Dissertation Competition Finals and a New Promotion and Outreach Strategy
This morning Rebecca Ponce de Leon (2021 Winner) announced the finalists for the 2024 Organization Science Dissertation Competition. The OSDC has a long history, and each year receives well over 100 submissions. Recent winners include Matteo Tranchero (2023), Michael Park (2022), Rebecca, Summer Jackson (2020), Saerom Lee (2019), and Basima Tewfik (2018). Check out the history of winners and finalists here and it’s quite a list. Nobody liked my dissertation on car leasing (shocking), but my colleague Minyuan Zhao won in 2003, which is pretty cool. This year’s finalists will present at the INFORMS conference in Seattle, which is unfortunately overlapping with SMS in Istanbul. INFORMS is working on a space catapult to get me between conferences (we are an operations organization after all) but test launches with the undergrads are not going well.
Congratulations to all the finalists:
Farzam Boroomand (University of Minnesota)
Finding Inclusive Solutions to Grand Challenges: Evidence from US Public Education
Susie Choe (University of Michigan)
Identity-Based Competition: How Identity Shapes Producers’ Market Positioning and Stratification Processes
Cynthia Feng (HEC Paris)
The Paradox of Multicultural Experiences: Exploring the Social Impact with Home Country Compatriots
Oguz Gencay (University of Maryland)
Jazzing Through Task Uncertainty: The Improvisation Mindset as An Intervention
Piyush Gulati (INSEAD)
The Interplay of Structure, Skills, and Digital Technologies in Decentralizing Firms
Nicholas Otis (UC Berkeley)
Essays on Entrepreneurship, Artificial Intelligence, and Firm Performance
Ming Wang (Northwestern University)
Lessons from the Future and Hopes for the Past: Prospective Organizing of Risks in Contemporary Organizations
Shun Yiu (University of Pennsylvania)
Algorithmic Governance: How Decentralization of Decision Rights Erodes Platform Participation
Promotion and Outreach Strategy
Although we’ve done some cool things with Substack (obviously not the cat photos) and WeChat, this is an area where I feel I should have been doing a better job as EIC, so this is a heavy focus for the next year. To lead this effort, I’ve appointed Xiaoli (Shirley) Tang of Bocconi and Jino Lu of WashU as Promotion and Outreach Editors. We’ve built significant strategy to raise visibility of the research we publish and to build a deeper and broader community. They will work in conjunction with regional outreach editors in Asia Pacific (Yun Hou) and South Asia (stay tuned). We’d love to expand this to other regions and I’m always up for proposals on this. The promotion and outreach initiative will include these and other projects:
Increased Social Media Presence: I’ve been woefully absent on this, but Shirley and Gino are building a team to keep on top of this daily. I still have deep ethical concerns about being on X, but this may be necessary to support our authors.
Recent Literature Showcases: A few years ago my brother was teaching a Form and Analysis class (music theory), and decided he would only include recent pieces on the syllabus. What did he get? A great list of masterpieces by composers who weren’t all dead white guys wearing wigs. We’re excited to provide a great showcase for research from the last few years, organized into topical areas and updated frequently, so you can always find the best and most recent work from Org Science and other journals for your papers or your syllabus. I promise that the first one will not be on car leasing. You could call these virtual special issues, but they aren’t. They’ll be living, breathing documents that stay up to date with the latest great work.
More Columns and Content for Substack: There are so many valuable voices to hear from, and so many opportunities to inform our readers about other parts of the diverse set of fields that make up our journal. Plus I’m running out of jokes. We’ll also introduce interviews with authors and editors to help people understand what goes into a successful review and revision process.
So what can I do to help?
We’ll be calling on a number of people to help source a diverse set of high-quality content, so there will always be opportunities to help. But you can also tell everyone to subscribe to our Substack. We’re at about 1,500 subscribers, and only one of those is my mom, but we’d like to bump that up substantially. So share with everyone you know and get them to subscribe. We want to continue to build a community here, both within our journal and with others in our field, and we are dedicated to a purely opt-in product. I earn zero dollars off this Substack, which is perfectly correlated with my annual salary as EIC, so I’m doing both simply for the purpose we espouse. And of course the angry emails. . . those are the best parts of the job. With that, click something below if you’re up for it.
—Lamar