It's Time for Special Issue Submissions and Perspective on Perspectives
It’s the start of the summer for the Northern Hemisphere crowd and things are still humming along at Organization Science, even as I spend much of my time dreaming of the mountains. Submissions are up quite a bit, and so we’ll have a new set of editors coming on shortly. Stay tuned! This summer we’ll be ramping up our content generation and outreach, including introducing new regional editors, and tackling some research transparency initiatives in the spirit of what ASQ has been doing. The special issue on Migration should be arriving later this year as well. I’ll be going on sabbatical (to my third floor writer’s garret), which I’ll happily spend. . . running the journal! And writing too. Hopefully.
But first things first! Below is a reminder that submissions for the special issue on Psychologically (Unsafe) Climates start Saturday. We’re committed to running special issues that avoid all the classic process problems and produce a diverse set of topical papers. So submit away! I also provide guidance on what perspectives submissions are at Org Science and why they’re important. Many of our most impactful papers have been perspectives, which are fully peer-reviewed and considered of equivalent research value to standard submissions.
If they aren’t already, make sure you get your friends, grad students, and barbers to subscribe to our Substack. Sharique promised me if we get to 2,000 subscribers by August that he’ll let me double the number of Midjourney images I include in future posts.
Special Issue Submissions Opening
Submissions are about to start June 1 for the new special issue: Psychologically-(Un)Safe Climates in the Age of Digital and Social Tensions. Edited by Jean-François Harvey, Henrik Bresman, Amy Edmondson, and Anita Williams Woolley, the special issue will cover the challenges of promoting psychological safety (and related organizational climates) in a rapidly evolving technological landscape. In the spirit of the journal, the special issue is welcoming a broad set of theoretical and empirical approaches related to this topic from scholars across related fields.
I’m particularly excited about this SI because of the huge impact that technology is having on privacy, monitoring, autonomy, and information dissemination. We need to be constantly studying these types of topics as social, legal, and managerial landscapes rapidly change. The full call for papers goes into extensive detail on wide range of topics that might fit. I’m excited to see what you send us, and to get to participate in the whole editorial process. I’ll be there as a resource for the SI editors, in whom I have great confidence.
As with all special issues moving forward, the norms, processes, and standards of the journal will apply equally to these submissions. The call explicitly lays out the decision-making process and rules around the SI. Since the SI will not operate as a fixed-capacity tournament, submissions will be handled on a rolling basis, and we will seek to adhere as closely as possible to journal review process guidelines such as fast turnaround, clear guidance, limited review rounds, and others. Thank you to all those of you who don’t yet know that you’ll agree to review for this! We appreciate your support.
We are committed to a fair and equitable process, with standard conflict-of-interest rules applying. Since this is not a tournament, reviewers need not worry about papers competing with their own potential submissions. The editors will not submit their own papers beyond an introductory piece.
The submission portal will close on September 30, so get those papers in! I’m excited to see what the finished special issue will look like, what problems it will help solve, and how it might help improve lives in organizations across the world.
So What Actually Is a Perspectives Paper?
Organization Science has long published peer-reviewed papers classified as “perspectives”—a formal designation in our review process to reflect manuscripts with different structures and purposes than more traditional theory or empirical papers. Yet as many people have pointed out, we don’t have good guidance on what these are. We may have, at some point, but my Wayback Machine is giving me error codes right now. To resolve this, we did what any good academics would do, which is form a committee: the Organization Science Committee on Perspectives and Auto Repair. Since I know nothing about the latter, our committee (Gokhan and I) focused on the Perspectives part.
Below you will find the guidance we developed with the help of many others. Although we briefly piloted the submission of proposals (instead of full manuscripts), this grossly complicated the review process flow, so we will continue to only accept submissions of full manuscripts. As you’ll note below, it’s impossible to draw strict boundaries between perspectives and other submissions, but I will again rely on the judgment of our outstanding editorial team. We’ve also listed some examples from the past, in case you’re curious.
The Guidance
Organization Science has published more than 35 peer-reviewed Perspectives over more than 20 years. Although Perspectives have played an important role for the journal, there has been limited author guidance to explain what they are and what they are not. This document provides both content guidance for potential Perspectives submissions as well as clarity on the current processes through which Perspectives might be accepted for publication.
What qualifies as a potential Perspectives piece?
Published Perspectives are intended to be peer-reviewed papers that make substantial contributions to advancing theory. They are not second-class publications with lower review standards and should be considered top publications in the evaluation of any author’s research portfolio. Consequently, any Perspectives piece will need to clearly explain its first-order importance and how it will influence our study of important organizational problems, theories, and identified empirical evidence. Perspectives represent logical arguments and evidence of the authors and not the opinion or beliefs of the current editorial team.
Perspectives should be informed by and reflect existing research literatures across relevant fields. In particular, Perspectives should be of broad interest to multiple lines of research and theoretical frameworks and should make this relevance clear and explicit throughout the paper. Even though they can be on a specific topic or issue, the wider the implications of the discussion are, the more likely we are to consider it as a Perspectives piece. Although all published papers represent some degree of opinion, Perspectives should be logically argued, based on defensible assumptions and theoretical priors, rather than unsupported beliefs or opinions. The arguments should be supported with evidence, where appropriate, and potentially even formal analysis of that evidence.
The existence of the Perspectives category does not indicate our disinterest in high-quality verbal theory papers submitted through the regular track. It is impossible to define a discrete boundary between these two paper types, but theory papers would typically provide clear testable propositions or a framework to generate them.
Organization Science can roughly categorize Perspectives into four categories:
1. The introduction or improvement of important processes or methods for advancing theory.
a. Behfar and Okhuysen (2018) explains the important role of abductive reasoning in advancing theory through data and empirics.
b. von Nordenflycht (2023) presents an argument on better processes for improving theory.
2. The introduction of new empirical frameworks, approaches, or principles for addressing important organizational problems. These Perspectives might highlight new or modified empirical approaches that could substantially change how we test existing or new theories about people and organizations.
a. Anthony, Bechky, and Fayard (2023) promote a system view of human/AI collaboration and the implications this has for qualitative methods.
b. Kluppel, Pierce, and Snyder (2018) introduce how the historical persistence literature can help causally connect culture and institutions with modern organizational heterogeneity.
c. Carton and Tewfik (2016) build typologies and frameworks for expanding our views of conflict management in work groups with recognition of positive and negative spillovers.
d. Anteby (2013) argues that the taboo of intermingling personal experience with research is too extreme and impedes our ability to generate and develop theoretical insights.
3. The introduction of or reconceptualization of important constructs or definitions. These Perspectives argue that introducing, redefining, or reconceptualizing these constructs might fundamentally change how we theorize and empirically test causal relationships as well as design policy and practice to improve organizations or societies.
a. Pillemer (2024) introduces the self-presentation approach of strategic authenticity.
b. Mortensen and Haas (2018) reconceptualize teams as having fluid and fuzzy boundaries and present the implications of this for existing and future work.
4. Challenges to or development of theoretical explanations of important organizational phenomena. These Perspectives identify logical flaws or incompleteness of existing theory, and why adapting or correcting such theory would more completely explain observable outcomes and processes.
a. Yap, Madan, and Puranam (2022) offer a theoretical model where complex hierarchical structures can generate upward status disagreement between formal ranks and informal cues.
5. The theoretical and policy examination of major social and economic developments, with a focus on how theory and existing evidence can help us understand emergent phenomena and processes and inform public and managerial policies to address them.
a. Lumineau, Wang, and Schilke (2021) outline the features and history of blockchain technologies, then present a research agenda for exploring the implications for organizations and society.
Perspectives are not “review” pieces (in the manner of either systematic or integrative reviews). There are multiple journals/outlets for each of these kinds of studies across the field of organization and management research. Perspectives are also not pure methods papers, dataset papers, or articles that make methodology contributions, as all of these are welcomed as standard submissions to Organization Science.
Perspectives Submission Process
Papers should be submitted through the standard review track under the perspective submission track, through which they would follow the standard review process—the same as a regular submission. Alternatively, a paper submitted under the regular track might receive a revision request conditional on the paper switching to the Perspectives track. This request could happen at two stages. First, a deputy editor might give the authors a “desk reject and resubmit” if the paper has potential as a Perspectives piece. Second, a senior editor might, in consultation with a deputy editor, issue a “major revision” or “minor revision” conditional on the paper switching to the perspectives track. This decision would be issued only after receiving reviews on the original submission.