The value of convening, reflections on register in writing, and a welcome to our new editor
Christine Beckman and András Tilcsik share their final reflection on academic values, Ashleigh Imus tells us about register in writing, and previous editors welcome Beth Bechky to hew new role
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.
In our final installment of “What are journals good for?” we talk about the importance of convening because it reminds us of the importance of fostering community – not just of advancing individual careers. (As a reminder, we posit that journals help to curate, cultivate, certify, and convene scholarship, and we tackled the other values in prior newsletters.)
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!
I think ASQ has a lot of reflecting to do about its complete lack of academic values! Here is the true cover of ASQ! https://substack.com/home/post/p-169413849