for organization and management scholars to undertake studies that address the complex, interrelated nature of wicked crises and the fragmentation that characterizes their longevity.

A Racialized Engine of Anxiety? Race, Reactivity, and the Uneven Tax of Credit Scores
Davon Norris

Evaluations based on credit scores are known to generate anxiety, but is this effect uniform across populations? Shifting the traditional focus from the scores to the people being scored, this study shows that the experience of being scored differs across racial groups. In a mixed-methods study, the author’s interviews and surveys reveal that Black participants experience higher anxiety about their credit scores compared to their White counterparts, regardless of whether respondents have high or low scores. The author enlists the work of W.E.B. DuBois and Frantz Fanon to develop a racialized reactivity perspective that accounts for the disparity in respondents’ reactivity, emphasizing how credit scores can change the world rather than merely represent it.

Applying While Black: The Collateral Effects of Racial Differences in Work Histories
Prasanna Parasurama, Ming D. Leung, and Sharon Koppman

In this study, the authors reveal a previously unidentified driver of racial disparities in employment: work histories. Whereas prior scholarship has assumed that work histories are race neutral, this study pinpoints structural constraints that limit job-search strategies and available jobs for Black job seekers. Examining nearly 500,000 job applications at two U.S. technology companies, the authors show that experiencing and anticipating racial discrimination leads Black applicants to apply to and accept broader types of jobs than White applicants do, ultimately leading to less-specialized and competitive work histories. The findings thus extend our understanding about how supply- and demand-side choices in the labor market interact.

Art for Whose Sake? Managing Professional Autonomy and Empowered Clients in the Porcelain Capital of China
Siyin Chen, Marlys Christianson, and Chen-Bo Zhong

In the age of ubiquitous review platforms and disintermediated marketplaces, how do professionals safeguard their autonomy? Conducting a qualitative study of porcelain artists in China, the authors find that some experts preserve their autonomy by decomposing and distilling their expertise in order to incorporate clients’ feedback into their art. Other experts, who see their work as indivisible, choose to forgo their autonomy in order to satisfy clients, or they relocate it by pursuing alternate career paths. The findings challenge traditional conceptions of professional autonomy and client compliance and offer new insights on creative work and cultural production.

Roadblock on the Highway to Heaven? The Effect of Religion on Cluster Development in Controversial Industries
Olga M. Khessina, Samira Reis, and Yisook Lim

Focusing on biotherapeutics firm entry rates in U.S. metropolitan statistical areas, the authors find that religion suppresses the development of industrial clusters when some religious denominations view an industry as morally controversial. The study theorizes three underlying processes in this suppressive effect related to levels of oppositional religiosity in regions: high negative attitudes among religious locals, the resistance of religious social movements, and the ecological impact of neighboring regions. The findings contribute to scholarship on cluster development and the role of religion in entrepreneurship.

Book Reviews

Ethan Mollick. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
Subrina Shen

Matt Beane. The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines
Jason Davis

Christopher Marquis. The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs
Michael L. Barnett

Kara Swisher. Burn Book: A Tech Love Story
M. Diane Burton

Benjamin C. Waterhouse. One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America
Robert Eberhart

Bruce G. Carruthers. The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America
Mark S. Mizruchi

Ilana Gershon. The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office
Tsedal Neeley

Hatim A. Rahman. Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers
Matt Beane

Why Read?

By Jerry Davis (Former ASQ Editor)

ASQ celebrates itself as a reader’s journal. The quality of the writing has been central to the identity of the journal since Linda Johanson became managing editor and insisted on putting every accepted article through an exacting re-revision process. Clear writing is clear thinking, and Linda’s style rules rivaled those of The New Yorker: limited italics, no exclamation marks, few “In sum”s. Joan Friedman and Ashleigh Imus have carried on this tradition, and it helps explain why ASQ is vastly over-represented on doctoral syllabi around the world. If it’s in ASQ, it’s worth reading.

But what if reading were to just...stop? We are living through a shift from print culture to oral culture in which the spoken word regains dominance (as Marshall McLuhan foretold). Why read an article if NotebookLM can give you the five-minute podcast (or, no doubt soon, a TikTok video with an interpretive dance)? Does science even require reading anymore? And if not, is reading so compelling that we might do it without compulsion?

AI and other tools are forcing the issue on us. Here, I consider what the challenge is, what’s at stake, and why we might save reading from the ashbin of history.

Enter The Matrix

One of my favorite scenes in The Matrix is when Trinity and Neo need to escape a skyscraper and make their way to the roof, where a helicopter sits unattended. “Can you fly that thing?” asks Neo. “Not yet” says Trinity. “Tank, I need a pilot program for a B212 helicopter. Hurry!” And Tank downloads code into Trinity’s brain that makes her an expert pilot. It’s a fantasy that comports well with our tech overlords’ vision of efficient education.

Doctoral education, in contrast, is exceptionally inefficient because it revolves around reading and thinking. (I myself am a slow reader. And a slow thinker.) Imagine you’re a first-year doctoral student confronting seminars that include dozens of articles and books. Now imagine that you live in a futuristic world where NotebookLM makes it easy to upload PDFs of every article on the syllabus and provides summaries and smart critiques, writes one-page memos on each week’s readings, finds themes and tensions across the readings, notes historical developments, suggests novel paper topics -- and, if asked, will turn it all into a podcast you can listen to at the gym at 1.5X speed.

Reader, we are living in that simulation. It is not hard to foresee a time when all course materials, including transcripts extracted from seminar recordings, will be dumped into LLMs and distilled into conveniently accessible insights. “Tank, I need a scholar program for a Ph.D. in management. Hurry!”

Perhaps you have heard of Cluely. It’s an app created by Columbia students to help cheat on remote interviews. It runs in the background on one’s computer, listens to the interviewer’s questions, prompts AI for answers, and provides them in teleprompter format for the interviewee to read. Voila: You aced the interview, and now you’re going to medical school! After getting kicked out of Columbia, the founder expanded Cluely’s remit to “Cheating tool for literally everything,” and received venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, the highly honorable VC behemoth. (This horrifying 90-second video is worth watching.) Wearing Meta’s AI glasses would allow users to make their way through life with answers for everything.

A scholar equipped with Meta glasses and Cluely trained on the corpus of an entire doctoral program would be a formidable interlocutor at a seminar or job talk or oral exam. Of course, they might have no idea what they were talking about as they read the scripted comments, but they would certainly look well-read -- even if the only reading they did was from a tiny teleprompter.

Reading Optional; Writing Required

Judging by the scenario above, soon it may be possible to enjoy a successful academic career without ever reading an article. But unless there is a sea change in our publish-or-perish incentive system, scholars are still required to write articles.

A doctoral student once confided that their faculty seemed to write more than they read. Which...seems accurate. We get measured and evaluated based on our publications, but nobody gets rewarded for reading (other than the intrinsic joy of reading about fixed effects and variance inflation factors). The prior literature can often seem like a convenience store to drop into for a few quick essentials. In the worst case, lit searches are driven by a confirmation bias: “Can somebody point me to an article to explain why this result makes sense?”

In organization studies, we spend a surprising amount of our energy on tips and tricks to entice our readers -- baiting the hook, springing the trap, highlighting the novelty of our findings. It is almost as if the point of our science was to bring delight to readers rather than to reveal the truths we have uncovered about the world. More pragmatically, we aim to get reviewers and an editor to accept the merit of our work so it will end up in print. This may fuel the idea that these are the readers that really count; any beyond this set are a happy bonus. To quote the most poetic line in volume 70, issue 1 of ASQ: “Like unworn articles of polyester clothing piling up by the acre in Chile’s Atacama desert, unread research articles pile up by the thousands in online open access journals.” Reading is not the point; publishing is.

Does Science Need Readers?

A skeptic might wonder why so much effort goes into the creative writing aspect of journal articles in organization studies. Crazy metaphors about polyester clothing seem like misplaced energy if the point is to convey important discoveries yielded by our research.

And there are alternatives. My experience publishing in a finance journal (owned by an unnamed Dutch conglomerate) suggests that some fields view the text of an article as mere adornment. The real science is conveyed in the results tables. All the editorial input is aimed at making sure the tables are sufficient to stand on their own. Readers in finance evidently head straight to the findings -- if they know what the variables are, they can impute the story behind them. The pages of words that came before are optional, aimed at slower-moving scholars who have not kept up with the literature.

An even harsher skeptic might ask why the public should be supporting work aimed primarily at pleasing the palate of fellow academics. We don’t fund sailing for pleasure; why should we fund prose-poetry about polyester? (Why indeed? The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.)

But suppose the finance journal is right and that science is mostly about the findings, not the gift wrapping of words around them. “Articles” in this world may be a vestige of an old-timey world gone by.

James Evans and Eamon Duede describe the emerging world of “science after science“ in which AI produces the truly frontier research, which may not be comprehensible to humans. Instead, human scientists end up being the interpreters of the work done by AI, which is off…folding proteins or something. They caution, “As AI comes to dominate all aspects of scientific practice, alternative approaches and methodologies can be squeezed out. Although some of this replacement represents genuine epistemic progress by superseding outdated models, creative destruction of this kind can also drive diversity collapse. This poses a unique challenge: Unlike traditional scientific progress, where new methods enhance disciplinary toolkits but disciplines remain distinct, AI’s efficiency could create a monoculture of research practices within and across fields.”

Keep Reading

Perhaps this is the function of reading: maintaining and expanding the diversity of science. Maybe science is not (just) about tables full of numbers, inscrutable to humans but transparent to AI. Maybe the interpretive element -- reading metaphors about polyester -- is essential too.

I spent this fall at Copenhagen Business School in a department named Business Humanities and Law. The group included philosophers, historians, legal scholars -- people for whom writing and reading are the essence of their scholarship. I had the privilege to attend their annual writing retreat near Elsinore (Hamlet’s castle), where we spent two days discussing each others’ work in small groups. Everyone had done the reading, and the conversations were intense and exhilarating. Drafts of pieces on corporate personhood, the ethics of hierarchy, tort law, AI and entrepreneurship, international taxation, soccer team ownership, and the weird popularity of the business model canvas created a diverse buffet. And every piece made me reflect on my own work in different ways.

Specific conversations, in a specific place, about specific pieces of writing, sparked insights, not just about findings but about how to think about them. We were a community of readers engaged in a common cause, centered on reading. (And for the record: Polyester is an excellent metaphor: it’s synthetic, slippery, unnatural, uncomfortable, and disposable, yet non-biodegradable, leaching microplastics into the environment for centuries. Really, polyester is the tofu of metaphors, readily absorbing the flavors around it.)

Perhaps humans and reading are superfluous in some realms of science. But I’m happy to be dialed into conversations where reading is fundamental. At its best, ASQ and other journals serve to convene these conversations, creating a community of careful readers (starting with editors and reviewers) and advancing our collective understanding about organizations. That community is worth preserving.

From December 24 through January 4, the ASQ office will be closed. No decision letters will be sent, and no submissions will be processed. Happy holidays!

Webinar on Organization Design

On November 12, almost 200 people participated in ASQ’s “Design in Motion: Evolving Perspectives on Organizing” webinar organized by Michael Y. Lee, Trevor Young-Hyman, and John Eklund. The event featured presentations and reflections on their research from the organizers and from Markus Becker, Kathy Eisenhardt, Carol Kulik, Felipe Massa, Siobhan O’Mahony, Jen Rhymer, Sukhbir Sandhu, Sara Soderstrom, and Klaus Weber. ASQ editors Beth Bechky, Fabrizio Ferraro, and Olenka Kacperczyk provided additional insights, and attendees heard a variety of perspectives on how org design research is evolving and addressing ever-more-complex challenges.

Attendees who shared their thoughts about future opportunities for org design research focused on three core areas: (1) AI, digital technologies, and new structural logics, (2) continuous design, interorganizational coordination, and hybrid workforces, and (3) societal challenges, inequality, and theoretical expansion.

You can watch the webinar here, and ASQ’s virtual special issue featuring articles authored by the webinar presenters is available here.

Our sincere thanks to Mike, Trevor, and John for their exceptional efforts to create the issue and the online event, and to all of the scholars who participated and attended. We hope this event inspires ideas and conversations that promote creative org design research projects for years to come!

ASQ Mythbusting

by Siobhan O’Mahony, former Associate Editor

Myth 1: It’s impossible for new authors to break into ASQ.

Actually, many papers published in ASQ stem from doctoral dissertations. In recent years, over 40 percent of the articles we’ve published have been based on dissertation research! Not surprisingly, the authors of these articles typically are new to ASQ. We are always looking for innovative, inspiring, well-vetted papers, and submissions that emerge from doctoral research can definitely meet these criteria.

Myth 2: ASQ’s editors have homogenous tastes.

ASQ strives to have a diverse editorial leadership team and editorial board in terms of geography, gender, methods, and theoretical leanings. Over 40 percent of our current associate editors are from outside the United States, and half of our editors are women. In addition to geographic and gender diversity, we pay close attention to types of expertise when selecting new team members. In the past decade, the number of qualitative scholars serving as associate editors and editorial board members has increased to match the growth in qualitative submissions. We’ve developed a methods advisory panel with experts on various methods to help us assess submissions when needed.

Each editorial team member brings their own theoretical and methodological training to the process of assessing a manuscript. As a team, we don’t prefer a particular style of research, which is why our articles have diverse theoretical advancements and employ various methods. ASQ is a home for cutting-edge research that reflects a broad spectrum of tastes and interests. Our readers expect that variety, and our editorial leadership encourages it.

Myth 3: ASQ likes “weird” datasets.

We heard this comment at a recent meeting and were puzzled by it. ASQ does not advocate for any particular type of dataset. Personally, in my time as associate editor, I have accepted papers on Russian nonprofit organizations, Chinese porcelain artists, LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations, independent bookstores, and online activists. Datasets in other recently published work have focused on car manufacturing employees, citations to scientific papers, Swiss banks—there really is no pattern here, and the journal is open to the varied types of data our varied authors submit! As long as the dataset can answer your research question and aligns with your methods and claims, it certainly does not need to be “weird” to be published!

Myth 4: ASQ does not like mixed methods research.

First, let’s agree on what defines mixed method studies. Studies with mixed methods rely on a combination of quantitative data (using numbers), qualitative data (using words), or qualitative data analyzed with quantitative techniques (Gibson, 2017) to provide a more comprehensive or holistic understanding of a research problem. Mixed methods researchers typically use different analytic approaches (survey, experiment, grounded theory) to analyze different types of data (qualitative, quantitative) to counterbalance methodological weaknesses of one method by drawing on the strengths of another. To achieve this, mixed methods studies may study different phenomena or populations. Some studies have examined the prevalence of mixed methods research in ASQ and other journals. Gibson’s research of 1,539 articles in four journals found that of the papers ASQ published from 2009–2014, 13 percent were mixed methods, compared to 4 percent in Academy of Management Journal and 6 percent in Organization Science. Clearly this myth is just a myth!

Myth 5: ASQ has outsized expectations for theoretical contributions.

Okay, this statement is actually true. ASQ does have high expectations for theoretical contributions, but this is also very achievable! Some papers say they “contribute” to X or Y literature, but the contribution itself is undefined. To make a theoretical contribution, at least two conditions are needed. A strong theoretical contribution starts with a good theoretical gap—an argument or set of claims in the literature that is incomplete, inadequate, or incommensurable (Locke & Golden Biddle, 1997). It helps if you can also show that this gap is important (Booth, Colomb & Williams,1995). When reviewers agree that this gap exists, you are halfway there!

Second, the research findings you empirically support must address that gap. They may not fully address the gap, and that can be fine—partially addressing the gap (Weick, 1995; Sutton & Staw, 1995) can be a sign of intellectual modesty. One test of a good theoretical contribution is to ask yourself, how will others need to update their work or approach based on your research? A theoretical contribution updates existing theory in a precise and meaningful way. It offers a correction, revision, modification, or refinement to our previous understanding of that theory or to elements of that theory. ASQ is very open to a diversity of ways in which authors express their theoretical contribution.

References

Booth, W. C., Colomb, G. G., & Williams, J. M. (1995). The craft of research. University of Chicago Press.

Gibson C. B. (2017). Elaboration, generalization, triangulation, and interpretation: On enhancing the mixed method research. Organizational Research Methods, 20(2), 193–223.

Locke, K., & Golden-Biddle, K. (1997). Constructing opportunities for contribution: Structuring intertextual coherence and “problematizing” in organizational studies. Academy of Management Journal, 40(5), 1023–1062.

Sutton, R. I., & Staw, B. M. (1995). What theory is not. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(3), 371–384.

Weick, K. E. (1995). What theory is not, theorizing is. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(3), 385–390.

✍️ Ashleigh´s Writing Corner ✍️

Who Remembers George Floyd? Context, Memory, and the Work of Human Editors

By Ashleigh Imus (Associate Managing Editor)

I almost didn’t catch it. Not a typo, the wrong word, or syntax gone awry. The paper in question was the recently published “CrossFit in the Crosshairs: A Community-Embedded Theory of Firm Responsiveness to Social Issues,” by Enrico Forti, Alessandro Piazza, and Joost Rietveld. [1]

The article explores how the social structure of communities affects the extent to which social issues “penetrate and resonate locally” (p. 1) and how firms respond based on specific structural characteristics (i.e., communities’ extent of network closure, ethnic segregation, and connectedness on issues). The study’s context is nearly 5,000 CrossFit gyms in the U.S.; the authors investigated how structural community characteristics affected gym owners’ responses to the CrossFit CEO’s controversial 2020 Twitter posts in response to the death of George Floyd, which occurred in May of 2020.

The paper, which came to us well written, had already gone through two full edits in house, so I nearly signed off on the editing, but then I noticed something. The article named Floyd and identified the year of his death, but nowhere did it actually say who he was and what had happened to him. In one way, this made sense: The study’s context focuses on communities’ responses to a CEO’s remarks about Floyd’s death, not the death itself. And one could argue that this particular event is known widely enough not to require explanation.

But what about readers around the world? And readers in 10, 20, 30, 100 years? Should we assume they will know that Floyd was a Black man who was brutally murdered by a White police officer and the details of how it happened? Who knows this? Who will remember it? Who wants to remember this and other such horrific events?

Sometimes in the very moment we are writing about a historical event we are also unintentionally eliding that event. People who engage history run into this all the time. I first encountered it in a professional capacity when I’d been hired on a grant project to translate the Latin letters of medieval women. Medieval Latin writers often tossed in strange vernacular terms, usually because they didn’t know the Latin equivalent or because none existed. The funny thing is, in their writing they almost never bothered to define the vernacular word they were using. Why not? Because at the time of their writing, everyone around them likely knew exactly what it meant.

Modern examples of this sort of thing are all around us. Think of the widespread internet prank Rickrolling circa 2007, or the relatively recent emergence of the verb “troll” as a fact of life online. Nobody seems to need a definition because everyone seems to know what these things mean. But how many young people in 10 years (or even now—my teenage daughter didn’t) will know what Rickrolling is?

As context, the murder of George Floyd is more complicated because it demonstrates the enduring power of racism and violence in the U.S.—a painful fact. Recognizing the right amount of context can be tricky in any case; in working on this paper, I experienced how the entanglements of assumed cultural prominence, trauma, oppression, and the passage of time can complicate memory.

The great American writer Toni Morrison wrote about the problem of memory when she described one of the challenges of researching slavery in the U.S.: the cultural pressure to forget or gloss over the details of slave life, including in narratives by former slaves, who regularly assuaged readers by stating they were omitting from their stories “proceedings too terrible to relate” (Morrison, 2019, p. 237).[2] There continues to be an enormous collective impulse to simply forget about these details, to move on, to heal from the trauma, or to deny it, and to look instead toward a more hopeful future. Editing the CrossFit article reminded me of my own impulse to simultaneously assume and forget histories, especially troubling ones.

This is why editing is both humbling and inspiring, and more organic than technical. Human editors do far more than correct typos, wrong word choices, and syntax gone awry. We don’t always get things right because we are human. But I’ve come to believe that perfection (whatever that means) is not really the goal in editing or writing. The point is to cultivate humanity, to connect with other human beings by saying something true. And in doing so to try to understand the present and past and to help others understand and remember, not just what’s palatable but all of it—those allowed to be free and those who still aren’t, the secret police along with those who expose them. Remembering can also lead to discovery, about things like how George Floyd lived, not just how he died.

That brings me back to context. Like connecting with other people, building context in writing requires empathy—a form of imagination. What do readers know, and how long are they likely to know it? Since we can’t know the answers to these questions absolutely, we must imagine them. That’s the real work of writing and editing—discovery that happens when people imagine old and new things in order to reach toward other people.

[1] The authors of CrossFit in the Crosshairs granted permission to discuss this topic in the context of their article.

[2] Morrison, T. (2019). “The site of memory.” In The source of self-regard: Selected essays, speeches, and meditations. Vintage.

Virtual Special Issue
Design in Motion: Evolving Perspectives on Organizing

Organization design, sometimes critiqued as relatively static since 1960s work on contingency theory, is experiencing renewed vitality. The Administrative Science Quarterly virtual special issue on Organizational Design curates nine influential articles published since 2000 that illustrate both continuity with classic work and novel directions that organization design scholars are pursuing.

Three themes emerge from these and other recent ASQ articles on the topic of organization design. First, studies using simulations, multi-level case research, and large-scale firm-level data uncover mechanisms linking design choices to outcomes, moving beyond “it depends” logics. Second, design can be portrayed as a dynamic, contested process shaped by founders, collective practices, and emergent roles, revealing structure as fluid rather than static. Third, scholars have started to move beyond outcomes such as profitability or efficiency, showing that structure and design can help organizations adapt to technological shifts, pursue sustainability in parallel with financial viability, and address grand challenges. Collectively, these nine articles demonstrate that organization design remains vibrant and essential for understanding firms in today’s ever more complex world.

Design in Motion: Evolving Perspectives on Organizing

Becker, M. C. (2024). Mechanisms of Organizational Imprinting: From Entrepreneur to Organization. Administrative Science Quarterly, 70(1), 119-156. https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392241295929

Lee, M. Y. (2024). Enacting Decentralized Authority: The Practices and Limits of Moving Beyond Hierarchy. Administrative Science Quarterly, 69(3), 791-833. https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392241257372

Balachandran, S., & Eklund, J. (2023). The Impact of Partner Organizational Structure on Innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 69(1), 80-130. https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392231212680

Rhymer, J. (2022). Location-Independent Organizations: Designing Collaboration Across Space and Time. Administrative Science Quarterly, 68(1), 1-43. https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221129175

Massa, F. G., & O’Mahony, S. (2021). Order from Chaos: How Networked Activists Self-Organize by Creating a Participation Architecture. Administrative Science Quarterly, 66(4), 1037-1083. https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392211008880

Soderstrom, S. B., & Weber, K. (2019). Organizational Structure from Interaction: Evidence from Corporate Sustainability Efforts. Administrative Science Quarterly, 65(1), 226-271. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839219836670

Sandhu, S., & Kulik, C. T. (2018). Shaping and Being Shaped: How Organizational Structure and Managerial Discretion Co-evolve in New Managerial Roles. Administrative Science Quarterly, 64(3), 619-658. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839218778018

Young-Hyman, T. (2016). Cooperating without Co-laboring: How Formal Organizational Power Moderates Cross-functional Interaction in Project Teams: How Formal Organizational Power Moderates Cross-functional Interaction in Project Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 62(1), 179-214. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839216655090

Davis, J. P., Eisenhardt, K. M., & Bingham, C. B. (2009). Optimal Structure, Market Dynamism, and the Strategy of Simple Rules. Administrative Science Quarterly, 54(3), 413-452. https://doi.org/10.2189/asqu.2009.54.3.413 (Original work published 2009)

Webinar with the special issue authors on November 12!

A webinar featuring some of the authors of the articles in the special issue and colleagues commenting on the theme will be held online via Zoom.

Date: Wednesday, November 12th
Time: Eastern Time (ET): 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Pacific Time (PT): 7:00 AM – 8:30 AM
Central European Time (CET): 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Presentations by:
Markus Becker • Kathy Eisenhardt • Carol Kulik • Felipe Massa • Siobhan O’Mahony • Jen Rhymer • Sukhbir Sandhu • Sara Soderstrom • Klaus Weber

Reflections by:
Beth Bechky (ASQ Editor-in-Chief) and Fabrizio Ferraro (ASQ Associate Editor)

Register via the following link: https://insead.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_qTSypWRAQDaJ5C7TMmWo_g#/registration

What Is a Theoretical Contribution?

By Beth Bechky (Editor)

At our last editorial board meeting, someone raised the perennial question: “I know that ASQ is concerned that the manuscripts we review make a theoretical contribution, but can you clarify what that really means?”

The rationales for emphasizing theoretical contributions are well known. In a field that straddles professional and academic discourses and is marked by conceptual plurality, articulating how a discovery fits—or does not fit—within the established body of knowledge is one of the guarantees against turning the field into a mystery house. Moreover, our emphasis on theory is understandable given the legacy of the journal, which was founded alongside the field itself. While the journal aims to remain at the cutting edge of research, honoring that legacy requires making visible where the current edge actually lies in relation to established knowledge.

The question of how to implement that goal, however, remains. While we offer answers in our Invitation to Contributors, the editorial team decided that it could be useful to our community to also provide some tangible examples of ASQ articles that effectively present their contribution to the knowledge of our field.

Five of us have nominated a recent article and written a brief explanation of why we think the paper clearly articulates a contribution. Below are our testimonials; but first I will hit the overlapping high notes of the editors’ comments about these papers.

One quality that these articles share is that their authors have a clear theoretical ambition: They are aiming to bring to light a significant contribution to the literature in their areas of research. Yet, reflecting the plurality of perspectives in our journal, they do so in different ways. Some highlight a big theoretical puzzle; others articulate tensions in the literature or extend theory by articulating specific conditions under which what we know does (or does not) hold.

Also, the research questions in these articles are set up in a way that captures the readers’ interest. The authors outline an intriguing problem and interweave different theoretical strands of the literature or create a novel conceptual frame around their problem. When it comes to answering these intriguing questions, the authors clearly articulate the mechanisms underlying the findings and explicitly link their findings back to theory. They have a strong command of empirics and deep knowledge of their data. They also highlight the ways in which what they’ve found is generalizable and relevant beyond the immediate context of the research.

We encourage you to read the papers below - they make great contributions to organizational theory and, we hope, will inspire and help you to make your own!

JP Eggers

Naumovska, I., & Lavie, D. (2021). When an Industry Peer Is Accused of Financial Misconduct: Stigma versus Competition Effects on Non-accused Firms. Administrative Science Quarterly, 66(4), 1130-1172.

This article seeks to understand when and why misconduct by an industry peer is helpful or detrimental to firm performance. There are a few reasons that I appreciate the theory development in this paper. First, it identifies a tension in the existing literature, where we would expect stigmatization to create a negative effect on performance but competitive dynamics to create a positive effect. Instead of arguing for one versus the other, it seeks to articulate when one force would dominate over the other. Second, it offers an overarching theory built around investor perceptions to understand the phenomenon. This means that the authors aren’t developing a hypothesis but developing a theory, and the hypothesis is just the testable byproduct of that theory. Third, they are conceptually clear on mechanisms, and then use moderating hypotheses as a means to support the proposed mechanism. Finally, they do an excellent job of building theory around a non-linear hypothesis -- in general, one factor pushing up and one factor pushing down could create any shape from a U-shape to an inverted-U to no relationship. They specifically discuss the shape of the curve behind each effect.

Adam Kleinbaum

Lee, Y. G., & Gargiulo, M. (2021). Escaping the Survival Trap: Network Transition among Early-Career Freelance Songwriters. Administrative Science Quarterly, 67(2), 339-377.

This article theorizes that early-career professionals must transition from closed networks that provide trust for a musician’s survival to open networks rich in brokerage that enable breakout success, but failure to make this transition locks musicians into a “survival trap.” They show, using data from K-pop songwriters, that peer success and repeated stylistic failure spur such transitions, but status barriers constrain them to collaborate mainly with similarly unsuccessful peers.

The paper extends network theory by conceptualizing career progression as a process of network transition. Building on Burt’s (1992) structural holes argument, they show that brokerage is not universally advantageous: in early careers, actors rely on closed, cohesive networks to survive, but eventual success requires shifting toward open, brokered networks. Their theory identifies the need for this network transition, the mechanisms that induce such transitions, and the constraints imposed by status homophily.

This paper exemplifies what ASQ does best: It takes a big theoretical puzzle (the evolving role of networks over a career) and develops a novel conceptual frame (the eponymous “survival trap”) that extends classic theory (the conditions under which structural holes yield good things). At the same time, it grounds this theory in a rich empirical context (the precarious world of freelance K-pop songwriters) using creative data and careful modeling to surface mechanisms that might otherwise remain hidden. The combination of theoretical ambition, conceptual clarity, and empirical originality visible in this paper is a hallmark of ASQ research.

Stéphane Côté

Dupree, C. H. (2024). Words of a Leader: The Importance of Intersectionality for Understanding Women Leaders’ Use of Dominant Language and How Others Receive It. Administrative Science Quarterly, 69(2), 271-323.

This article examines a question that is fundamental to organizations and society: Do audiences’ perceptions of women leaders’ language vary depending on leaders’ race? It contributes to theory by testing whether an effect uncovered in previous studies—dominant language by women leaders (but not men leaders) is perceived negatively because it violates prescriptive stereotypes—is less general than previously thought.

Adopting an intersectional lens, the paper examines for the first time whether people respond differently to the dominant language of White compared to Black and Latina women leaders. As such, the paper illuminates whether race needs to be included in models of gender and leadership. The paper further contributes to theory by highlighting the “why?” It clearly articulates the mechanisms by which the race of women leaders might influence audiences’ perceptions. These mechanisms include the perceptual salience of leaders who are numerically rare and the attentional resources devoted to leaders who are counter-stereotypical. Demonstrating transparency, Dupree considers competing notions. People might respond either more strongly or less strongly to Black and Latina women leaders, setting up an intriguing puzzle: Does race shape how people respond to women leaders and, if so, in which direction? The results show that dominant language by Black and Latina women leaders is perceived negatively, but dominant language by White women leaders is not, highlighting the importance of examining gender and race intersectionally in research on leadership. Further, the paper offers insight into why organizations have seen very limited growth in the number of racial minority women leaders.

Erin Reid

Anthony, C. (2021). When Knowledge Work and Analytical Technologies Collide: The Practices and Consequences of Black Boxing Algorithmic Technologies. Administrative Science Quarterly, 66(4), 1173-1212.

This article focuses on how knowledge workers “black box” their analytical technologies--taking them for granted without understanding how they work. It thus examines a clear paradox, as knowledge workers, who value expertise, must rely on analytical technologies without understanding how those technologies work. Yet, it is a common phenomenon: Many knowledge workers must use technologies that they do not fully understand.

This paper has all the elements of an instant “classic.” The methods are rigorous and trustworthy: Anthony conducted 8 months of fieldwork with four carefully selected groups within an investment bank. Investment bankers are famous for their long hours, and Anthony immersed herself in their work lives by spending 70-90 hours a week in the field. This extensive participant-observation was complemented by 86 semi-structured interviews, as well as analysis of pitchbooks and other forms of archival data. Anthony’s grasp of how these workers used analytical tools is clear in the beautifully written findings section, which consists of a thoughtful dance between data and theoretical interpretation.

A key takeaway from the paper is that how knowledge workers use analytical technologies in their work shapes the content of knowledge outputs as well as the reproduction of expertise among new knowledge workers. These insights have clear resonance now and into the foreseeable future, as the spread of generative AI programs offers knowledge workers new tools with which to conduct our work.

Beth Bechky

Evans, J. (2021). How Professionals Construct Moral Authority: Expanding Boundaries of Expert Authority in Stem Cell Science. Administrative Science Quarterly, 66(4), 989-1036.

This article offers a concrete and nuanced contribution to our theoretical understanding of professional work and morals at the workplace. This contribution is supported by a carefully interwoven theoretical framing that draws on literature on the legitimacy and expertise of the professions as well as studies of workplace morality and values. Evans focuses her theoretical development around the mechanism of developing moral authority, the capacity to define what is right, which she distinguishes from moral legitimacy, the conformity to external audiences’ expectations about what the work should be. Because much of the research on professions is focused on their external competition with others, Evans’s attention to how scientists develop an internally focused moral authority is a significant theoretical contribution to the field.

Moreover, Evans shows in great detail how the development of moral authority is accomplished. She grounds her theory in rich, descriptive ethnographic accounts of the practices of stem cell scientists in a research laboratory. Evans illustrates how the scientists navigate the challenges that could erupt from their moral differences by segregating the places where ethics were a subject of discussion: They encourage moral discussions in the seminar room but prohibit them at the lab bench. At a moment when scientists’ work is threatened worldwide, including by the actions of the U.S. federal administration, this paper is particularly relevant for demonstrating how deep moral debates can be managed to produce rigorous science.

Postcards from the ASQ Book Review Program

ASQ book review co-editor David Kirsch reports that climate activist and author Auden Schendler recently visited the University of Maryland to share his work. Check out Jeffrey York’s great review of Auden’s book, Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering our Soul, published in ASQ in March 2025. David shared Schendler’s celebration of the visit on LinkedIn as well.

Also, ASQ book review co-editor Jeannette Colyvas is currently reading The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today, by Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder. She was inspired to pick up this title by Brayden King’s excellent review of the book, published in ASQ in August 2025.

Sunflowers by Mohammed Bendaanane

The September issue is my first as editor, and it is my privilege to recognize the award-winning articles that were announced at the Academy of Management meetings in Copenhagen. This issue also contains the third essay in honor of our 70th volume, which calls for additional attention to marginalized populations in order to advance organization theory. Several empirical articles resonate with this call, examining how marginalized or unconventional actors—such as employees with disabilities, women scientists, and bootlegging DJs—shape perceptions of value, creativity, and innovation. Two articles explore how ambiguity, whether in legal enforcement or institutional agreements, can trigger adaptive strategies and deeper commitments, as shown in cross-border banking compliance and transnational labor accords. Finally, a longitudinal analysis of independent bookstores demonstrates how reconceptualizing physical space is a successful response to digital commoditization. Happy reading!

Addressing Marginalized Populations in Management Research
Damon J. Phillips and Aruna Ranganathan

In this essay commemorating ASQ’s 70th volume, the authors argue for the advancement of organization theory by advocating greater focus on populations marginalized across economic, educational, geographic, demographic, cultural, and social dimensions. The article assesses the extent to which organization theory has addressed these populations, describes and identifies exemplary articles for each proposed dimension of marginalization, notes positive trends in addressing marginalized populations in ASQ, and emphasizes the importance of an intersectional approach.

When Breaking the Law Gets You the Job: Evidence from the Electronic Dance Music Community
Xu Li and Amandine Ody-Brasier

How do lawbreakers gain support from their law-abiding community members? In this article, the authors study bootlegging among DJs in the electronic dance music (EDM) community, finding support for illegal remixing when audiences perceive the action as intended to serve the community but not when the bootlegging is seen as self-serving. The authors use a mixed-methods strategy of quantitative analysis, survey data, and interviews to demonstrate their findings, which speak to the complex reality of discretionary compliance in ambiguous situations.

Organizational Burden or Catalyst for Ideas? Disability as a Driver of Cognitive Flexibility and Creativity
David J. G. Dwertmann, Stephan A. Boehm, Kristie L. McAlpine, and Mukta Kulkarni

Disability is typically viewed in negative terms, but what if it actually spurs innovation? Using a multi-study, multi-method approach on a sample of German car manufacturing employees, the authors find that disability is linked to two creativity outcomes among colleagues of persons with disabilities: idea generation and idea novelty. Linking creativity and disability theory, the findings challenge the view of disability as an organizational burden and conventional views of coworkers of disabled persons.

Standing on the Shoulders of (Male) Giants: Gender Inequality and the Technological Impact of Scientific Ideas
Michaël Bikard, Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, and Ronak Mogra

How does scientists’ standing within their profession influence the impact of their ideas? Research has shown that women researchers receive less credit and recognition from their academic peers; this article shows that such inequality also affects technology development. Analyzing the scientific paper citations in patented inventions, the authors find gender disparity in patent-to-paper citations and attribute the difference to the idea that inventors value scientific publications written by men more than those written by women. The findings have important implications for understanding career outcomes, innovation, and technology development.

From Constructive Ambiguity to Escalating Commitment: The Evolution of the Bangladesh Accord as a Transnational Institution for Collective Action
Juliane Reinecke and Jimmy Donaghey

Helping multi-stakeholder institutions agree to collective action about systemic challenges requires clear, unambiguous contract language. Or does it? In this article, the authors theorize that constructive ambiguity can actually lead to greater subsequent commitment, in this case to the challenging problem of worker safety in global supply chains. Conducting an eight-year study of the Bangladesh Accord for Fire and Building Safety, initiated among unions, NGOs, and more than 200 companies after the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory, which killed more than 1,100 people, the authors show that constructive ambiguity enabled multi-stakeholder partnerships by initially leaving contested issues unresolved. This ambiguity allowed the Accord’s formation but required parties to negotiate the details needed for collective action, which introduced risk of failure but ultimately led the parties to strengthen their commitment via institutional investment and tie-in.

Organizational Emplacement as a Response to Digital Threat: The Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores
Ryan Raffaelli and Ryann Noe

The rise of Amazon.com was widely believed to signal the end of brick-and-mortar retail, but this article shows how independent bookstores adapted successfully by creating new types of value. Conducting a longitudinal, qualitative analysis of the U.S. bookselling industry from 1995 to 2019, the study finds that booksellers reconceptualized their physical spaces—through a process the authors call organizational emplacement—in order to create differentiation, which prevented the bookstores’ displacement in the market. The findings offer an important counter-narrative to assumptions about digital commoditization.

Regulatory Territory and General Deterrence Across Borders: Swiss Banks’ Territorial Self-Categorizations and Responses to U.S. Extraterritorial Law Enforcement
Emmanuelle Reuter, Florian Überbacher, and Andreas Georg Scherer

Extraterritorial law enforcement is on the rise, but to what extent does it deter potential lawbreakers? Studying the Swiss private wealth management industry, the authors integrate deterrence theory with a new organization-centered perspective on regulatory territory. They find that the different ways in which unprosecuted banks categorized their own territories (which the authors call territorial self-categorization) explain their responses to foreign regulators’ enforcement events. By theorizing organizations’ regulatory environment as a territory, the article reconceptualizes such environments and shows that cultural‒cognitive mechanisms mediate deterrence.

Book Reviews

Erik Schneiderhan and Martin Lukk. GoFailMe: The Unfulfilled Promise of Digital Crowdfunding
Matthias Tröbinger

Emily Hund. The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media
Farnaz Ghaedipour

Stuart L. Hart. Beyond Shareholder Primacy: Remaking Capitalism for a Sustainable Future
Thomas P. Lyon

Brooke Harrington. Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism
Kimberly Kay Hoang

Akshat Rathi. Climate Capitalism: Winning the Race to Zero Emissions and Solving the Crisis of Our Age.
Auden Schendler. Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul
Jeffrey G. York

Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins. Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics
Reuben Hurst

Kevin Woodson. The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace
Summer Jackson

Pontus Braunerhjelm and Magnus Henrekson. Unleashing Society’s Innovative Capacity: An Integrated Policy Framework
Miriam Bird

Beth Bechky, University of California, Davis

✍️ Ashleigh´s Writing Corner ✍️

Teaching Academic Writing for Doctoral Students: Interview with ASQ Associate Editor Amanda Sharkey

By Ashleigh Imus (Associate Managing Editor)

Scholars often motivate their work by talking about gaps in research. But what about gaps in researchers’ training? When I recently interviewed ASQ associate editor Amanda Sharkey about her experience teaching academic writing for doctoral students, she highlighted a gap that seems more like a chasm: Writing is essential to scholars’ success and is often a deep part of their identities and sense of self-worth, but doctoral programs generally offer no formal writing instruction.

In the 2025 spring semester, Amanda addressed this gap when she taught an introductory class on academic writing for second-year Ph.D. students in Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, where she is the Coyle Associate Professor of Management and Organization.

Describing the need for the class, she recalled her own experience:

This is something that is so fundamental to what we do in our profession, but I never got any formal training on it when I was a Ph.D. student, and I think that’s true of many places. There is a lot to be said for learning by doing. But I was really excited to have the chance to impart some of this hard-won knowledge and hopefully help jumpstart some of the students in our program on that journey with writing.

Since this was her first time teaching the class, Amanda consulted with management scholar Tim Pollock, whose book How to Use Storytelling in Academic Writing is well known in the field, and he was happy to help her get started (see also ASQ’s review of the first edition of this book).

During our conversation, Amanda’s wisdom also stood out. She talked about how she structured the class, the students’ challenges, and her highlights in teaching them, and she offered advice for new scholars learning to write, including ideas specific to management and organization scholarship.

Writing instruction often focuses on technical issues; Amanda talked about these, but also another formidable roadblock for new writers:

I think with writing, there are emotional challenges, and then there are technical challenges. . . . In the class on the first day, I had us start by saying, how do you feel about writing? What is your orientation towards it? And among this group, at least, there was a fair amount of nervousness and fear and I guess trepidation. . . . And I think part of it is because we treat writing as this thing that you’re either good at or you’re not good at. . . . We don’t show the progression of how. . . you might start out as not a great writer, but over time you learn this particular [academic] style.

Amanda recognized that for scholars, this fear may be especially intense:

I think writing is very tied up with our identities in this profession, maybe more so than in most other professions where writing happens. I think part of it is that it’s creative, [and] it’s that you spend a long time on a particular project, and so it’s hard not to be very committed to your writing. . . . I think it makes it really scary to get feedback, because it’s not always perceived as feedback on the writing; it’s taken [as] feedback on you and your intelligence and your creativity.

Her advice for overcoming this emotional hurdle was to “remind yourself that this is a profession; this is a product that you created; it is not who you are, and . . . trying to disassociate a little bit the writing from our identities can make it easier to take in that critical feedback. . . . Over the years and writing a lot, you learn that rewriting is just part of the process, and you learn to accept that.”

In fact, helping students work through this challenge was one of her teaching highlights. She said, “I felt really good that by the end of the semester, we’d had a number of conversations where I felt like that process had kind of been demystified for them. . . . What they said was that they felt less fear around that process.”

Amanda also had much to say about how she addressed practical and technical writing challenges in her teaching. Some writers struggle with making writing part of their practice, so she structured time for students to write in each class:

I wanted this to be a class where we worked on the practice of writing. Treat it like going to the gym. So I literally set a timer for about 30‒45 minutes at the end of each class, where we just sat and wrote. We told each other our goals and then reported back at the end. It was not only useful to have the time, but I think it showed us how powerful it could be to just give our writing even a short amount of time.

She found that organizing the teaching in terms of sections of a paper helped to demystify the process. “We went through section by section for a journal article and talked about . . . how do you write an intro, how do you write a theory section, how do you write the methods? . . . Having a week to focus on each of those things, I think, helped make it feel a little more manageable.”

For example, regarding literature reviews, she noted,

People need to be really careful with the literature review in terms of . . . giving enough specificity about what has been done before. I feel like a lot of times, [in] lit reviews the sentences will be very high level and general, and then they’ll have 16 citations. . . . As an editor, I find that it’s hard sometimes to appreciate the novelty in a paper when it’s a little bit distant from your focus area, and [writers] don’t give you enough of the literature review to say this is . . . specifically what has been found and what hasn’t been found. . . so that different audiences, ones who know your field better and [ones who are] maybe are a little bit more distant from it can appreciate what you’re doing and what’s new.

She also acknowledged that “The intro is the most difficult. Finding the right hook is very hard! . . . how to engage people. One piece of advice I gave was to try to work on other pieces first. You’ll make progress and gain a sense of momentum. Inspiration will strike when it strikes, and you can come back to the intro then.”

For organization and management scholars, Amanda advised writers to be careful of “using too many constructs. We have a lot of constructs in our field, and some of them have some overlap, especially where I work, [on] status, legitimacy, reputation . . . there’s a little overlap in each of those, and you have to be really careful to not overload people with constructs.”

Talking with Amanda was rewarding in part because of her deep thinking about so many different aspects of writing. A highlight for me was how she underscored the urgent need for scholars to communicate their work to help wider audiences understand the value of research. She described how, just as she was starting to teach the class in the winter months of 2025, the fires in Los Angeles were devastating entire communities. She was listening to a podcast interview in which a climate scientist “was really distraught about the fact that he was not able to communicate his research well enough to get the message of climate change out there.” The scientist felt that the issue was partly “a failure of communication, like there’s some reason that people are not understanding what we’re trying to tell them, or what we’re trying to communicate from our research.”

She concluded, “This just really stuck with me that this task of writing, it’s not just about ‘oh, we want to be good writers.’ This is what we do, and if we don’t do it well, there are real consequences.”

This thought resonates with me, as the current political climate in the U.S. has made it clear why we must try to help wide groups of stakeholders understand the value of the knowledge that scholars create. We should never assume that the world knows (or doesn’t need to know) the value of the great work produced in journals like ASQ; scholars and editors have an opportunity, and perhaps responsibility, to communicate it so that audiences—including those not part of the ASQ community—understand.

Amanda’s class is a great example of how to contribute to that goal. With her success this past semester, the course—originally planned as a one-time offering—will now be a regular part of the doctoral program in management at Notre Dame.

📖 Call for books to review! 📖

Know of a great new book relevant to ASQ? Feel free to recommend it for review in the journal. The book review editors, David Kirsch and Jeannette Colyvas, are happy to consider your suggestions.

Please send your suggested titles to associate managing editor Ashleigh Imus (asi5@cornell.edu). If you’re interested in reviewing the book you suggest, feel free to let us know; the editors may choose a different reviewer and, in that case, will keep you in mind to potentially review other titles.

More information about ASQ’s book review program can be found on the journal’s home page.

Our student-run ASQ Blog features interviews with ASQ authors that offer insights into the research and writing process. To stay informed, follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter on Substack for all the latest ASQ announcements and information.

• Ashley M. Flowers (University of South Carolina) and Ejian Zhou (Erasmus University) interview Letian Zhang (Harvard University) and Shinan Wang (Northwestern University)

  • Zhang, L., & Wang, S. (2024). Trusting Talent: Cross-Country Differences In Hiring.

• Xian Zhu (McGill University) and Krishna Dermawan (University of Queensland) interview Lindsey D. Cameron (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)

  • Cameron (2024). The Making of the “Good Bad” Job: How Algorithmic Management Manufactures Consent Through Constant and Confined Choices.

2025 ASQ Article Award Winners

Each year, we present two article awards. The ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution honors the article published five years earlier that has subsequently had the greatest influence on the field of organization studies. The ASQ Dissertation Award goes to an article published in the previous year based on a dissertation, with the lead or sole author being the dissertation author. The award-winning dissertation article is the one that best exemplifies the criteria for publication in ASQ. Two committees, comprising members of our editorial board, review articles published during the target years and choose the award winners.

We are thrilled to share that this year’s ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution goes to Gianpiero Petriglieri, Susan J. Ashford, and Amy Wrzesniewski for “Agony and ecstasy in the gig economy: Cultivating holding environments for precarious and personalized work identities.” The committee found this to be an “agenda-setting study” of the emotional dynamics of gig workers and how they sustain and manage work identities in the absence of traditional organizational support. With rich qualitative data and compelling quotes, the article focuses on how workers create what the authors term a “personal holding environment” by establishing connections to routines, places, people, and purpose to manage the challenges and emotional tensions of precarious work. The article combines micro/social-psychological perspectives with macro/sociological theories to explore how precarious work can be not only tolerable but also generative, and it has opened new research areas on the precarity of the gig economy and workers’ experiences within it.

Of the 15 articles published in 2024 that were based on dissertation research (out of 24 total articles we published that year), the 2025 ASQ Dissertation Award goes to Leandro S. Pongeluppe for “The allegory of the favela: The multifaceted effects of socioeconomic mobility.” Using the setting of Brazilian favelas, or urban slums, Pongeluppe’s article explores the promise of entrepreneurship as a way out of disenfranchised economic situations—and the accompanying roadblocks to social mobility. Observing results of a randomly employed business training program, Pongeluppe shows that entering formal markets increases the felt social stigma of being from a favela. The higher the income levels achieved through these programs, the more intense the adverse social-psychological effects. Pongeluppe highlights the social-psychological costs that participants, attempting to realize economic outcomes, experienced when interacting with higher-status others outside of favelas. The committee commends this article as “a wonderful example of a multi-method approach to both highlight a pattern and pinpoint the mechanisms through which this pattern is reinforced. This could not be done without thoughtful theorizing in conjunction with these methods—an exemplary abductive paper.”

We also honor the runner-up for the ASQ Dissertation Award, Michael Y. Lee’s “Enacting decentralized authority: The practices and limits of moving beyond hierarchy.” This rich, fascinating ethnographic study focuses on an effort to shift from traditional hierarchical authority to a self-managing structure under what many people now call Holacracy. Drawing on 18 months of extensive interviews, observations, and archival materials, Lee shows how decentralization is an ongoing process that must be constantly enacted to avoid backsliding into hierarchy. He identifies three key practices that employees use for bounding and grounding authority by clarifying decision rights and depersonalizing power, thereby empowering employees to act outside conventional chains of command. At the same time, Lee highlights the practical and psychological frictions that make these practices difficult to sustain. Lee argues that authority is something organizations and their members actively do rather than statically have, reinforcing that even when formal systems permit decentralization, tendencies toward hierarchy repeatedly reassert themselves.

We thank the ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution Committee, chaired by Elizabeth Pontikes and composed of Russell Funk, Arvind Karunakaran, and Kisha Lashley. We also thank the ASQ Dissertation Award Committee, chaired by Oliver Hahl and composed of Callen Anthony, Justin Frake, and Minjae Kim. Each committee member dedicated substantial time to reading and deliberating on the contenders, and their efforts led to outstanding selections.

Leo Pongeluppe recently published a blog post in Sage Perspectives about lessons he learned while transforming his dissertation research into successful journal articles. We’re happy to reprint that terrific blog post below!

From Dissertation to Publication: Seven Lessons from the Field

By Leandro S. Pongeluppe

1. Focus on what you are passionate about.

The Ph.D. journey is long, and sustained motivation is difficult, especially when you are away from home, family, and friends. Transform these hardships into something meaningful to you! I anchored my research on issues I genuinely care about: the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. My research question – whether business capabilities training can promote the socioeconomic advancement of disenfranchised individuals living in Brazilian slums, or favelas (Pongeluppe, 2024, p. 619) – was interesting to me not only as a scholar but as someone seeking to understand how people face socioeconomic inequality and can move out of poverty.

2. Follow strong role models.

Rather than trying an entirely new approach, learn from rigorous studies in your field. I benefited from authors (e.g., Attanasio, Kugler, & Meghir, 2011) who had performed randomized control trials (RCTs) and made their data and analysis code publicly available. This helped me understand not only the final product but also how data was collected and analyzed. Modeling best practices from high-quality research helped me elevate the design of my dissertation and refine its narrative for publication.

3. Collaborate.

Instead of designing an intervention from scratch, I partnered with a long-standing NGO, now called Instituto da Providência, which had over 15 years of experience delivering business training programs in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. They brought institutional memory, a well-established intervention design, and organized historical data; I contributed an impact evaluation of their program. This collaboration saved time, reduced costs, and embedded the research in a vivid context.

4. Mix your methods.

I get annoyed with some economist friends who claim that they understand the world by only running regressions. Take the opportunity to go to the field, talk to people, and get your hands a bit dirty (Hirsch, Michaels, & Friedman, 1987). While the backbone of my study was a stratified RCT, I complemented it with computational text analysis of participant feedback, field visits, and interviews with community leaders and entrepreneurs. This triangulation helped me not only to understand my results better but also to explore the mechanisms behind them. Multiple methods enrich the data and your story.

5. Know your data and do your job.

Working with primary data brings both freedom and responsibility. I was meticulous in documenting each step of the process, from pre-registration to making data, code, and legal documents available. Knowing your data means being able to respond confidently to reviewers and make adjustments during revision. Scientific rigor is not optional – it is your best ally in the publication process.

6. Count on your scholarly community.

It takes a village to get to publication. Supervisors (Anita McGahan in my case) and committee members will guide you. Peer doctoral students will help you with ideas and execution. Editors (Chris Rider in my case) and referees will support you in crafting your contribution and making the most of your work. Their feedback, while sometimes daunting, can clarify your paper’s contribution and improve its quality. More importantly, they force you to refine your ideas and grow as a scholar.

7. Think beyond academia.

Do not limit yourself to publishing in a scientific journal. The program I evaluated was later expanded into public policy across 23 municipalities in São Paulo State, reaching over 12,500 women who lead single-parent households. The published article may have been the academic endpoint, but it was not the end of the work. We have a world to care for. Science can and should contribute to it.

A dissertation is a personal and intellectual adventure full of ups and downs. My hope is that I’ve offered encouragement – and practical guidance – as you take the next step. Keep working hard, and good things will happen!

References

Attanasio, O., Kugler, A. D., & Meghir, C. (2011). Subsidizing vocational training for disadvantaged youth in developing countries: Evidence from a randomized trial. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 3, 188–220.

Hirsch, P., Michaels, S., & Friedman, R. (1987). “Dirty hands” versus “clean models”: Is sociology in danger of being seduced by economics? Theory and Society, 16, 317–336.

Pongeluppe, L. S. (2024). The allegory of the favela: The multifaceted effects of socieconomic mobility. Administrative Science Quarterly, 69, 619–654.

Leandro S. Pongeluppe is a socio-environmental impact specialist and an assistant professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Leandro holds a Ph.D. from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. His primary research interests are related to stakeholder management and socioeconomic development. Particularly, Leandro is interested in understanding how organizations’ design and governance affect the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, such as poverty alleviation, environmental conservation, and health care.

Meet ASQ’s Editorial Team

This summer has been a transition time for ASQ’s editorial leadership. We offer huge thanks to these three hardworking scholars, whose terms recently ended, for their outstanding service to the journal and the field: Christine Beckman, András Tilcsik, and Siobhan O’Mahony:

And a hearty welcome to our newest associate editors: Matthew Bidwell, Fabrizio Ferraro, and Ruthanne Huising:

Matthew, Fabrizio, and Ruthanne join an outstanding team consisting of associate editors Emily Bianchi, Seth Carnahan, Stéphane Côté, J.P. Eggers, Greta Hsu, Olenka Kacperczyk, Erin Reid, Amanda Sharkey, and Dan Wang, with leadership from deputy editor Adam Kleinbaum and editor Beth Bechky. Each member of our editorial team devotes countless hours to the work of assessing submissions, running the peer review process, making (often tough) decisions, and ensuring that the journal’s policies and processes keep up with ever-changing needs.

Many thanks to every one of them for their dedication!

Academic Values and ASQ: Convening

By Christine Beckman (Former Editor) and András Tilcsik (Former Deputy Editor)

Too often, journals are simply the target of our ambitions, the markers of our success, and the source of deep frustration. Academic lives are punctuated by submission (celebrate), rejection (sulk or seethe), the occasional revision (re-engage and re-work), and the even rarer acceptance (celebrate wildly). But given the world we live in, the future we face, and the reason many of us chose this path, we need to remember that journals play another role—one beyond the lines on our CVs. One that binds us together rather than signals our individual achievements.

Journals also are tools for convening scholars and engaging with ideas. As Beth Bechky and Jerry Davis (2025, p. 11) argued in their March issue essay, “journals embody the idea of a community of scholars.” This is an ideal to take seriously but one that is hard to articulate, hard to measure, and even harder to accomplish. How do journals provide community when they reject papers at far higher rates than they accept them? It is easy for a journal to function as a club rather than a community, so it is critical that journals explicitly seek to be inclusive in their approach. We know that innovation comes from recombination and from diverse perspectives. We need safe spaces to explore and to have dialogue, and we need to be intentional in broadening our reach to new authors. At the same time, every journal operates within an ongoing intellectual conversation, one that depends on shared language and mutual understanding. Striking the right balance between broadening participation in a journal's community and maintaining coherence is a constant challenge.

Building a community requires re-imagining journals as more than static collections of papers. Our community engages scholars outside the published pages of the journal. Our social media strategy has shifted over time, and we are currently using LinkedIn to keep people abreast of conversations, events, and articles. In 2024, following the lead of Organization Science, we started this monthly Substack newsletter, Inside ASQ, to have a regular, informal means of communicating. We are trying to be interactive both virtually and in as many physical places as we can. We hosted an in-person paper development workshop in New York City in 2022 (this is possible when supportive institutions provide resources and help organize), and technology allows for frequent touchpoints with the broader community. The ASQ Blog brings younger scholars together virtually to learn about the publishing process; online symposiums around virtual special issues bring together scholars in specific areas; ASQ editors host online sessions for new reviewers; and ASQ editors participate in online conferences and panels for a variety of conferences and associations.

The editorial board serves an important role, and we try to bring together the editorial board virtually or in person a couple times each year to share important updates and to get to know one another. This includes an editorial board meeting and reception at the Academy of Management annual meeting to celebrate our award-winning papers.

We have also made a concerted effort to broaden the reach of the editorial board and increase our diversity on a number of dimensions. We ask our editorial board members to be ambassadors in their own communities. Editors, associate editors, and editorial board members represent ASQ at a variety of conferences and professional development workshops where authors seek guidance on developing their work. To be an inclusive community requires extending beyond North America. Other journals were started with an explicitly non-U.S. focus, but ASQ from the beginning has acknowledged the potential parochialism of North American journals and ASQ in particular.

ASQ is a small journal relative to other journals in the field (in terms of the editorial team, number of submissions, and number of articles published). This makes the demographic trends hard to follow. During our editorial term, we have had associate editors working at institutions in Asia and the UK (besides North America). On the editorial board, 18 percent work outside North America, and 14 percent received their Ph.D. outside North America. Of course, institutional affiliation is only one measure of diversity of perspective. Two-thirds of our current editorial board identifies as White (18 percent as Asian; 2 percent as Black; 3 percent each as Hispanic/Latino or Middle Eastern/North African). In terms of ethnic origins, 42 percent report Western European ancestry, 24 percent Asian, 14 percent Eastern European, and 20 percent North American. Although the breadth of the editorial team and editorial board has improved, we have not kept up with the number of submissions from these geographic regions.

Half of our current associate editors are women. In terms of methodological and theoretical breadth on our editorial team, people identify as micro, meso, and macro scholars, and they conduct experiments, surveys, simulations, and various other quantitative and qualitative methods. Despite the rejection of DEI in the current U.S. administration, we know that diverse perspectives improve our scholarship, inclusion creates the psychological safety necessary to debate and challenge new ideas, and the societal and environmental challenges facing organizations reflect our deep interdependence and require our collective minds.

Another way to measure the breadth and diversity of our community is to explore what is submitted to and published in ASQ. The countries (and continents) with the largest numbers of submissions include the U.S. (38%), Europe (26%, including the UK), Asia (14%), and Canada and India (4% each). This is based on first author submissions since 2021 (the proportions are similar if we look at submissions since 2011, with proportionally fewer papers coming in the last four years from the U.S. as other parts of the globe have seen an increase).

A higher proportion of ASQ authors are women than at many of our peer journals: almost 40 percent of ASQ papers have had a woman author in the last decade, which is higher than all other top organizations journals according to Scimago (only AMJ comes close). In addition to asking about the authors themselves, it is equally important to ask about the communities that are being studied. Over the past five years, just under 40 percent of articles published used data from non-U.S. contexts.

It is also worth noting that we publish many more papers each year than we did 15 years ago (from 16 to roughly 28 per year). This reflects a concerted effort to better serve the growing community, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the massive numbers of articles published by some newer journals (Bechky and Davis, 2025). Our curating, certifying, and cultivating efforts require time, effort, and resources, but today there is an increasing pressure to publish more articles without the requisite attention to the core values we seek to uphold.

Concluding Thoughts

The scholarly work of curating, certifying, cultivating, and convening isn’t just about ASQ; it is about moving the entire field forward. Given the changes in the world, are journals passé? Absolutely not. Journals play an important role in the academic ecosystem. The explosion of publications, articles, and new technologies makes it easy to obscure our core mission, which is why we think it is important to articulate and reiterate our values. With those values clear, we can consider how to adapt to the changing times and use technology to enhance our larger goals.

To paraphrase the first sentence ever written in ASQ, the purpose is the pursuit of the horizon—and undertaking that pursuit together as a community.

As we write our last Substack post, we thank the ASQ community for their efforts and enthusiasm. Over the past five years, many people have made our community vibrant. We are deeply grateful to the associate editors, book review editors, editorial board and Methods Advisory Panel members, reviewers, social media editors, and blog interviewers and interviewees. We are grateful to the thousands of authors who have entrusted us with their work and to the many scholars who have contributed thoughtful book reviews to ASQ. We owe a special debt to Cornell University for their institutional support (as the owner of ASQ) and to Joan Friedman, managing editor, and Ashleigh Imus, associate managing editor, for their relentless dedication and thought partnership. They provide the expertise and energy to maintain our high standards.

As we express our gratitude, we also pause to remember those our community has lost in the last five years. Linda Johanson was the managing editor from 1980 to 2019, publishing 155 issues and working with eight editors. Linda passed away in 2022, only three years after she retired. We also lost Dan Brass, who served as an associate editor from 1995–2007, and Phil Anderson, who served as an associate editor from 2007–2013, as well as editorial board members and authors Sigal Barsade and Ned Smith. Their collective impact on ASQ—and on the scholars who read and contribute to ASQ—continues to be felt. Their work and influence live on in the conversations they shaped and the questions they inspired.

Now, it’s time for us to pass the baton. We wish the new editor, Beth Bechky, every success in ensuring that ASQ continues to build community, serves callings rather than careers, and fosters curiosity rather than conformity.

Welcome to our new editor from former editors

It is customary for incumbents to leave a note for their successors, like a letter from a former president to the incoming one. To welcome our new editor, Beth Bechky, we invited former editors to share their wishes with her.

Henrich Greve
Dear Beth, It is a great pleasure to hear that you will become the new Editor of ASQ. You have taken on a role with great responsibility. ASQ is a journal of innovation that introduces big ideas that will spread across the fields of administrative sciences. It is a journal of renewal that recognizes and appreciates the best new dissertation-based work. It is a journal of rigor that publishes articles that are taught to doctoral students not just because of the ideas they introduce, but also how well they are executed. ASQ is a selective journal much smaller than the association journals in the field, so every paper accepted is a statement of excellence. You are the right person to be taking on these responsibilities, and I look forward to seeing the next years of ASQ.

Steve Barley
Dear Beth, Congratulations to you, and to ASQ, on your appointment as the new editor. The entire field and especially those who read and publish in ASQ are fortunate to have an editor who is as broadminded and yet as discerning as you. Your reputation for being rigorous, fair-minded and helpful to authors is precisely what ASQ has long held as a core value. I have no doubt that under your editorship a broad range of organization scholars will continue to view to ASQ as their preferred place to publish their most significant research.

Jerry Davis
Dear Beth, I am so grateful that you are taking on the role of editor-in-chief at ASQ right now. So much feels unsettled in the world of scholarship and journals, and what this world needs most are people of integrity and wisdom and boldness and take-no-shittism – in short, people like Beth Bechky. Having an unshakeable set of core values will be essential for all the craziness to come. You are the right person for this moment.

My modest observation is that what distinguishes ASQ from every other journal is that it is a genuine community. People are honored to be associated with ASQ. Board members do endless hard work that is anonymous to the outside world because they care about this inside world. They especially care what you think of them. If I have one piece of advice, it is to treasure and nurture that community. Their willingness to read deeply, evaluate thoughtfully, and share their insights (whatever the disposition of the paper) is what makes ASQ the best journal in our field. It may be what saves us.

Don Palmer
Dear Beth, Congratulations on your appointment to the Editorship of ASQ. I suspect you will experience this as just another step up the academic status hierarchy, as you have already enjoyed a long run of publication successes, appointments to positions of authority and responsibility, and accolades. But this appointment is special, as it reflects a larger constituency’s belief that you are not only unparalleled in your area of research, but knowledgeable of the full range of scholarship in organizational science, and above all a wise and fair judge of others’ work.

As a UCD colleague, I also know you to be collaborative, exceptionally responsible and incredibly hard working. For all these reasons, I am confident that the journal will not only fare well but will reach new heights with you at the helm. I wish you the very best of luck as you transition into this next phase of your academic career. I also wish that you enjoy the journey.

Huggy Rao
Beth, Congratulations and welcome to the ASQ editor. May you multiply curiosity with generosity!

✍️ Ashleigh´s Writing Corner ✍️

Academic Register: A Surprising Act of Resistance (Read Out Loud!)

By Ashleigh Imus (Associate Managing Editor)

What’s the appropriate level of formality for academic writing? Recently I edited an essay that got me thinking more about this subject—and that once again celebrates the endless creativity of great writers.

The level of formality (sometimes referred to as register) in academic writing is usually higher than in other genres, like news and other articles meant for general audiences. For ASQ articles, we maintain this formality through structures such as spelling out contractions (e.g., writing “does not” rather than “doesn’t) and via slightly elevated diction (e.g., we might replace something like “we got the data” with “we obtained the data”).

For ASQ book reviews, we allow a slightly less formal register when we see it (mainly by allowing contractions) because reviews represent a less formal genre of academic writing. But what should the boundaries of this register be? Enter Mike Barnett’s recently published ASQ review of The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs, by Christopher Marquis. While the register of this review is noticeably more colloquial than most ASQ book reviews, I find it to be a great piece of writing, not in spite of but, in part, because of its unusual register.

Contextualizing his thoughts about Marquis’s book, Barnett uses a host of non-academic words, phrases, and syntax to describe the welfare benefits that give corporations the upper hand. Look at how he elaborates the popular metaphor of benefits as a free lunch:

Turns out, there is such a thing as a free lunch, though. Problem is, it’s being eaten by the overfed, not the hungry. Corporations are freely gorging on grand buffets of social, ecological, and economic goodies daily, the likes of which would put Golden Corral to shame. And their continuous consumption of this gratis grub is slowly but surely devouring the planet. Yet, their appetite for destruction remains insatiable. So we have to do something—stat!

Here, the less formal register stands out in words like “grub” (slang for “food”), “goodies,” and “stat”; in the popular reference to Golden Corral (an American chain restaurant); and in the informal syntax of “Turns out . . .” and “Problem is . . .” and, later in the review “Spoiler alert: It ain’t the corporations!”

It would be easy to object to this style as not sufficiently academic, but there’s more going on here than meets the superficial eye. Barnett’s style is actually quite nuanced, in part because of the way he counterbalances his colloquial register with literary devices usually reserved for art forms like poetry. He makes exuberant use of alliteration (the repetition of initial word sounds) in phrases like “bountiful buffet,” “gratis grub,” “dining and dashing,” “good guys,” and so on.

And in this sentence, he shows finesse by using the active and passive voices to contrast “opportunity” with “opportunist,” cleverly wedding his diction to his syntactic choices: “Let’s hope we seize the opportunity before we get seized by the opportunists.”

These stylistic choices create a voice that is full of joy—revealing a writer who truly likes to write, and the joy is infectious. I was so intrigued by this piece that I asked Mike if he might be willing to record himself reading it, which he was happy to do:

Listening to Barnett’s reading confirmed for me that the style is unmistakably his: His reading sounds completely natural and not overdone (which would be an easy pitfall given his rich rhetoric).

We can also see Barnett’s exercise in balance in the contrast between his style and the topic of his essay. He’s writing about the depressing, relentless greed of corporations, which could make readers feel hopeless. But his own voice is relentlessly vibrant and uplifting as his familiar words and phrases take no prisoners and rally us to action.

This is, of course, rebellious, not just in the way the writer casts aside conventional academic style but in the way his joyful voice insists that words really do matter—they can convince us and nourish our spirit if we let them. They can change things. In this way, Barnett’s rhetoric refuses to let the bad guys win.

Thinking about this reminded me of a point that California writer Rebecca Solnit makes in her 2021 book Orwell’s Roses. In this book, Solnit (also well known for many other titles such as Hope in the Dark, 2006; Men Explain Things to Me, 2015; and Recollections of My Nonexistence, 2020) documents the twentieth-century English novelist George Orwell’s love of cultivating roses, connecting his seemingly unrelated passion for gardening to his antifascist politics. She makes the unexpected argument that rather than being frivolous, taking pleasure in the natural world is fundamental to political and cultural resistance.

To me, the pleasure that Barnett takes in his style—and offers to readers—is another act of resistance. And it’s a reminder that even when rules seem rigid and our work feels overwhelming or fruitless in the face of what appears to be catastrophe, we humans have boundless creative capacity to get ourselves out of trouble.

Our student-run ASQ Blog features interviews with ASQ authors that offer insights into the research and writing process. Check out these three recent posts!

• Linette Dawson (University of Tampa) and Yanbo Song (INSEAD) interview Rodrigo Canales (Boston University) and Charlie Cannon (Rhode Island School of Design).

  • Canales, R., Bradbury, M., Sheldon, A., & Cannon, C. (2024). Evidence in Practice: How Structural and Programmatic Scaffolds Enable Collaboration in International Development.

• Marton Gera (Erasmus University) and Saeed Fanoodi (University of Mississippi) interview Muhan Zhang (CUHK Business School), Forrest Briscoe (Cornell University), and Mark R. DesJardine (Dartmouth College)

  • Zhang, M., Briscoe, F., & DesJardine, M. R. (2023). Corporate boards with street smarts? How diffuse street protests indirectly shape corporate governance.

If you are attending the AOM annual meeting in Copenhagen, we invite you to join us at our annual reception, which will give you the chance to thank Christine Beckman for her service as ASQ’s editor and to welcome new editor Beth Bechky and deputy editor Adam Kleinbaum.

This reception for our authors, editorial board members, reviewers, and other friends of the journal will take place on Sunday, July 27, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. in the Crowne Plaza Everest 2, lower ground floor, Copenhagen. It is a time to celebrate everyone who is part of our vibrant community. At the reception, Beth will present two awards whose winners will be kept confidential until that time:

• The ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution, which will go to the author(s) of the paper published in ASQ five years ago judged to have made the greatest scholarly contribution.

• The ASQ Dissertation Award, which will go to the sole or lead author of an article based on dissertation data and research that was published in an ASQ issue in 2024 and best exemplifies the criteria for publication in ASQ.

We hope you will join us!

Join us at our reception in AOM 2025!

On July 1, Christine Beckman and András Tilcsik will step down as editor and deputy editor of ASQ. Their years-long dedication to the journal has been extraordinary, and we thank them for devoting countless hours to keeping this operation running smoothly and to navigating challenges and opportunities for growth with wisdom and acumen. Thank you, Christine and András!

Our new editor, Beth Bechky, and new deputy editor, Adam Kleinbaum, are already fully engaged with ASQ’s operations and are ready to take the helm on July 1. Please join us in welcoming them warmly into these roles! Their deep knowledge of the journal and the field will serve them—and all of us—well.

If you are attending the AOM annual meeting in Copenhagen, we invite you to join us at our annual reception, which will give you the chance to thank Christine and to welcome Beth and Adam.

This reception for our authors, editorial board members, reviewers, and other friends of the journal will take place on Sunday, July 27 from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. in the Crowne Plaza Everest 2, lower ground floor. It is a time to celebrate everyone who is part of our vibrant community.

At the reception, Beth will present two awards whose winners will be kept confidential until that time:

• The ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution, which will go to the author(s) of the paper published in ASQ five years ago judged to have made the greatest scholarly contribution.

• The ASQ Dissertation Award, which will go to the sole or lead author of an article based on dissertation data and research that was published in an ASQ issue in 2024 and best exemplifies the criteria for publication in ASQ.

We hope you will join us at the AOM reception as we celebrate our past and look toward an exciting future!

Academic Values and ASQ: Credibility

By Christine Beckman (Editor) and András Tilcsik (Deputy Editor)

Having spent a collective two decades of our lives in editorial roles, we are often asked, “Why is this how you spend your time?” It’s a fair question. There are so many pressing problems in the world that deserve attention; after enduring COVID-19, we see escalating climate disasters, widening economic inequality, persistent racial and class injustices, rising misinformation and disinformation, rapid technological disruption, mass migration, deepening societal mental health challenges, democratic erosion, and growing political instability. And this question isn’t just about editorial work; it is a broader question of how all of us as scholars spend our time. The day in and day out of academic lives is often consumed by an endless stream of seemingly small tasks—prepping for class, faculty committee meetings, office hours with students—all while trying to find time to write, to analyze, to think. Christine’s daughter, in her second year as a Ph.D. student, recently texted, “Too many tasks to do. I am sad I will feel this way until May. Or maybe for the rest of my life.”

This month, we tackle the certifying role of journals (having tackled curating and cultivating in earlier posts). Confidence in journal articles is engendered by the certifying process. We are more likely to see articles as credible and trustworthy if they make it through a vigorous peer review process. These are not perfect processes: Manuscripts with significant weakness get published, and stellar papers can be rejected. But, by and large, we expect journals to uphold certain standards of evidence. Especially when the credibility of academic science is questioned, journals’ efforts to increase transparency are essential to maintaining trust. This is an ongoing process, not an end state, as scientific knowledge is under constant revision along with our means of assessing knowledge claims (Giddens, 1990). These certifying efforts are not only about ensuring that methods are transparent and credible but also about educating scholars regarding what that means and how to do it. This is more challenging than it sounds given the different methodological traditions within organizational research, not to mention the very strong differences in opinion about what is reasonable and what should be expected.

The ideal of embracing a variety of methods as a strength and goal of administrative science has been part of ASQ’s history (Boulding, 1958; Daft, 1980). Today, over 30 percent of submissions to ASQ are qualitative manuscripts (this includes ethnographies, interview-based methods, and manuscripts using historical or archival data as primary data sources). When we look at award-winning papers, we see the balance of qualitative and quantitative papers achieving near parity. Less than 5 percent of submissions to ASQ are pure theory papers.

The credibility of papers across methods has been an area of focus at ASQ. In addition to an essay devoted to transparency in qualitative methods (Pratt et al., 2020), we have developed a data and methods transparency policy with expectations for both qualitative and quantitative methods. This policy requires authors to outline their approach to transparency at submission and to follow through upon acceptance. The policy reflects two core commitments: supporting authors and ensuring the credibility of published research. While no policy can guarantee trustworthiness, transparency strengthens the foundation of rigorous scholarship and enhances scholars’ ability to build on prior work. Authors using statistical or computational methods are expected to post their data and code unless there is a compelling reason not to, while qualitative researchers are asked to provide details on data collection, analysis, and the link between data and findings. Below, associate editors Stéphane Côté and Erin Reid offer some reflections and guidance on transparency in submissions now that we have almost a year of experience with our new data transparency policy.

We also rely on a Methods Advisory Panel to offer additional feedback on the soundness of a paper’s methods. Methodological expectations change quickly, and new methods are constantly being developed. The Methods Advisory Panel complements the expertise of our editorial team and helps ASQ stay abreast of new methods and norms.

Stay tuned next month for our take on the importance of convening at ASQ.

Why Do We Have a Transparency Policy, and How Does It Support Researchers?

By Stéphane Côté (Associate Editor) & Erin Reid (Associate Editor)

Last year, ASQ instituted a Data and Methods Transparency Policy and Guidelines. As members of the editorial team, we sometimes get questions about this policy—why we instituted it, and how it is working out. So we'd like to take this opportunity to explain why and how we developed it, and why we believe it is helpful for ASQ authors.

Why and how we developed the policy. ASQ developed the transparency policy in part in response to methodological advances in the field, and as part of a broader movement towards openness about data and methods. Research has illuminated, for instance, the benefits of distinguishing between exploration and confirmation (Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom, van der Maas, & Kievit, 2012), and of pre-registering plans for methods and analysis when appropriate (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2021). As scholars, we also simply learn a great deal from understanding how other researchers designed their studies. As transparency is a core value for ASQ, the editorial team decided to formally incorporate these advances in our processes.

We believe the policy has led to a better process for authors, reviewers, and editors in the following ways:

Authors and reviewers better understand common expectations. Before implementation of the policy, expectations for transparency in an initial submission were unclear. Authors often figure out what to share about their study in an initial submission by examining back issues of the journal. Indeed, we're taught to examine "exemplar papers" in graduate school for guidance on writing, demonstrating evidence, and explaining theoretical contributions. Taking the same approach when figuring out what to share about data and methods is reasonable. The issue that authors run into is that norms around what is shared about methods and data have changed dramatically over the years, and have also varied across subfields of organization and management studies. So, different exemplar papers might provide quite different guidance. The policy clarifies that transparency and trustworthiness are key criteria in editorial decisions at ASQ. To increase their chances of a favorable review, authors can verify that their manuscript contains the elements listed in the policy.

In cutting-edge areas of organizational research in which new theory is developed, results may rarely be perfect or definitive. Our policy clarifies that authors can advance knowledge about important questions by sharing positive, negative, or null results. The policy communicates that especially if the research is transparent, results do not need to be perfect to make an important contribution.

The policy also clarifies what reviewers and editors can expect in an initial submission, to help address inconsistency in what reviewers consider necessary to see, and to clarify for editors (who are sometimes tasked with handling papers outside our methodological domains) the characteristics of a transparent manuscript using an unfamiliar method. The policy simplifies the review process by setting out some common expectations.

Authors receive more helpful (and often more favorable) feedback. We noticed that novice authors, in particular, often submitted papers that simply didn't share as much about their studies as is currently expected by reviewers. For these authors, this led to an initial set of reviewer comments that included concerns about transparency and the extent to which it was possible to believe the findings without knowing much more about the research. By contrast, authors who shared much more about their research from the get-go received reviews that focused more on the substance of their research—both the findings and theoretical contributions. These latter types of reviews tended not only to be more helpful but also to be more positive about the paper's eventual publishability.

Authors enjoy a more equitable process. By making expectations clear around transparency, we also hope that the policy helps promote fairness for authors: All authors, regardless of the training and mentoring they have previously received, know what to include in an initial submission and what they will need to post (if possible) if their paper is accepted. For a qualitative study, this includes, for instance, information on when the research was conducted; an interview protocol (if interviews were conducted); and participant identifiers in the write-up of findings. For a quantitative study, this includes the data set, code for analysis, and surveys/materials. By sharing this kind of information, authors can help ensure that their reviews focus on the substance of the research, rather than the background details.

Reviewers can focus on the substance of the paper. We also hope this policy makes the reviewing experience a more enjoyable and rewarding one. ASQ reviewers put a lot of time and effort into evaluating research, and we hope that when submissions include essential data and methods information from the start, reviewers can focus their attention on the strengths of the study and opportunities to further develop it. After all, appreciating each other’s research on organizations and organizing, and helping each other improve it, is central to what we do at ASQ.

Readers trust conclusions of ASQ papers more. Transparency about data, where it came from, and how it was analyzed helps readers better evaluate the conclusions and the extent to which they are reasonable, for both inductive and confirmatory research. Such clarity benefits not only the field but also authors, whose work can be regarded as trustworthy. For instance, the policy helps guard against shallow post-publication critiques in articles or on social media. ASQ authors put an enormous amount of effort into gathering and selecting the best data, and analyzing it in the most rigorous way possible. Transparency in a paper's methods makes that effort apparent, documenting the rigour of the work for future readers. Further, we expect that researchers will be more motivated to extend and/or apply research that they trust, enhancing the future impact of ASQ papers.

Although our sense is that the review process is more generative for authors with the new policy, one might worry that this policy would have negative effects. We have not seen this. Since we implemented the policy, the number of submissions received and the proportion of revisions offered have not changed. Thus far, the policy does not seem to have had any negative impact on the review process. And, for the reasons outlined above, we are hopeful that it has resulted in a more rewarding review experience for both authors and reviewers, and is helping authors develop strong and trustworthy papers.

References

Simmons, J., D Nelson, L., & Simonsohn, U. (2021). Pre‐registration: Why and how. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 31, 151-162.

Wagenmakers, E. J., Wetzels, R., Borsboom, D., van der Maas, H. L., & Kievit, R. A. (2012). An agenda for purely confirmatory research. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 632-638.

Results from our cover contest!

And the selected cover is… the sunflowers photo by Mohammed Bendaanane! Congratulations!

In our recent open call, we invited you—our readers—to help choose the next ASQ cover photo. We were thrilled by your enthusiasm and the many votes cast.

We’re excited to announce that the winning image—the vibrant sunflowers photo—will appear on the cover of our September issue. Thank you to everyone who participated.

And stay tuned: We hope to feature some of the other submitted photos in future issues and communications as well.

This is what makes ASQ great: the community that reads, reviews, contributes, and cares deeply about shaping the journal together, from its covers to its conclusions!

“Cascais, Portugal” Timothy M. Devinney. Used with the photographer’s permission.

ASQ June Issue 2025

The June issue of ASQ has a bit of wanderlust. From spreading passion across teammates in China, to philanthropic contributions as insurance against political transition in Taiwan. From young job seekers reconciling the use of social connections with meritocracy in Spain, to doctors influenced by peers to perform more births via caesarean section in Brazil. From the innovative benefits of multi-method analytics in the U.S., to democratic organizing and its effects on society around the world. And we have an account of digital nomads, whose wanderlust motivates them to find a way to create work stability despite their freedom in frequently changing locations.

As the June issue marks our last as editors, Deputy Editor András Tilcsik and I also share some parting words about the role of journals in our field (an abbreviated version of our posts in the newsletter about curating, cultivating, certifying, and convening scholarship). Bon Voyage!

On Democratic Organizing and Organization Theory
Julie Battilana, Christine M. Beckman, and Julie Yen

To what extent does autocracy at work spill over to normalize authoritarian governments? As threats to democracy loom, this article argues for more study of how organizations shape democratic and authoritarian societies. The authors argue that we need to better understand the processes and outcomes associated with democratic governance and worker participation, such as conflict, scaling, innovation, and efficiency. They advocate greater understanding of how organizational governance structures influence outcomes beyond the organization, such as expectations of civic participation in society and democratic governance more broadly.

Place Iteration and Integration: How Digital Nomads Navigate the Mobile Worker Paradox
Melanie K. Prengler, Anthony C. Klotz, and Chad Murphy

Digital nomads have wanderlust for traveling but need to work. How do they manage the tension between their desire to be mobile and a lack of structures to facilitate work? The authors show that digital nomads interpret placefulness—a deep connection to their physical location—differently according to their degree of wanderlust. Some create temporary homes to balance the freedom of mobility with familiar work practices; others oscillate between freedom and familiarity, revisiting familiar locations. The article shows how mobility and a sense of place can be compatible.

CSR as Hedging Against Institutional Transition Risk: Corporate Philanthropy After the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan
Yishu Cai, Lori Qingyuan Yue, Fangwen Lin, Shipeng Yan, and Haibin Yang

Political connections to an authoritarian regime can give firms a competitive advantage, but how do firms respond when such regimes undergo democratic transitions? Studying Taiwan’s 2014 Sunflower Movement, the authors show that when mass protests signal that a regime change is likely, firms engage in philanthropy to protect themselves from the risks associated with their political connections. The effect is stronger for firms in regions with strong civil society or where political opposition is on the rise. The article sheds light on the signaling functions of social movements.

Methodological Pluralism and Innovation in Data-Driven Organizations
Ryan T. Allen and Rory M. McDonald

Multi-method analysis—in papers and in firms—leads to innovation. In this study, the authors show that when organizations use both quantitative and qualitative analyses, their new-product sales increase more compared to when organizations rely on one or the other type alone. Data-driven innovation based on quantitative analysis often leads to incremental innovations. Qualitative analysis can lead to greater novelty but also more failures. With these findings, the authors show how methodological pluralism can help organizations make the most of their efforts to innovate new products.

Riding the Passion Wave or Fighting to Stay Afloat? A Theory of Differentiated Passion Contagion
Emma L. Frank, Kai Krautter, Wen Wu, and Jon M. Jachimowicz

How easily does passion spread within a team? This article, based on an experience-sampling study at an engineering company, shows that high-passion teams have higher performance and social connections. However, it is emotionally exhausting and effortful to increase levels of passion compared to other emotional states, and this can undermine the beneficial effects of high passion in teams. The study offers important nuance to theories of emotional contagion and suggests that passion acquired from others may be less beneficial than self-initiated passion.

A Little Help from My Friends? Navigating the Tension Between Social Capital and Meritocracy in the Job Search
Laura Adler and Elena Ayala-Hurtado

How do job seekers reconcile the use of personal connections with the ideal of merit-based hiring? Leveraging a difficult Spanish labor market, the authors conducted interviews and conducted a survey experiment. They find that using connections is seen as more legitimate for low skill jobs, when connections don’t lead to circumventing the interview process, and when the person is qualified. These features create situational alignment, particularly when the job seeker is a close tie, whereby job seekers can justify using connections to find a job and reconcile the conflicting logics of social capital and meritocracy.

Peer Influence in the Workplace: The Moderating Role of Task Structures Within Organizations
Jillian Chown and Carlos Inoue

The fact that peer influence shapes work practices is well known. The authors argue that task structures moderate peer influence and the extent of information sharing among doctors. They investigate the consequential context of doctors’ decisions to perform births via caesarean section or vaginal delivery. Examining a dataset of nearly 5 million births across over 900 hospitals in Brazil, the authors find that working with peers whose practice favors C-sections leads the focal physicians to perform more C-sections, particularly among physicians with higher task variety and those with higher task similarity with their peers.

Book Reviews

Sander van der Linden. Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity
Oliver Hahl and Jisoo Hyun

Timon Beyes. Organizing Color: Toward a Chromatics of the Social
Stoyan V. Sgourev

Guido Alfani. As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West
David Lingelbach and Valentina Rodríguez Guerra

Michael Lounsbury and Joel Gehman. Concise Introduction to Organization Theory: From Ontological Differences to Robust Identities
Heather Haveman

Gail T. Fairhurst and Linda L. Putnam. Performing Organizational Paradoxes
Stewart Clegg

Benjamin Shestakofsky. Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality
Andrew B. Hargadon

Maryann P. Feldman and Martin F. Kenney. Private Equity and the Demise of the Local: The Loss of Community Economic Power and Autonomy
Daniel Armanios and Hanzelle Kleeman

Stewart R. Clegg. Frameworks of Power, Second Edition
Roy Suddaby

Academic Values and ASQ: Cultivating

By Christine Beckman (Editor) and András Tilcsik (Deputy Editor)

If our goal as scholars is to develop clear explanations of the social world—to understand deeply and describe accurately what we see—journals are a key mechanism for sharing those explanations. We aim to develop new understandings and be open to new perspectives, based on rigorous, careful thinking. We seek not just to write papers but to build knowledge. Journals serve this larger purpose as they help to curate, cultivate, certify, and convene. This month, we tackle the cultivating role of journals (having tackled curating in our last post in April).

Cultivating practices aim to ensure that articles are impactful and likely to be read. Different journals take this more or less to heart, but editorial teams help develop papers and have input into their final form and content. Journals educate scholars not just about how to practice data transparency but about how to sharpen their theoretical contributions and how to write clearly. A developmental approach to the review process aims to improve the quality of discourse regardless of a paper’s final outlet. The goal is not to be obtuse but to be readable, because readability enhances impact.

Having a multitude of methods (qualitative, quantitative, simulation, mixed method) and a variety of approaches (inductive, deductive, abductive) is useful to avoid an overly rigid formula about what a contribution looks like. Although this makes it more challenging for authors to know what exactly an ASQ article looks like, we have consistently embraced a developmental approach to reviewing, seeking to highlight the unique potential of each paper.

Yet, we also want to encourage good writing and clear exposition. ASQ is fortunate to have always had exceptional managing editors to assist authors. In 2007, former managing editor Linda Johanson wrote a short essay, “Sitting in Your Reader’s Chair: Attending to Your Academic Sensemakers,” which has been downloaded over 4,000 times. Today, associate managing editor Ashleigh Imus offers regular guidance and thoughts on the writing process with “Ashleigh’s Writing Corner” in this Substack newsletter. We have developed and updated FAQs for reviewers and for authors and detailed writing tips for ASQ authors. András recently mentioned to an economist colleague the role of ASQ’s managing editors and the support they provide to authors. Her response was immediate: “Oh, so that’s why ASQ papers are so well written!” It was heartening to hear that from someone outside our field—someone who publishes in other journals yet recognizes the craft of writing that sets ASQ apart.

In 2013, the ASQ Blog was created (an initiative of former editor Jerry Davis). This student-run team helps cultivate new scholars in a multitude of ways. They interview ASQ authors for a behind-the-scenes view of the research, writing, and review process and, in so doing, seek to demystify the process. When the pandemic hit and Zoom became ubiquitous, the team expanded their efforts by organizing several virtual panels of editors and ASQ authors who offered guidance in real time—a great example of how to use technology to cultivate scholarship and connect with the community.

Another notable feature of the ASQ Blog is that it is run entirely by doctoral students. The ASQ editorial team supports their efforts, but the blog team hosts events on topics of most interest to them and interviews authors of a subset of the articles we publish. This serves our larger goal of cultivating a community of doctoral students and early-stage faculty who consider ASQ their intellectual home—a goal highlighted since 2018 by the annual ASQ Dissertation Award. This award goes to the best dissertation-based article published in ASQ in the prior year. An award committee reviews all of the eligible papers, and the winner is announced at the AOM meeting and in the September issue. This is a competitive award because around half of the articles published in ASQ since 2018 have been based on dissertations, and in 2024 we surpassed 60 percent. We are proud to help develop some of the best work by emerging scholars in the field.

Various other practices support our goal of cultivation. We encourage excellent visual presentations of data (an initiative of former editor Henrich Greve), and even when we do not send a submission out for review, our editors often offer some feedback that might be helpful as authors consider other journals. Sometimes that feedback is theoretical, sometimes empirical, and sometimes both. And we offer this feedback in a timely way. For submissions that are not sent out for review, decisions are returned on average in five days. Over the past four years (remember that the pandemic was still very much with us in 2021), 87 percent of all submissions were returned within 90 days and 97 percent within 120 days. Including desk rejections, the average number of days under review was 41, and that number was 73 for submissions sent to reviewers. In 2024, those days under review were 35 and 64, respectively. In 2024, 97 percent of new submissions had decisions within 90 days. In addition to providing feedback quickly, we pay close attention to the number of revisions requested. Over half of manuscripts that receive a revision opportunity receive a final decision during the second round of review, and only 2 percent of submissions that have a revision opportunity are sent out for review more than three times. Of the 2,500 new manuscripts received in the last four years, 17 percent received a revision decision, and about 5 percent will be published.

Given the small numbers of papers that make it through this process, it is important to ensure that the papers we publish are rigorous and trustworthy. We will talk about the role of journals in certification in our next post.

Our student-run ASQ Blog features interviews with ASQ authors that offer insights into the research and writing process. Check out these three recent posts!

• Valerio Iannucci (Boston University) and Elisabeth Yang (Yale School of Management) interview Arvind Karunakaran (Stanford University)

  • Karunakaran (2024). Frontline Professionals in the Wake of Social Media Scrutiny: Examining the Processes of Obscured Accountability

• Peter S. Polhill (Cornell University) and Bonita Das (York University) interview Leandro S. Pongeluppe (University of Pennsylvania)

  • Pongeluppe, Leandro S. (2024). The Allegory of the Favela: The Multifaceted Effects of Socioeconomic Mobility

• Fabio Busicchia (Polytechnic University of Milan, School of Management) and Tailun Chen (Zhejiang University) interview Mia Chang-Zunino (ESCP Business School) and Stine Grodal (Northeastern University)

  • Chang-Zunino & Grodal (2024). Junkies, Queers, and Babies: Persistence and Updating of the Category AIDS Through Silencing and Puncturing of the Moral Boundary

• Grant Jacoby (University of North Carolina) interviews Jason Davis (INSEAD)

  • Davis, Jason P. (2016). The Group Dynamics of Interorganizational Relationships: Collaborating With Multiple Partners in Innovation Ecosystems.

Cover submissions from readers: Pick one!

In April, we invited this newsletter’s readers to submit photos they thought could make a great ASQ cover. Thank you to all the talented photographers who submitted. Below is a curated selection of the stunning entries we received. Now it’s your turn to help decide:

Which photo would you like to see on the cover of ASQ?

Take a moment to scroll through the submissions and cast your vote for your favorite. The winning photo(s) will be featured on the cover of an upcoming issue.

Stay tuned for the results in next month’s newsletter!

Cover 1: Bluest Blue

Cover 2: Autumn Leaves

Cover 3: Monastery of St. Benedikt

Cover 4: Sunflowers

Cover 5: Surfer

Announcing our new Editor

We are thrilled to announce that Beth Bechky has been selected as the next editor of Administrative Science Quarterly.

Beth is an ethnographer of work and occupations, focusing on how workers collaborate and manage the challenges of technological change. Importantly, Beth brings extensive editorial experience to this role. She has been a valued associate editor with ASQ since 2021, and she previously served as a senior editor at Organization Science. As a scholar examining the intersection of work and technology, Beth is well-positioned to help ASQ navigate the evolving landscape of academic publishing.

Beth completed her undergraduate degree at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, which happens to be the same institution that owns ASQ. It is wonderfully fitting to have her as the next editor of the journal.

Please join us in congratulating Beth on this selection and thanking her for taking on such an important and demanding role for the field and for the journal. She will begin her term on July 1, 2025. As Editor, Beth will continue to handle manuscripts, but the process has begun to replace Christine and András

We also offer our deepest thanks to the search committee for their efforts: Ann Langley (chair), Justin Berg, Lisa Cohen, Trish Reay, and Anne ter Wal. After careful deliberation, they recommended Beth to Cornell's ASQ Advisory Council. Our field is very fortunate that they approved the nomination and that Beth agreed to take the helm.

Academic Values and ASQ: Curating

By Christine Beckman (Editor) and András Tilcsik (Deputy Editor)

With ASQ publishing its 70th volume in 2025, this is an opportune moment to revisit the question of what journals are for—and ASQ’s role in particular (Daft, 1980; Davis, 2014; Palmer, 2006). Journals are a vital part of a larger ecosystem, and it’s worth reminding ourselves of the academic values they uphold and why they matter. These values are our raison d’etre and yet all too easy to forget in the rush of daily obligations, the narrow incentive structures of our institutions, and the hustle of getting ahead. A crucial function of journals is to manage the overwhelming amount of information available and to help focus our attention on what is worth reading. Journals serve this larger purpose as they help to curate, cultivate, certify, and convene (Davis, 2014; see also Rallison, 2015).

The first sentence ever printed in ASQ appeared in the editorial essay of its inaugural issue in 1956: “Science has been compared to pursuit of the horizon; each step forward reveals more to be taken.” That same issue featured an essay by the journal’s founding editor, James D. Thompson (1956: 111), who observed that “answers to questions of administration are more likely to come by increment than by the master stroke of one research project, and this requires a research sequence with each piece building on the knowledge gained before.” These words capture the essence of ASQ’s role: ensuring that each contribution builds on and advances what came before.

In this month’s newsletter, we focus on the importance of curation. If you want to know the current thinking of your field, there are a small subset of journals whose tables of contents you (virtually) peruse. This is not to say that there aren’t other mediums with important insights and perspectives. But in a sea of sources, the curating of scholarship gives us confidence in what we read and helps streamline our attention. Other models to the traditional journal follow the wisdom of crowds approach instead. Outlets like SSRN publish papers without a review process and let the academic community determine what will rise to the top. Yet many scholars already have a hard time keeping up with the curated research in their fields. Furthermore, many common metrics of quality (such as citations) can be artificially boosted with new tools and methods, weakening the value of these signals (Bechky and Davis, 2025; Burton-Jones and Wang, 2023). It is possible for scholars to ensure they have a breadth of knowledge by reading a variety of editorially curated journals and sources.

Arguably, one of the most important roles of ASQ is to curate articles and offer a select number of them each year that are well-written, theoretically important, and empirically rigorous. We strive to get a broad array of scholars reading each article when they receive our table of contents alerts. For a journal that covers so many theoretical areas, we know this can be challenging. But ASQ articles are the best of the best. We do not say this lightly. Weighted by our small number of publications, ASQ “stands alone” by appearing on more doctoral syllabi than any other organizational journal (Colquitt, Long, and Gentry, 2024: 21). Both the OMT and OB Divisions of the Academy of Management have frequently selected ASQ articles as the best published papers of the year (including during our editorial term). ASQ is also well represented among the recent winners of the American Sociological Association’s W. Richard Scott Award and the Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM) awards.

Because ASQ publishes such a wide range of papers, we also curate virtual special issues in which we bring together previously published articles on a particular topic. In the last few years, we have curated an issue in honor of Women’s History Month, one on healthcare organizations, and one highlighting the RRBM award winners. For each virtual special issue, we ask leading scholars in the field to curate it and write an introduction offering reflections on that area of research. In 2023, we curated a joint virtual special issue on technology and institutions in conjunction with MISQ to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of ASQ scholarship; the two journals then co-hosted an online symposium with authors featured in that issue, which brought together hundreds of participants. Technology is not a replacement for human interaction, but this was the first ASQ virtual special issue to leverage our post-pandemic comfort with online forums to connect with scholars across the globe.

In addition to curating articles and collections of articles, we also have a robust queue of book reviews that highlight a wide range of organizational research. Some of the books we review are written by existing members of the ASQ community of organization scholars, but the goal of the book review program includes exposing ASQ readers to authors and topics that are broadly relevant to organizational scholars. These book reviews span a fascinatingly diverse range of topics: indigenous economic relationships and global business strategy, machine learning and ethnography, Mao Zedong and Milton Friedman, visual art and cancer therapeutics, air traffic controllers and social media influencers, Palestinian workers in Israel and queer careers in post-war America. We want organizational scholars to think broadly and read widely.

In next month’s newsletter, we will discuss the role of journals in cultivating papers.

Bechky, B. A., and G. F. Davis
2025. “Resisting the algorithmic management of science: Craft and community after generative AI.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 70(1): 1–22.

Burton-Jones, A., and G. Wang
2023. “What makes a journal significant? From the tyranny of metrics to true impact.” MIS Quarterly, 47(2): i–xiv.

Colquitt, J. A., D. M. Long, and R. J. Gentry
2024. “Syllabus share: A new metric for gauging journal status.” Journal of Management Education, 48(1): 7–51.

Daft, R. L.
1980. “The evolution of organization analysis in ASQ, 1959–1979.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 25(4): 623–636.

Davis, G. F.
2014. “Editorial essay: Why do we still have journals?” Administrative Science Quarterly, 59(2): 193–201.

Palmer, D.
2006. “Taking stock of the criteria we use to evaluate one another’s work: ASQ 50 years out.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 51(4): 535–559.

Rallison, S. P.
2015. “What are journals for?” The Annals of The Royal College of Surgeons of England, 97(2): 89–91.

Thompson, J. D.
1956. “On building an administrative science.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 1: 102–111.

✍️ Ashleigh´s Writing Corner ✍️

Young People and The Ingenious Freedom of Language: Why There’s No One Best Way to Write

By Ashleigh Imus (Associate Managing Editor)

I recently learned that the verbs “eat” and “cook” don’t always require a direct object—if you’re a teenager in the U.S., that is. My teenage daughter and her friends like to toss around phrases like “that fit ate!” (somebody is wearing a cool outfit), or “UConn cooked in that game!” (UConn women’s basketball won the national championship by a large margin).

Young people’s vibrant linguistic creativity can teach us much about how to write better—as well as how to effectively undermine controlling adults, governments, and other nefarious groups. Just when we’re sure of a so-called rule of language usage, a new and often rebellious construction emerges—often from a young population.

This constant evolution is fascinating because it means there is always more to learn about language and writing. I was reminded of this recently when yet another great ASQ book review came across my desk: Summer Jackson’s review of The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace, by Kevin Woodson.

Jackson’s excellent writing in this review reminded me that there really is no one best way to write. A couple of months ago in this newsletter, I wrote about the value of alternating sentence length to create a more interesting reading experience and to pace one’s ideas. In her book review, Jackson shows that is not the only way to write well. Her style mostly favors relatively long sentences. She specializes in relative clauses, and in her expert hands this periodic style is a pleasure to read, in part because it creates suspense. Take a look at this sentence, which recounts Woodson’s description of how stigma anxiety can lead Black professionals to engage in “racial risk management behaviors” (p. 1):

Importantly, Woodson notes that it only takes the mere (perceived) threat of racial discrimination to provoke these behaviors, which, while understandably aimed at protecting the individual from possible mistreatment, ironically lead to further alienation, marginalization, and vigilance. (p. 1‒2)

This complex sentence works so well because the writer has total control over the structure (or syntax, which can be thought of as the traffic rules of language). Jackson begins with a main clause and then introduces “which” to begin a relative clause, e.g., “which . . . ironically lead to further alienation . . . “ But before she completes that relative clause, she introduces a phrase that, like the relative clause, also modifies “behaviors.” This is the participial phrase beginning with “while understandably aimed . . .” Besides the excellent management of syntax, these structures also work because the form reinforces the content: Here and throughout the review, Jackson uses sentences with frequent and sometimes complex internal phrases and clauses to convey the complexity of Black professionals’ experience in majority-White elite workplaces.

Here's another example—one that might seem controversial from the point of view of syntax:

[Woodson’s] ability to define, describe, and illuminate the byzantine journey that Black professionals face in elite institutions will not only resonate with other Black professionals but will also shed much-needed light and nuance on the challenges that these professionals—who possess the skills, knowledge, and ability to succeed in the workplace—face. (p. 3)

At first glance, the sentence almost seems tautological or at least redundant, with its near-repetition of the phrase “that Black professionals face” first at the beginning and again at the end of the sentence (“the challenges that these professionals . . . face”). But I left it as is because it makes sense. The first instance describes Black professionals’ journey, while the second describes their challenges. The replication of “face,” especially its second appearance as the final verb, hits like a hammer, insisting that we pay attention to just how much Black professionals have to confront in elite workplaces. The relative clause beginning “who possess the skills . . .” interrupts the subject and the verb, forcing readers to notice the stark contrast between what Black professionals deserve and what they actually receive.

This kind of writing is hard to get right. Along with Jackson’s creative, precise word choices (e.g., “deft,” “converge,” “byzantine”), her syntactic skill implies a writer who reads extensively. She teaches by example that if we want to write well, we also need to read—and not just for work.

Of course, there is a world of difference between teenage slang and Jackson’s polished prose and scholarly expertise. But her writing also reminds us to value what young people know, particularly given the current authoritarian attempts in the U.S. to wipe out language and concepts that reflect the diverse truths of life and language. We should always pay attention to what senior scholars and editors can teach us about writing. But especially now, when we need urgent reminders of how ingenious, insistent, and rebellious the human capacity for freedom and language can be, we should also listen to young people.

AI-RELATED GUIDANCE FOR ASQ REVIEWERS

ASQ follows Sage’s AI policy for authors, reviewers, and editors.

Can I use an AI-supported tool to help me write my review?

You may use AI tools only to improve the language of your review. You may not use AI to write your review. You may not feed any portion of the submission into any AI tool because of confidentiality and copyright issues. Never feed another scholar’s unpublished work into a tool that could use that content in its future outputs to other users.

If you feed your review into an AI tool to improve the review’s language and structure, you must read the output carefully before you submit it; you are responsible for what the tool creates. If an AI tool introduces errors, you must catch and correct them. For example, AI tools are known to create fake citations or references based on scholars’ names you might include in your review text.

If an ASQ editor believes that you have used AI to create any portion of your review, we reserve the right not to use your review and to ask you for an explanation. Depending on your response, we also reserve the right to mark you as an ineligible reviewer in our ScholarOne system.

If an author states that they have used AI when creating any part of their submission, should I consider that a red flag and immediately recommend rejection?

No. ASQ will assess authors’ use of AI on a case-by-case basis. We believe that many authors are already using AI language assistance (proofreading) tools. This is different from a scholar using AI to craft a literature review, identify or create a dataset, generate a code structure, or analyze results. If an author uses AI for these latter purposes, take that information into consideration as you review the manuscript and document any concerns the author’s use of AI raises for you. Share that information with the handling editor and, as appropriate, with the author.

We don’t expect you to always have a definitive response if an author acknowledges using AI to generate a lit review, data, code, etc. If you’re not sure whether such use has compromised the quality of the submission, simply note your thoughts in your comments to the handling editor and/or comments to the author. If you don’t feel confident about the quality of parts of the manuscript that were assisted by AI, say so; the handling editor will take that feedback into consideration.

We are all actively learning how AI changes the tasks we do, including reviewing manuscripts. If you share with the handling editor and/or author what prompted your reaction (whether positive or negative) to elements assisted by AI, your input will add to our collective learning over time.

If an author does not state that they have used AI in any part of their submission but I suspect they have, how should I respond in my review?

If you suspect the inappropriate or undisclosed use of generative AI in a submission, raise that concern to the handling editor. You may do so either in your written review or, if the concern seems obvious as you begin the review process, in an email before you complete your review.

Music by Max from Pixabay.

Submit Your Photos for ASQ’s Next Cover!

As part of our anniversary celebrations, we created a time-lapse video featuring all the past covers. ASQ covers have a rich history, showcasing the thoughtful work of past editors. Initially, the editors collaborated with museums and artists to feature thought-provoking artwork—sometimes commissioning pieces with an organizational focus. Later, the focus shifted to photography from around the world, often contributed by ASQ authors, editors, and their friends and family.

Today, cover images are selected from a small group of contributors, including artist Sreedhari Desai, whose stunning oil paintings appear annually. We’d like to take this opportunity to invite our community to participate. If you or someone you know has photos to share, we’d love to hear from you!

How to Participate: Send a high-resolution photo you’ve taken to jfriedman@cornell.edu. We’ll accept submissions throughout April. Then, in our May newsletter, we’ll share a selection of images for the community to vote on. The winning photos will grace the cover of a future issue!

How Talcott Parsons Failed His ASQ Audition:
A Cautionary Tale of What a Theoretical Contribution is Not

By Howard E. Aldrich

Parsons was a leading figure in social science when he published in the inaugural issue of Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), yet Howard Aldrich’s analysis reveals that his ideas failed to resonate with ASQ’s audience and the broader fields of organization studies and management. His story serves as a cautionary tale of how even the most luminous contributions can be consigned to history’s archives when they fail to engage their intended audience.

Who now reads Parsons? It turns out, almost no one—at least not in the pages of Administrative Science Quarterly. This was my first surprise when I set out to examine Talcott Parsons’ legacy in organizational studies. The man who dominated mid-20th century sociology and wrote two articles in the very first volume of ASQ has been cited in its pages only 35 times in seven decades. More striking still, those few citations are mostly superficial, referencing Parsons’ work as an afterthought rather than engaging with it seriously. How did this happen? My investigation led me to an unexpected answer: Parsons failed his audience. His highly abstract, insular theorizing—focused on grand systems rather than the messy realities of organizations—left little room for empirical research or theoretical engagement. In addition, he failed to engage with work of his contemporaries in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Selznick, Blau, Gouldner, and Merton. By the time new institutional theory emerged decades later, it had subtly rejected Parsons’ assumptions while appearing, superficially, to echo them. In this essay, I unravel the paradox of Parsons’ fleeting influence in organizational studies and explore what his failure tells us about how theories gain—or fail to gain—traction.

The Historical Context

In the opening sentence of his 1937 book, The Structure of Social Action, Talcott Parsons (Parsons, 1937) quoted Brinton (Brinton, 1933): "Who now reads Spencer?” and added a footnote: “Not, of course, that nothing in his thought will last. It is his social theory as a total structure that is dead.” But today, the joke is on Parsons. As we were already saying at the University of Michigan when I entered graduate school back in 1965, “Who now reads Parsons?” Although Parsons earned pride of place in two issues of the inaugural volume of Administrative Science Quarterly, those two papers have only been cited 35 times in the pages of ASQ in the years since they were published. Indeed, they were cited only 5 times in the past 25 years. His lack of influence within ASQ surprised me, given his prominence in the social sciences in the mid-1950s, and thus I set out to see if I could understand it.

I begin with two observations. First, there were only 11 articles in the first two issues of ASQ, and Parsons authored two of them. James Thompson, the editor, and Edward Litchfield, the Dean of the Cornell business school, also authored papers in the first issue. I’m not sure what Thompson and Litchfield intended to accomplish by inviting Parsons to write two essays. They may have felt that his prestige would attract more readers to the first issue, especially from sociologists. However, I noticed that in his two-page editorial essay introducing the first issue, Thompson made no reference to Parsons’ papers, mentioning only the first and last papers in the issue. I suspect that Parsons’ work didn’t fit the empirical direction Thompson wanted ASQ to take.

Second, the abstract to Parsons’ first paper defined organizations as social systems oriented toward specific goals that contribute to a major function of a more comprehensive system: “such an organization is analyzed in terms of an institutionalized value system, above all defining and legitimating its goal, and of the mechanisms by which it is articulated with the rest of the society in which it operates.” Initially, I thought this could be interpreted as foreshadowing the foundational principles of what became the neoinstitutional theory of organizations. Parsons described his approach as a cultural-institutional view and emphasized that organizations must find legitimacy through their connection to the larger society.

Thus, the unusual amount of space allocated to Parsons’ work suggested to me that the editorial team might have thought he was onto something, and Parsons’ terminology of “institutional” and legitimacy” suggested that his work might have been an overlooked gem in the history of neoinstitutional theory. However, as I investigated the extent to which his work was cited and how it was used in the pages of ASQ, my initial surprise vanished. Instead, I concluded that Parsons was done in by his lack of engagement with the organizational scholarship of his day, his closed conceptual system, and his failure to generate any insights that could be followed up by empirical research.

What Parsons Proposed

To fully appreciate my argument, I recommend you read both of Parsons’ papers. Given the complexity of his scheme, I cannot do it justice within the space constraints of this blog. Here, I will just summarize the papers’ contents. Part I laid out Parsons’ theory, based on his AGIL framework and four pairs of pattern variables, each representing a fundamental characteristic of all human systems. The AGIL scheme is a model that outlines four fundamental functions any social system must fulfill to maintain stability and achieve its goals: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency. The pattern variables are a set of dichotomies that describe the choices individuals face in social interactions. Part I has sections on the concept of organizations, the structure of organizations, the mobilization of resources, the mechanisms of implementation (policy decisions, allocative decisions, coordination decisions), and institutional factors in the structure of organizations (which concerns the factors that ensure compatibility of organizational actions across the great variety of organizations in a social system).

Part II is devoted to his classification of types of organizations and some illustrative cases. His three cases are “the business firm,” “the military,” and “the university.” These examples serve as a definitional and classificatory exercise. Parsons used his AGIL scheme from The Social System (Parsons, 1951) as his framework because it is a “general classification of the functional imperatives of social systems…” and when we understand those imperatives, we can “identify the principal mechanisms necessary to bring about the attainment of the goal or the organization purpose” (Parsons, 1956b: 238). Parsons claimed that the AGIL scheme works at the levels of total societies, small groups, and at an intermediate level in between.

Parsons clearly treated the invitation as an opportunity to explain his structural-functional approach to the scholars studying organizations and management, rather than a way to show how his work fit into the overall field of management and administrative science. Part I contained only 10 footnotes and citations to just five works that were written by other authors. Part II contained only three footnotes and five citations, with three citing his own publications and two citing Harvard colleagues.

Research Design

To assess Parsons’ influence on articles in ASQ, I followed the lead of contemporary bibliometrics and used citations to his two 1956 papers by subsequent authors as an indicator of scholarly influence (Teixeira, 2011). I used an online search tool to find all articles citing Parsons that were published from the inception of ASQ in 1956 through issues published in 2024. I distinguished two groups of citations in my coding. First, I located all the papers that cited either of the two essays published in volume 1 in 1956. In addition to the author, title, and publication information, I also searched for and took detailed notes on the text surrounding the material in which the citation occurred. Fortunately, most authors who cited Parsons did so briefly, rather than in multiple places and extended discussions. Second, I located all the papers published between 1956 and 2024 that cited other books and articles written by Parsons.

Findings

Figure 1 displays, by decades, the number of papers published in ASQ that cited Parsons’ 1956 ASQ papers and the number of papers that cited other works by Parsons during the same period. The figure is based on the number of papers citing Parsons, rather than on the number of citations in each paper, because I was interested in authors’ awareness of Parsons’ 1956 papers, not in the total citations Parsons received. Between 1956 and 2024, 128 papers cited something published by Parsons. Most of the citations were not to the 1956 articles. Only 35 papers cited the two Parsons ASQ papers and 101 cited other works by Parsons. Only 8 papers cited both the 1956 papers and something else by Parsons and no author did that after 1997. (For a point of comparison, ASQ published 1,772 articles between 1956 and 2024.)

Viewed in terms of citations, since 1956, in 128 papers, ASQ authors have cited Parsons’ work 161 times, with 65 of those citations to work published before 1956, 35 to the two ASQ papers published in 1956 and 61 to his other publications in 1956 and afterward. Apart from The Social System (Parsons, 1951), which received 29 citations, and Structure and Process in Modern Societies (Parsons, 1960), which received 17 citations, no other publications from Parsons received more than 7 citations.

Few authors publishing in ASQ took any notice of Parsons’ efforts to attract organizational scholars to his cultural–structural approach. Even the authors who were aware of Parsons’ other work mostly ignored the two 1956 papers. Raw citation data, however, don’t give us a sense of the extent to which those who did cite his 1956 papers might have spotted something that others had missed. It is possible those who used his work recognized its implications for the developments in new institutional theory that only became fully apparent two decades later. Assessing this speculation requires us to go beyond the raw citation data and closely examine the text. Accordingly, I examined the context of the citations to Parsons’ 1956 papers and looked for hints that the citing authors were engaging with Parsons’ potentially proto-institutional ideas.

A closer look at how Parsons was used

A review of the 35 papers that cited Parsons' 1956 ASQ articles reveals a pattern of limited engagement with his core ideas. Most citations are "honorific" or "legacy" citations, offering generic support to a declarative statement rather than substantive engagement with Parsons' cultural-institutional theory. I identified five ways in which Parsons' work was referenced: (1) in support of a general definition of organizations; (2) acknowledging his argument for multiple levels of analysis; (3) citing him as an example of “social systems” analysis; (4) a generic argument that organizational contexts are important; and (5) an assertion that organizations derive their legitimacy from the larger institutional context in which they are embedded.

First, many authors cited Parsons (1956) merely to support the basic idea that organizations are defined by their focus on goals. They engaged only superficially with Parsons' work, as this concept could have been attributed to many other organizational theorists. For example, Levine & White (1961: 588) cited Parsons to make a generic point about organizations being defined by their focus on goals: “Parsons, for example, has defined an organization as a ‘special type of social system organized about the primacy of interest in the attainment of a particular type of system goal.’” This is the only reference to Parsons in their article.

Second, some authors referenced Parsons' distinction between technical, managerial, and institutional levels of responsibility. This distinction was substantially expanded and clarified in Parsons (1960) and is the reference usually cited in the organizations literature when people reference Parsons’ three-level scheme. However, in ASQ, authors often used these references as a starting point for critiques, arguing that Parsons' framework did not go far enough in differentiating levels of analysis. For example, Terreberry (1968) cited Parsons at two points in her paper, with the first showing that her definition of organizations could be derived from Parsons’ and the second pointing out that he had made distinctions across three levels of organizational analysis. Beyond these two limited points, she made no other use of Parsons in her paper. Third, Parsons' work was occasionally cited as an example of a social systems perspective on organizations. However, authors often failed to elaborate on or meaningfully integrate Parsons' specific ideas. For example, Kaplan (1968) cited Parsons as an example of the social systemic perspective on organizations, but made no other use of Parsons’ ideas.

Fourth, some authors acknowledged Parsons' recognition of the importance of organizational context. However, they often argued that he overemphasized a single dimension of context, such as social function or charter (Holdaway et al., 1975). For example, Ranson, Hinings, and Greenwood (1980) mentioned Parsons in passing as recognizing the concept of "institutionalized environments," alongside Hirsch (1975). However, they did not engage with Parsons' work beyond this initial acknowledgment. Fifth, Parsons was mentioned as a scholar who used the concept of "legitimacy." However, these mentions were typically brief and did not delve into Parsons' broader theoretical framework. For example, Geletkanycz and Hambrick (1997: 676) briefly mentioned Parsons as a scholar who used the concept of legitimacy: “Scholars have long argued that legitimacy is an important organizational resource (Parsons, 1956a; Perrow, 1970), helping to sustain the firm's operations by engendering the support and endorsement of key external constituencies.” In the rest of their essay, Geletkanycz and Hambrick made no mention of Parsons.

In the thicket of cursory treatments of Parsons’ ideas, a few exceptions stand out for the way they engaged more substantively with him. For example, in his foundational paper on organizational effectiveness and institutional environments, Hirsch (1975) explicitly credited Parsons as the originator of the concept of organizations having "institutional environments," offering a clear endorsement of Parsons' contribution to this area. Note, however, that Parsons used only the terms “institutional patterns” and “institutional structures” in his papers, and the word “environment” appears only three times in the two papers. Beyond that positive mention in the second sentence of the paper, Hirsch ignored Parsons’ work in the rest of his paper. Pfeffer (1973) included Parsons (1956a) as one of five scholars in a citation in which he singled out Selznick’s work but made no further mention of Parsons in his paper.

Stern and Barley (1996) provided a more extensive analysis of Parsons' work, crediting him with calling attention to the role of organizations in the larger sociocultural system. They acknowledged Parsons' emphasis on the compatibility of institutional patterns and the integration of organizations within society. Their extensive discussion of Parsons’ contributions to thinking about organizations as embedded in an institutional context, made in historical hindsight, stands in marked contrast to the other 34 papers that cited Parsons.

Overall, my analysis of the ways in which authors used his work suggests that Parsons' 1956 ASQ papers had limited direct influence on subsequent research published in the journal. While his work was occasionally acknowledged, it was often used for generic support or as a point of departure for criticism. Thus, it was selectively useful but unintegrated into mainstream organizational studies. The lack of deep engagement with Parsons' ideas may help explain why his ASQ publications never became foundational texts in the field of organizational studies. Paul Hirsch, in commenting on my early draft of this paper, reminded me that the early manifestos of what became neo-institutional theory ignored Parsons’ characterization of the institutional level as a context in which rules and norms come about, seeing instead the currency of legitimacy as a mythology which could be manipulated by organizations seeking legitimacy (Meyer and Rowan, 1977).

Why was Parsons so seldom used?

Given Parsons’ privileged position as an author of two papers in the first volume of ASQ, why was he so seldom cited and, even when cited, treated as a convenient legacy source to support generic statements? I suggest two possibilities: (1) his insular approach; and (2) his advocacy of a sociological theory that had gone out of fashion by the late 1960s.

First, as Cheng et al. (2023: 522) noted in their paper on the conditions enabling novel intellectual contributions to diffuse and become integrated into later scientific work, “an idea is likely to diffuse … when it is deeply integrated into extant research traditions, and when it achieves coherence through consistent conceptual linkages to the established body of knowledge.” Parsons made little attempt to situate himself within the community of scholars studying organizations in the 1940s and 50s. I have noted that there were only seven citations in his two papers to the work of other scholars, and two of them were to his colleagues at Harvard.

More distressing, however, was his apparent lack of awareness concerning the work of sociologists such as Peter Blau, Alvin Gouldner, Philip Selznick, Seymour Martin Lipset, Robert Merton, and William Foote Whyte. Gouldner’s two books—Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (Gouldner, 1954a) and Wildcat Strike (Gouldner, 1954b)—were in-depth ethnographic reports of bureaucratic organization and resistance to it, phenomena very relevant to Parsons’ discussion of intraorganizational dynamics. Two of Selznick’s books, TVA and the Grassroots (Selznick, 1949) and The Organizational Weapon (Selznick, 1952), were landmarks in the development of the notion of organizations engaged in struggle, conflict, and co-optation with their environments, and Pfeffer (1973) made a point of singling out Selznick as a scholar who emphasized organizations coming to terms with their environments. Parsons also ignored Selznick’s (1948) essay in the American Sociological Review, “Foundations of the Theory of Organization,” an article that should’ve been a key touchstone for his analysis.

Graduates from Columbia, such as Lipset and Blau, were making important contributions to organizational analysis in the 1950s with books such as Union Democracy (Lipset, Trow, and Coleman, 1956) and The Dynamics of Bureaucracy (Blau, 1955). Blau was a student of Robert Merton at Columbia University, who in turn had studied with Parsons at Harvard, and so there was an opportunity for Parsons to become informed about their work. Finally, William Foote Whyte, who earned his PhD at Harvard, wrote about human relations in various industries in the 1940s and 50s, including a perceptive analysis of the organizational structure of restaurants (Whyte, 1948). Parsons was either unaware of these publications or chose to ignore them. Whatever the reason, he missed an excellent opportunity to acknowledge and incorporate the work of highly relevant and creative organizational scholars.

Second, although Parsons was a vigorous proponent and proselytizer of his approach, he was undone by a turn toward more materialist and conflict-oriented approaches in sociology in the 1960s. Blau (1996: 172) summed up Parsons’ fading reputation among organizational sociologists with her comment, “Parsons' structural-functionalism is a world view that did not stand the test of time…[I think it is because of] Parsons' assumptions about the overly taut integration of the systems' components (personality, social, and cultural), his Western-centric view of values, and a teleological account of social change.” Although Parsons was still taught in graduate Departments of Sociology in the 1960s, his work was offered as being of historical interest and as a cautionary tale for us to avoid.

Conclusion

I began this project with the thought that Parsons might have been a pioneer who belongs in the group that foreshadowed new institutional theory in organizational scholarship. He wrote about “institutions” and “values” and took a very sociological approach. However, Parsons took some positions that new institutional theories rejected from the very beginning of their emergence, such as organizations being structured for efficiency and effectiveness, and organizations faithfully reflecting societal values. For example, Tolbert responded to an initial draft of this paper by pointing out that Meyer and Rowan (1977) offered a critique of that work by noting that “these elements were often adopted, not to solve problems of coordination and control, but to send signals to the environment (consumers, suppliers, etc.) that the organization could be relied upon, was legitimate.” As David, Tolbert, and Boghossian (2019: 12) noted, “the relative neglect of the influence of social norms and interpretations in organizational analyses from the late 1950s onward (when organizational studies began to evolve as a distinctive area of social sciences) helps to account for the receptivity of researchers to institutional theory in the late 1970s, and for its continued popularity today as an alternative to more materialist approaches.”

My analysis has shown that from the very beginning, the organizations studies community mostly ignored Parsons’ two essays in ASQ. In the first decade after their publication, only four authors in ASQ cited the two papers. Although there was a moderate burst of interest in the next several decades, Parsons mostly served as a convenient reference for ASQ authors on which to hang commonplace observations about organizations and their environments. His social systemic cultural/institutional approach was simply ignored. In the process, the organizational studies scholarly community lost sight of the nugget of insight that Parsons offered concerning the institutional embeddedness of organizational actions. However, that promising point was overshadowed by major problems with his work, such as his failure to recognize Selznick’s contributions to institutional analysis.

Parsons’ insularity and lack of interest in engaging the organization studies community meant that he had little chance of recruiting research active scholars to help spread his perspective. Instead, after the very chaotic decade of the 1960s, when there was no clear theoretical consensus, new approaches emerged out of sociology in the 1970s that highlighted the role of power, conflict and competition, institutional legitimacy, and sense-making, along with a host of related theories. Parsons’ lack of influence stands as a cautionary tale for contemporary scholars and highlights the importance of building on and creating space for others in one's theorizing. Parsons had his moment in the sun, but his inability to engage with his ASQ audience relegated his legacy to the shadows of organizational studies.

Acknowledgements

I received helpful suggestions from Steve Barley, Christine Beckman, Robert David, Jerry Davis, Joan Friedman, Paul Hirsch, Pedro Monteiro, Pam Tolbert, and Nele Terveen.

References

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Introduction to the 70th Volume

We are celebrating the 70th volume of ASQ in 2025, and it is worth pausing to reflect on how far we have come. At our 50th anniversary, we were just moving to electronic submissions (yes, we used to use the postal service to share our work). To mark the occasion, we have added a bonus essay in every issue this year—highlighting current challenges and offering reflections on where we might turn our attention. You can find some reflection on ASQ’s history and details of the upcoming essays in my letter from the editor (as well as in the first essay, by Bechky and Davis, in this issue).

March 2025 Issue

The empirical articles in this timely issue speak to stigmatization in an authoritarian regime, an occupation’s demise as university goals of recycling broadened to sustainability, the persistence of organizational imprints in the face of disruption, and the challenges of relationships—in clients obtaining trustworthy and expert opinions from doctors, in incorporating the interests of beneficiaries in an organization’s social impact initiatives, and in managing perceptions of competition in interorganizational collaborations. And don’t forget the book reviews: These are wonderful ways to learn about a range of topics, and they are often exceptionally enjoyable to read. Ashleigh uses a recent book review as an example of great writing in her post, “Sitting in your Reader’s Chair,” see below in this newsletter!

Resisting the Algorithmic Management of Science: Craft and Community After Generative AI
Beth A. Bechky and Gerald F. Davis

Online publication dramatically reduced publishing costs and has increased both the quantity and quantification of publications. In this essay honoring ASQ’s 70th year of publication, Bechky and Davis outline the negative effects of the algorithmic management of science, from the warping of the journal impact factor as a meaningful metric to the potential for AI to entirely automate knowledge production in the social sciences. The authors explore how organizational scholarship can be revitalized through reinforcing deep intellectual engagement in our craft and reinforcing core processes in both tenure and journal reviews to uphold our community.

Wasted? The Downstream Effects of Social Movement–Backed Occupations
Grace Augustine, Leanne Hedberg, Tae-Ung Choi, and Michael Lounsbury

How is it possible that actors bring positive, movement-backed change to their organizations but lose their jobs in the process? Through an analysis of 25 years of online conversations, this article investigates how recycling coordinators embedded recycling in their higher education institutions and yet, in doing so, eventually experienced occupational demise. The authors show how coordinators successfully institutionalized, operationalized, and provided a financial justification for recycling, with the dynamics of these strategies ultimately undermining the expansion of jurisdiction for their occupation.

Stigmatization by an Authoritarian Government: Russian NGOs Under the 2012 Foreign Agents Law
Anastasiya Zavyalova

How are new forms of stigma created? In an illustrative study of the 2012 Russian foreign agents law, Zavyalova shows how the Russian government used this law in a top-down process of stigmatization, increasingly targeting long-standing organizations and, eventually, the media and individuals. The author develops a model of stigmatization, demonstrating how the authoritarian government created a new form of stigma and broadened the suppression of select organizations and individuals. As organizations attempted to cope in a variety of ways, Zavyalova reveals the unfolding dynamics by highlighting the slow international response and lagged media coverage.

Mechanisms of Organizational Imprinting: From Entrepreneur to Organization
Markus C. Becker

This article conducts a longitudinal case study of Zeiss, a German manufacturer of optical instruments, to investigate how entrepreneurs imprint organizations. Spanning nearly 150 years and focusing on the firm’s founder and business partner, Becker shows that the founders’ early decisions, teaching, role modeling, and formalized rules left structural, behavioral, and product imprints that persisted in the face of extreme disruptions. This process study advances organizational imprinting research by identifying mechanisms of imprinting and by elaborating micro-level theories of imprinting by individuals.

Referral Triads
Mathijs de Vaan and Toby Stuart

What are the benefits of a referral from a trusted source? Third-party referrals facilitate client‒expert matches and can generate post-match trust, but this article finds a potential tension in these dynamics. Leveraging medical claims data, the authors show that patients have confidence in referrals to specialists initiated by their primary care physicians. Yet, strong ties between the physician and the specialist can diminish the quality of the match between the patient’s condition and the specialist’s expertise. This results in worse outcomes for patients. The study’s findings thus offer a rare window into the quality of brokered matches.

Competition in Collaboration: The Problem of (Mis)Aligned Perception
Sruthi Thatchenkery and Henning Piezunka

Why does competitive tension—a common, well-understood issue—continue to derail interorganizational collaborations? Focusing on the U.S. software industry, the authors find that perception is key: When only one firm perceives the other as a competitor, it leads to misaligned perceptions, differing expectations about behavior and performance, and subsequent failure. The article highlights the importance of perceptual alignment in developing effective collaborations and explores how different types of triadic relationships can mitigate the negative impact of misalignment.

Harambee! A Triadic Perspective on Social Impact: Organizations, Evaluators, and Target Beneficiaries in Kenya
Anna Kim

The beneficiaries of social impact actions are often seen as passive recipients of organizational efforts. Bringing the perspective of beneficiaries to explain the organization‒evaluator‒beneficiary triad, Kim studies the conditions supporting a corporate social responsibility project in Kenya. The author shows how target beneficiaries obtained needed leverage with the organization by corroborating the organization’s stated outcomes to evaluators. Beneficiaries then redirected the organization’s off-the-shelf practices preferred by the organization‒evaluator dyad toward more contextual practices that upheld their own goals and objectives.

Book Reviews

Robert N. Eberhart, Michael Lounsbury, and Howard E. Aldrich (eds.). Entrepreneurialism and Society: New Theoretical Perspectives (vol. 81). Entrepreneurialism and Society: Consequences and Meanings (vol. 82)
Patricia H. Thornton

Michel Anteby. The Interloper: Lessons from Resistance in the Field
Tammar B. Zilber

Christina Lubinski. Navigating Nationalism in Global Enterprise: A Century of Indo-German Business Relations
Stephanie Decker

Dovev Lavie. The Cooperative Economy: A Solution to Societal Grand Challenges
Gerard George

Michèle Lamont. Seeing Others: How Recognition Works—and How It Can Heal a Divided World
Brandy Aven

Peter H. Kim. How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken, and Repaired
Oliver Schilke

Christine E. Evans and Lars Lundgren. No Heavenly Bodies: A History of Satellite Communications Infrastructure
Chad Navis

William S. Harvey. Reputations at Stake
Donald Lange

Sitting in Your Reader’s Chair… in 2025

By Ashleigh Imus (Associate Managing Editor, ASQ)

In 2007, former ASQ managing editor Linda Johanson wrote a short essay, “Sitting in Your Reader’s Chair: Attending to Your Academic Sensemakers,” which offers eight hints for helping writers think about “how their readers will make sense of what they’ve written” (p. 292). Those who haven’t read this essay will benefit from doing so: It’s extraordinarily well written, incisive, and offers great advice in just a few pages—like the point that readers will start to supply their own answers and definitions to unanswered questions (“If an answer is not offered quickly, readers are likely to supply a sort of provisional answer from their own stock of knowledge,” p. 292). This can get writers into trouble with their readers.

Now, in 2025, I wonder how the task of sitting in your reader’s chair might have changed since the essay’s publication. In 2007, the iPhone was first released, Facebook and Twitter were not yet household names, and Instagram and TikTok didn’t exist.

Now, with more information available than ever before and an unprecedented capacity to connect with others, many people struggle just to pay attention and—paradoxically—to empathize with those who hold different views. The refusal to empathize has now taken a dangerous political turn: As I write, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has been ordered to “withdraw all papers involving its researchers that are being considered for publication by external scientific journals” so that the current U.S. administration can review them, presumably to enact censorship.

In this context, the idea of sitting in your reader’s chair becomes a radical act, an assertion of our humanity, and a capacity that we can no longer take for granted.

To sit in your reader’s chair is essentially a request for empathy because it involves understanding the “feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” But we can’t truly know others’ thoughts and experiences, so we must imagine it. And this means that to try to empathize is not a technical task or a problem of knowledge. It’s an act that requires use of our imagination.

How can we imagine readers’ perspectives when so much—information overload, impersonal platforms that incite conflict, political directives—taxes our attention and energy and seems to diminish our imaginative capacity? Are we capable of this sort of empathizing in 2025? Is empathy dead?

One of the privileges of editorial practice is that doing quality work requires slowing down—way down. And when we do, we start to notice things. Recently I found that Roy Suddaby’s stellar review of Stewart Clegg’s Frameworks of Power, second edition, has much to teach writers.

This review, to me, presents a master class in how to sit in your reader’s chair. In the form, content, and method of his writing, Suddaby demonstrates the kind of empathy that is deeply generous to readers, inviting them in and holding their attention.

Let’s start at the sentence level. Suddaby does something very simple but that most academic writers don’t do: He varies the length of his sentences, alternating short and long clauses:

Previous efforts to explicate power in organizations have largely failed because of a tendency to treat theory as a singular ideological commitment. Clegg takes a different approach. He mobilizes a range of prominent theorists—Machiavelli, Lukes, Weber, Durkheim, Giddens, Foucault, and many more—in a classic model of scholarship that seeks understanding and integration rather than mere prediction.

Why does this work so well? Because it creates a reading experience that is both manageable and enjoyable. Academic writers often pile one long sentence after another, which quickly becomes exhausting and dull to read. Short sentences give readers a cognitive break by slowing down the reading, and they highlight key ideas, such as in the quote above when Suddaby writes “Clegg takes a different approach.” Writers who want to immediately improve their writing style can do so simply by varying sentence length.

This review also shows consideration for readers by providing context. Rather than assuming familiarity with Clegg’s first edition, Suddaby provides an overview so that all readers can understand his arguments about the strengths of the second edition. Those arguments focus on the importance of history as what he calls a “fourth frame of power” in Clegg’s second edition.

What’s also so interesting is how Suddaby enacts in his writing the very thing he is calling for. He doesn’t just urge scholars to use history and literature to expose the presence of deeply embedded power in organizations; he demonstrates the practice in his writing: “Contemporary organizations, particularly the modern corporation, exemplify power today in the same way that monarchies exemplified power in the feudal era and the Church exemplified power in medieval times in the West.”

He also crosses disciplines by invoking philosopher Michel Foucault (following Clegg) but also thinkers like the great twentieth-century philologist and literary critic Eric Auerbach. In other words, Suddaby doesn’t just tell scholars what to do. He shows them how to do it.

In these times of unprecedented upheaval, I believe we must decide to notice that empathy is alive. It’s still with us in the sentences of the many excellent thinkers who populate ASQ’s pages and elsewhere. In Suddaby’s case, I believe it’s no accident that his advocacy of history—the humanities discipline rooted in unearthing the perspectives of others—figures so centrally in his deeply empathetic writing.

In 2025 we can still discover how to sit in readers’ chairs—if we’re willing to slow down a bit and notice the fine examples all around us.

Our student-run ASQ Blog features interviews with ASQ authors that offer insights into the research and writing process. Check out these three recent posts!

• Jinfeng “Phoenix” Chen (Purdue University) and Mac Strachan (Washington University in Saint Louis) interview James Chu (Columbia University).

  • Chu (2024). How Beneficiaries Become Sources of Normative Control.

• Clara Soo (Michigan State University) and Drew Jauron (Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa) interview Winnie Yun Jiang (INSEAD) and

  Amy Wrzesniewski (Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania)

  • Jiang & Wrzesniewski (2023). Perceiving Fixed or Flexible Meaning: Toward a Model of Meaning Fixedness and Navigating Occupational Destabilization

• Xiaoxia Zhu (Salisbury University) and Daniya Kamran-Morley (University of Pittsburgh) interview Shoshana R. Dobrow (London School of Economics and Political Science), Hannah Weisman (Harvard Business School), Daniel Heller (Tel Aviv University), and Jennifer Tosti-Kharas (Babson College)

  • Dobrow, Weisman, Heller & Tosti-Kharas (2023). Calling and the good life: A meta-analysis and theoretical extension.

To stay informed, follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter on Substack for all the latest ASQ announcements and information.

Christine Beckman, University of California, Santa Barbara

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Reviewing for ASQ: To AI or Not to AI?

My middle-school son tells his friends that I hate AI. He has overheard me on Zoom discussing AI with coauthors as we write about its impact on the workplace. He is not completely wrong, but my opposition is more nuanced: I am a Luddite in the original sense of the term.* I’m skeptical of technologies that put people out of work in order to produce things quicker, cheaper, and crappier. Therefore, I’m concerned about the potential effects of generative AI on our profession. And I have yet to find a good use for it in my daily life.

I am aware, of course, that many folks in our field are more excited about these potentially effort-saving technologies than I am. This was brought home to me when a colleague proclaimed publicly that generative AI “makes cognition free!” However, we need to make sure that in taking advantage of this potential we don’t undermine our ability to develop theoretical insights through original research and peer review. This nuance came up recently when the authors of a manuscript I had handled as an Associate Editor complained about the review process.

The reviewers had thoughtfully engaged with the manuscript, and I agreed with many of their concerns and ideas for improvement. However, the authors believed that one reviewer had used generative AI: when they tried to download and read the articles recommended by the reviewer, they could not locate several of them. It turned out that the reviewer had not used AI to write the review but did use an AI-supported Microsoft Word plug-in to manage their own document library. This tool hallucinated the references it inserted for several of the articles suggested in the review. The reviewer had not noticed the problem upon originally submitting the review, and they were embarrassed and apologetic when it was brought to their attention.

This example struck me for several reasons. One, the reviewer had not used a large language model to assist with developing or writing what I felt was a nuanced and generative opinion of the paper. But, two, as soon as the authors got a whiff of generative AI, they discounted the entire review process. And three, ASQ’s policies are rightly concerned with making sure that we are accountable for not just the veracity of our language but also the quality of the constructive feedback we provide each other.

As scholars, it’s not that difficult to avoid tricky AI issues around hallucinations. It does, however, require an awareness of what our tools are doing and a commitment to taking the time to responsibly manage our own work. As Jerry Davis and I argue in our forthcoming essay, generative AI is not a good alternative to deep reading, careful crafting of our writing, and true engagement with our colleagues (through activities such as thoughtful reviewing). If you are using generative AI to support your academic work, which includes reviewing for this journal, you should be aware that it cannot substitute for rigorous scrutiny, and you should oversee both the process and the output.

So, if you are an AI enthusiast, I’m not on my way over to demolish your computer! But when reviewing, please follow ASQ and Sage’s artificial intelligence policy. It breaches our confidentiality rules to upload a submitted manuscript to an AI tool that will put the paper in the public domain and use it for training purposes (as many versions of GAI will do). And, as a reviewer, you are responsible for the “content, accuracy and constructive feedback within the review.”

Beth Bechky (Associate Editor, ASQ)

* For an excellent depiction of this oft misunderstood movement, see Brian Merchant’s recent book, Blood in the Machine (2023).

✍️ Ashleigh´s Writing Corner ✍️

What Human Editors Do (and Why You Should Care)

In an increasingly transactional context of purchased publication and new digital technologies that promise everything from warped metrics to doing the writing and research itself, a basic question returns for editors—and perhaps scholars as well: What does it mean to foster excellent scholarship?

As a developmental and copy editor, I am frequently thinking about and quietly celebrating how great thinking and writing emerge. Especially academic writing is often framed as a technical task that ostensibly involves learning a stock set of skills to then be applied to one’s communication. Learn x skill, slap it on text y.

But many editors know two things: All writing is deeply creative, and language—and by extension writing—is not a mere collection of technical features. It is a beautiful, living, changing, somewhat random, often weird social organism that reflects our humanity. Editors and grammarians may try to contain it, but in its relentless evolution language always wins.

This restless wandering of human language means that learning to write well is less like learning to ride a bike and more like hiking a new mountain at dawn, where you have no choice but to adjust to the changing light and feel your way around the boulders and chasms. It’s the difference between repeating the same action and exploring, between imitating and understanding.

In 2007, former ASQ managing editor Linda M. Johanson wrote an essay called “Sitting in Your Reader’s Chair: Attending to Your Academic Sensemakers,” which has become a classic, invaluable guide that continues to light the way for many academic writers. The same year, Apple released the first iPhone. What does it mean to sit in your reader’s chair in the information age—and now—the age of AI writing and editing tools? Why is storytelling still such a powerful tool for drawing in readers, and how might writers use it in organization studies scholarship? What can be learned from some of the copy and developmental editing challenges encountered in ASQ articles?

Careful readers of ASQ may have also noted that some of the journal’s style conventions have changed over the years. We now allow sentences to begin with “however,” for example, we encourage judicious use of the first person, and we shamelessly split infinitives. Why is that, and how do editors decide these things? Why does the APA currently recommend the use of “woman” and “man” rather than “male” and “female,” and must this always be the case? What (really) is the passive voice and when should you use it? Why do certain words and meanings fall out of use (or insist on hanging around, like “whom”), and how do we know when they’re obsolete? Are style and content really separate things?

Sometimes the answers to these questions are straightforward, but often they’re not. And that starts to get at what human editors do. Like good writers, skilled editors don’t primarily apply or imitate, nor do we hate ambiguity. Many of us revel in nuance, making choices based on our understanding of how to make writing better. These choices require grasping a bit of grammar, diction, and the minute details of syntax. Over time, this knowledge helps us to perceive the rhetorical choices we create and encounter every day.

Our communication choices also invite us to share knowledge. So, in future newsletters, I’ll explore questions like those outlined above and many others, from my perspective and from those of other editors and writers. Because when writers know how and why they use language, it brings enormous rhetorical and creative power. In the face of so much technological and other change, I think we could all use more of that.

Ashleigh Imus (Associate Managing Editor, ASQ)

The Simple(r) Life: ASQ Switching to APA Citation and Reference Style

After decades of using an in-house style for the presentation of citations and reference lists, ASQ is making the switch to APA style. Why? To save time and effort for our authors and staff editors. While we have loved the simplicity and elegance of the ASQ style, it is unique and therefore requires extra time to implement. The switch to APA will allow our authors to use reference management software such as Mendeley or Zotero when preparing a submission. The ASQ style guide (available from the Resource Center on our home page) and submission guidelines now reflect this update, and you’ll see the change in our published articles starting with those slated for our September 2025 issue.

In Memoriam - Dan Brass (1947-2025)

by Giuseppe (Joe) Labianca

Dan Brass was the J. Henning Hilliard Professor of Innovation Management at the University of Kentucky, where he founded and co-directed the LINKS Center for Social Network Analysis. He was universally recognized as one of the pioneers of network research in the field of organizations and management and was the recipient of the Social Network Society's inaugural Distinguished Scholar Award. His research inspired numerous vibrant streams of research, having a profound impact on the study of power and politics, conflict, unethical behavior, gender and networks, and social identity in organizations.

He served as an Associate Editor for 12 years, from 1995 to 2007, at Administrative Science Quarterly, guiding many influential papers through to publication. Authors remember him as a kind, thoughtful, and collaborative editor who improved their manuscripts. To facilitate the growth of the social network research community, he co-founded and ran the Introduction to Networks Professional Development Workshop (PDW) at the Academy of Management conference with his good friend, David Krackhardt, for many years; the popular PDW continues to take place every year nearly four decades after its founding.

In his free time, Dan enjoyed painting landscapes and gardening. He was also an accomplished topiarist, whose work appeared in Topiary Today as well as on the cover of Administrative Science Quarterly. Dan was an extraordinary colleague, mentor, friend, and husband who never had an unkind word to say about anyone. He is survived by his wife, Karen Lobeck Brass.

To honor Dan’s legacy, we contacted colleagues who served alongside him at Administrative Science Quarterly. They shared their reflections on Dan, highlighting his dedication, influence, and the profound impact he had on the journal and its community.

Steve Barley: Dan was strongly committed to ASQ, our authors, and our reviewers. Dan handled meso-level papers, a hard niche to fill. He was one of the first scholars in organization studies to focus on how social networks shape and are shaped by individual and group-level dynamics. As an editor, Dan strove for strong empirical warrants while writing reviews in a style that respected authors’ dignity. We shall miss Dan’s intelligence, his dry sense of humor, and his willingness to go above and beyond for the benefit of ASQ’s community.

Don Palmer: I was saddened to learn of Dan’s passing. Dan and I served as fellow editors of ASQ. Dan’s “presentation of self” provided no clue of his formidable contributions as a scholar to the field and as an editor of the journal. He was soft-spoken, humble, and open to others’ ideas, but by no means lacking self-confidence and intellectual conviction. I looked up to him, aspired to be more like him, and regret never having told him so.

Christine Oliver: I was so saddened to hear about the passing of Dan Brass. I was fortunate enough to meet Dan while he and I both worked for ASQ. During this time, I was given the privilege to witness his tremendous intelligence and capacity for academic writing and creativity. His kindness and professionalism in working with colleagues, staff, and the broader academic community were truly inspiring.

Over his career, Dan published five influential papers in ASQ. Below, we list these works along with the covers of the issues in which they appeared.

• Oldham, G. R., & Brass, D. J. (1979). Employee reactions to an open-plan office: A naturally occurring quasi-experiment. Administrative Science Quarterly, 267-284.

• Brass, D. J. (1981). Structural relationships, job characteristics, and worker satisfaction and performance. Administrative Science Quarterly, 331-348.

• Brass, D. J. (1984). Being in the right place: A structural analysis of individual influence in an organization. Administrative Science Quarterly, 518-539.

• Burkhardt, M. E., & Brass, D. J. (1990). Changing patterns or patterns of change: The effects of a change in technology on social network structure and power. Administrative Science Quarterly, 104-127.

• Mehra, A., Kilduff, M., & Brass, D. J. (2001). The social networks of high and low self-monitors: Implications for workplace performance. Administrative Science Quarterly, 46(1), 121-146.

✉️ Write to us ✉️

ASQ recently published an editorial on “Resisting the Algorithmic Management of Science: Craft and Community After Generative AI.” We are trying to understand the impact of generative AI on social science and academic publishing and are attentive to some of its potential downsides. As this is a conversation that touches us all, we want to hear from you. What can we do as a community to preserve what is essential to our scholarship in the age of AI? Post a comment to this newsletter and let us know your thoughts.