New Papers and a New Resource for Recent Papers
In five days we’ll be moving journal headquarters across the pond to Copenhagen so I can reconnect with my viking ancestry attend AOM. Like most of you, I’m looking forward to seeing friends and colleagues and hearing about all the great things going on across the management field. I’ve been revisiting my math training as well for mentally converting kroner to dollars, which is evidently more complicated than my euro conversion formula of 1 Euro=$1 + epsilon, where epsilon is strictly decreasing in wine consumed. I’m sure the conference will be lovely, and since it comes with the Danish restaurant scene then this will surely be a great trip.
Today I’ll introduce our latest project: The Wellspring.1 The Wellspring is a resource providing curated reading lists of recent publications from Organization Science and other journals, organized by topic area and populated by teams of our editors. As I’ll explain below, the goal is to keep the field informed on the most recent work on topics that our scholars care about. There’s a risk that all of us fail to update syllabi, references, and best practices from the 2015 or earlier papers that populate them. This is our attempt to help with that, so I hope you’ll check it out.
Before I get to that, let me first present some recently published papers to read on your flight from Melbourne or Los Angeles, after of course frantically building the slides for your PDW. Today we have three from authors in Asia, Europe, and North America. Learning is a classic topic for our journal, as are entrepreneurship, innovation, and categories. They also show that, contrary to some rumors, Organization Theory is alive and well in our journal, and in fact still the largest field represented here.
Rudy Durand has followed up his “best title” paper from last year— “Difference in Deference”—with a new contender: “Meating Expectations.” The paper, led by Eunice Rhee and Jade Lo, is on a hugely important industry setting. Given the impact of livestock (particularly belching cows) on climate change, we need to understand what makes markets accept or reject plant-based (or lab-based) alternatives that soon might look and taste identically.
Check out these papers and our introduction of the Wellspring below. And be sure to encourage your local senior editor to write a guest column so I can get our engagement numbers back up to the high 60s. I’ll be back next week with our mid-year transparency and performance report.
-Lamar
Newly Accepted Papers:
Learning in Temporally Complex Problems: The Role of External Knowledge
Christina Fang, Ji-hyun (Jason) Kim, Hisan Yang
How do decision-makers utilize external and internal knowledge for problems where actions and outcomes are separated over time? We examine how decision-makers use external knowledge (e.g., rules or templates) and internal knowledge (gained through trial-and-error learning) to solve complex problems where feedback is delayed. Surprisingly, we find that limited external knowledge can harm performance, even more than having no external knowledge at all, by creating misleading "interim attractors" that distract decision-makers from their ultimate goal. This highlights the need for organizations to carefully balance external guidance with experiential learning, especially in long-term decision-making scenarios.
Meating Expectations: Category Legitimation and Transmutation
Eunice Y. Rhee, Jade Y. Lo, Rodolphe Durand
How can a product that doesn’t come from animals still be seen as “meat”? Intrigued by the rise of plant-based meat, we explore how firms introduce a product that challenges a core assumption of an established category—such as “meat must come from animals”—while competing in the same market. We found that plant-based meat producers use three key strategies: redefining what makes meat “meat,” replicating the familiar experience of cooking and eating it, and highlighting extra benefits like health or sustainability. These strategies can help explain how other innovative products, like lab-grown diamonds, may also challenge and compete with established product categories.
Selection Regimes and Selection Errors
Dmitry Sharapov, Linus Dahlander
How can organizations do better at selecting which innovation projects to fund? This paper uses rich qualitative and quantitative data from an accelerator that evolved through three selection regimes over three years to examine how these changes affected the prevalence of false positives (funding projects that fail) and false negatives (not funding projects that succeed). The findings reveal relatively small differences across the regimes despite deliberate efforts to improve the selection process. In the final regime, which increased average submission quality by emphasizing applicant track record and adding additional layers of screening, evaluators surprisingly made more selection errors. This seems to have happened because track record imperfectly predicted future performance and because some strong applicants didn’t submit their best ideas.
The Wellspring
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big proponent of reading and referencing recently-published papers. It’s much easier to just give classic older citations that are a rough fit for the point you want to make, and to keep them as the dominant content in your PhD syllabus, but ignoring the latest work perpetuates several problems in our area of science. First, it fails to incorporate theoretical and methodological improvement from recent work. Methodological advances are constant and sometimes substantial, yielding much stronger evidence than we had in the past. They also sometimes cast serious doubt on older papers that are the ones getting cited. Second, ignoring the latest work misrepresents our current knowledge on a topic or theory, which can overstate contribution or simply not give credit where credit is due. Third, and of particular importance to me, missing the most recent work is particularly costly to junior scholars, who by definition, didn’t write the 2015 paper that everyone cites. Not only should their great work get read, but they also represent a more diverse set of authors and ideas, which is something we care about in providing opportunity. It’s for these reasons that citation count is one of the least important factors in the tenure letters I write. There’s another whole Substack post on citations and promotion cases that might show up here in the coming months. You’ve been warned. . . There will probably be colorful figures and possibly my weird sense of humor.
Our outreach editors and the whole editorial board have been working to address this over the last months. To do so, we’ve created an online resource focused on recent publications organized into a series of topical areas. The Wellspring contains streams (clever, right?) of topical research published online in the last 3-4 years. I built the first one on Misconduct and Ethics, but we now have seven streams and are launching publicly. Our editors have adopted these streams as curators, and we will keep them updated as new work is published online. Editors are finishing more streams every week, so stay tuned. Our streams mostly contain papers that we published, partly for practical reasons and partly because we want to promote our own papers. But the curators are also including papers from other journals that they think are particularly important. The Corporate Strategy and Governance Stream, for example, is curated by Mark DesJardine and Emilie Feldman and includes 25 papers from five different journals. We’ll be adding new papers as they emerge, refining the lists, and archiving the oldest tranche of papers at the end of each year.
I’m grateful to the editors who took this on, and most specifically to our outreach editors Jino Lu and Shirley Tang who led this with support from doctoral students Albert Roh (USC) and Gordon Scott (WashU). We’ll be evolving this project as we learn what works best. But we hope you’ll take a look and see what’s most relevant to your work. Importantly, we hope you’ll see how you might update your PhD syllabi. These courses are typically the first look that new scholars get of the literature on organizations, and we want that to be representative of the field’s state of art and the great scholars emerging in it.
I’ll see you soon.
-Lamar
My initial idea of calling the project “The Beacon of Intellectual Enlightenment in the Study of Organizations and Other Cool Things” was not approved by our outreach editors.