The ASQ September issue and much more
Welcome to the first ASQ newsletter featuring the September issue, news from AOM 2024, details on a virtual special issue and online conversation on healthcare, and some myth busting about our journal
Shots from AOM 2024
We had the opportunity to celebrate with many of you at AOM in Chicago, where I announced this year’s winners of the ASQ Award for Scholarly Contribution, Drew Carton, and the ASQ Dissertation Award, Yoonjin Choi. If you weren’t able to attend our reception, you can read all about the award-winning authors and articles in my “From the Editor” piece in our September issue. Here are photos of the winners (thank you Mandy O’Neill!).
Our editorial team met in person in Chicago and had some great conversations, including about a few ASQ-related misperceptions that I’ll take the opportunity here to debunk. A great benefit of starting this newsletter is enabling communication that may shed light on the otherwise opaque behind-the-scenes activity at a quarterly journal. After reading this, if you have ideas for other misperceptions we might address in future posts, feel free to reach out (ASQ me anything)!
Debunking ASQ Myths
Here are three concerns that ASQ’s associate editors and I regularly hear. I hope that after you read this, you’ll be reminded of why you should send your best work to ASQ.
1. Myth: The turnaround times at ASQ are too long.
Long ago, when ASQ was still accepting submissions on paper (yes, paper!), this was a legitimate concern. In 2024, this statement is a myth. Last year, 69 was the average number of days from submission to decision for a paper that was sent out for review. To be clear, that average does not include submissions that received decline-to-review decisions (whose turnaround times are, of course, much faster). Let me say it loud and clear, in the style of On Kawara (and in honor of this year’s academy city, where On Kawara is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago):
Also, we returned 95% of submissions within 90 days last year. We know how important timely feedback is, and we work hard to keep our review times reasonable. The combination of timely and developmental feedback offered by ASQ reviewers and editors is exceptional, and our review times should be among the reasons you want to submit your best work here.
2. Myth: ASQ doesn’t publish [my type of] papers.
Here’s what we often hear:
- “ASQ doesn’t publish micro papers.” Wait, ASQ papers have won the best published paper award from the OB division of AOM in 6 of the last 10 years!
- “ASQ doesn’t publish strategy papers.” In June, our Associate Editors J.P. Eggers and Olenka Kacperczyk hosted an online conversation with authors Cheng Gao, Ivana Naumovska, Kate Odziemkowska, and Yanbo Wang about their recently published strategy papers in ASQ. And this is not new news: Oliver Williamson published a classic paper in ASQ, and Wesley Cohen and Daniel Levinthal’s 1990 paper on absorptive capacity is the most cited ASQ article ever.
- “ASQ doesn’t publish qualitative papers -or- ASQ publishes only qualitative papers.” These opposing misperceptions depend on who you talk to! To clarify, the last 100 papers published in ASQ are evenly divided between quantitative and qualitative studies.
3. Myth: ASQ is a journal that I can never publish in.
It is hard to get published in ASQ. We can’t deny it. The same is true at all the leading organization and management journals. But we are VERY friendly to young scholars and especially to doctoral research. Over half of the papers we publish are based on dissertations. For 11 years, PhD students have dedicated their time and energy to interviewing ASQ authors and sharing behind-the-scenes aspects of writing papers. Those insightful interviews are all archived on the ASQ student blog.
When I started as editor of ASQ in 2021, I did an analysis of the ASQ papers published in the 2010s. Here’s what I discovered:
· Increasing numbers of women authors. By 2021, almost half of our published authors were women.
· Increasing global diversity of authors. The number of authors from around the globe, beyond the U.S., increased to about 40%.
· Authors studying the world. Between 40-50% of the articles in my analysis feature research based on data from non-US countries.
We can improve on all of these dimensions, of course, but the trends are heading in the direction of being more inclusive and representing the diversity of experiences and situations that make up organization studies today. Our goal is to represent the best and the breadth of organizational scholarship.
New Virtual Special Issue on Healthcare and Organizational Theory
Excellent organizational theory work has been conducted in the healthcare sector, and I asked Julia DiBenigno and Tom D’Aunno to create a collection of articles published in Administrative Science Quarterly to draw attention to this scholarship. They have curated a new virtual special issue, “A Necessary Prescription: How Studies of Healthcare Can Advance Theory and Practice.” They have crafted a remarkably insightful and informative introduction to this special issue and have selected seven articles to feature. Find the special issue here:
Special issue: Healthcare and Organizational Theory
The exceptional papers featured in this collection are works by Victoria Zhang, Aharon Mohliver, and Marissa King; JR Keller; Teresa Cardador, Patrick Hill, and Arghavan Salles; Kate Kellogg; Marlys Christianson; Patricia Satterstrom, Michaela Kerrissey, and Julia DiBenigno; and Sigal Barsade and Mandy O’Neill. All seven articles are open access through November 1. If you’ve not yet read them, or if it’s been a while since you have, I encourage you to check them out.
Online Symposium on September 20th Focused on Healthcare and Org Theory
In conjunction with the virtual special issue, Julia, Tom, and I will host an online symposium on Friday, Sept. 20th featuring a conversation with authors representing each of the seven articles featured. The 90-minute symposium starts at 10:30 am Eastern Time, and you don’t want to miss it! Please register for that event here.
ASQ September Issue, 2024
Each quarter, I spend a few days reading the newest issue of ASQ from (beautiful) cover to (beautiful) cover, and I write a brief summary of each article. For our September issue, you will find this overview below. I hope my take on these fantastic articles will entice you to take a deep dive yourself. In addition to eight splendid book reviews, the articles explain the slow response to the emergence of AIDS, the impact of training programs in urban slums in Brazil, the success of interorganizational collaborations in international development, the cost of joint appointments for underrepresented faculty, the problems of public scrutiny for 911 call-takers and emergency response time, and the implementation of radically decentralized authority.
Mia Chang-Zunino and Stine Grodal
What happens when a new understanding of a category clashes with how people initially understand a category’s moral meanings? Exploring this tension in the emergence of the category AIDS, the authors find that even as crucial new information about the causes of the disease emerged, the “silent majority” held on to their moral beliefs about the category. Only when the “moral boundary” was punctured were audiences willing to consider the category’s updated causal dimension and allocate resources to the disease. The authors shed new light on the complex processes of category persistence and updating.
The Allegory of the Favela: The Multifaceted Effects of Socioeconomic Mobility
Leandro S. Pongeluppe
Education is generally considered an important tool for socioeconomic mobility, but this article shows that business training can have unintended consequences. The author studied the effects of a training program for people living in Brazilian urban slums (favelas), unexpectedly finding that while the programs helped participants gain income and experience self-efficacy and optimism, they also experienced more prejudice and feelings of social stigma as they interacted with higher-status people who had prejudices against favelas. This research has important implications for how researchers and policymakers approach similar training programs.
Henrich Greve’s blog post about this article is here.
Rodrigo Canales, Mikaela Bradbury, Anthony Sheldon, and Charlie Cannon
How do actors collaborate and learn across organizational and sectoral boundaries to solve complex social problems? Through an examination of eight interorganizational international development interventions, the authors demonstrate the importance of experimentation and a set of structural and programmatic scaffolding practices. For example, successful collaborations iterated between convening and protective spaces to maintain participation and develop common understandings. The result is a process theory in which complementary scaffolding practices provide stability and extend opportunities for collaboration and learning.
Tanya Y. Tian and Edward B. Smith
Attempts to hire underrepresented groups in the short run may inadvertently exclude those groups in the long run. Studying a sample of assistant professors in a large research university, Tian and Smith find a paradox at the heart of the organization’s efforts to achieve diversity: Black assistant professors were much more likely than their White counterparts to be jointly appointed to two academic departments. These appointments require work that does not count in formal evaluation systems and hinders research productivity. The result? Lower retention for faculty with joint appointments. The results offer critical considerations for organizations hiring into non-standard roles in their efforts to achieve greater diversity.
Henrich Greve’s blog post about this article is here.
Arvind Karunakaran
Social media platforms have become a popular way to evaluate professionals, allowing the public to call out professionals for perceived misbehavior. This article examines the downsides of such bottom-up scrutiny among 911 call-takers, finding that rather than helping these professionals improve their accountability, social media scrutiny caused the call-takers to deviate from their mandate and categorize more calls as non-emergency. Rather than supporting performance as top-down scrutiny had done, bottom-up scrutiny degraded the performance of call takers and had negative downstream impacts on police officers by slowing response times.
Enacting Decentralized Authority: The Practices and Limits of Moving Beyond Hierarchy
Michael Y. Lee
Organizations have increasingly tried to reduce hierarchical authority by creating decentralized structures and moving decision making to the front lines. But success has been hard to come by. Viewing decentralization as a dynamic, continual process rather than a static outcome, this article examines a firm’s implementation of holocracy. The author shows how three mutually reinforcing practices bound authority to tasks rather than people and require people to work and relate through role rather than rank. Despite frictions such as more cognitive effort for employees and continual updating of role responsibilities, the changes result in more horizontal communications.
Book Reviews
Taylor Lorenz. Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet
Y. Jenna Song
Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev. Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t
Elizabeth Gorman
Asaf Darr. Between Conflict and Collegiality: Palestinian Arabs and Jews in the Israeli Workplace
Peter Bamberger
Rodrigo Valadao
Simone Santoni
Gillian Tett. Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life
Madeleine Rauch
Catherine J. Turco. Harvard Square: A Love Story
Gino Cattani
Tae-Youn Park
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Sincerely,
Christine Beckman
Editor, Administrative Science Quarterly
ASQ articles have often been featured on Henrich Greve’s blog site Organizational Musings. Our student-run ASQ Blog features interviews with ASQ authors that offer insights into the research and writing process. To stay informed, also follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter.
i appreciate the newsletter. Good summaries and interesting.
Such a helpful and informative newsletter! Thank-you.