The March-April Issue of Organization Science is out!
If you thought this week's eclipse was magical, check out the new issue of Organization Science!
Hello Friends,
Welcome to the April 2024 issue of So Here's the Idea, the official Substack of Organization Science! Today, we’ll introduce the new March/April Issue, recap the 2024 Winter Conference, and cover the only journal topic less exciting than reference formatting—conflict of interest! First, let’s introduce the new issue, then move on to Zurich and why your dissertation advisor is not a good recommended reviewer, even if she referred to your research as “a structural black hole.”
This new issue covers a broad range of topics, from first-generational status, pay suppression in social impact work, and entrepreneurship to learning and social networks. As always, the articles reflect the vibrancy and diversity of our field—with articles by both experienced and first-time authors and a diversity of methods and approaches.
Beyond the articles in the issue, we have a fantastic set of several dozen Articles in Advance that you can check out here: https://pubsonline.informs.org/toc/orsc/0/0
As always, we’d love it if you shared the substack with your friends and colleagues.
Sincerely,
The Organization Science Team
The March-April Issue of Organization Science
Do Lower-Power Individuals Really Compete Less? An Investigation of Covert Competition by Yufei Zhong, Huisi (Jessica) Li
This research calls attention to the understudied covert form of competition and emphasizes the nuanced relationships between power and competitive behaviors.
Hybrid Administrative Interfaces: Authority Delegation and Reversion in Strategic Alliances by Marvin Hanisch, Jeffrey J. Reuer, Carolin Haeussler, Shivaram V. Devarakonda
We examine the conditions under which alliance partners delegate decision-making authority to steering committees as well as the conditions under which authority over discordant matters can be relocated to one of the alliance partners.
Inverted Apprenticeship: How Senior Occupational Members Develop Practical Expertise and Preserve Their Position When New Technologies Arrive by Matthew Beane, Callen Anthony
"Inverted apprenticeships," defined as configured struggle and restructured interactions with junior members that allow senior members to develop practical expertise with new technologies while maintaining their position, resolve this dilemma.
Pay Suppression in Social Impact Contexts: How Framing Work Around the Greater Good Inhibits Job Candidate Compensation Demands by Insiya Hussain, Marko Pitesa, Stefan Thau, Michael Schaerer
Our research contributes to understandings of how social responsibility messaging impacts workers’ perceptions of organizations and negotiation behavior.
Learning Strategic Representations: Exploring the Effects of Taking a Strategy Course by Mana Heshmati, Felipe A. Csaszar
We show that taking a strategy course improves strategic decision making, increases the depth of mental representations and the attention paid to broader industry and competitive concerns, and boosts students’ confidence, while making them more aware of the uncertainty pervading strategic decisions.
The Consequences of Revealing First-Generational Status by Peter Belmi, Kelly Raz, Margaret Neale, Melissa Thomas-Hunt
The results supported the first-gen disadvantage hypothesis. Even in the mainstream labor market, first-gen students were evaluated less favorably. We traced this bias to the impact of one possible mechanism: deficit thinking.
Time Is Not Money! Temporal Preferences for Time Investments and Entry into Entrepreneurship by Cédric Gutierrez, Randolph Sloof, Donal Crilly
Results from a laboratory-in-the-field study show that individuals who heavily discount future time investments are more likely to become entrepreneurs.
Legitimating Illegitimate Practices: How Data Analysts Compromised Their Standards to Promote Quantification by Ryan Stice-Lusvardi, Pamela J. Hinds, Melissa Valentine
Our findings articulate the relationship between captive occupations and conditions wherein experts work to legitimate what they consider illegitimate practices.
When Funders Aren’t Customers: Reputation Management and Capability Underinvestment in Multiaudience Organizations by David Keith, Lauren Taylor, James Paine, Richard Weisbach, Anthony Dowidowicz
Our findings suggest that building high-performance nonprofits requires coordinated action between managers and donors to allow capability investments to accumulate.
Technology Counteroffensive Strategies: Toward an Ex Ante View of Technology Substitution by Nathan R. Furr, Daniel C. Snow
In a study of technology substitution in the population of automobile carburetor manufacturers between 1979 and 1992, we find that these “technology counteroffensive” strategies effectively improved product performance, temporarily deferred technology substitution, and contributed to the continued survival of many firms.
The Reconnection Process: Mobilizing the Social Capital of Dormant Ties By Emanuela Rondi, Daniel Z. Levin, Alfredo De Massis
We find that the process of reconnecting dormant ties can and does fail, sometimes dramatically, when people do not refresh the tie and, as a result, do not trust where they stand with each other.
The Corporate Opportunity Structure for Shareholder Activism: How Activist Hedge Funds Exploit Board Demographic Diversity By Mark R. DesJardine, Wei Shi, Emilio Marti
When subject to governance and performance problems, firms become more likely targets of activist hedge funds when they also have demographically diverse boards.
Stigma by Association: The Unintended Interpersonal Consequences of Associating Oneself with an Abusive Supervisor by Liuxin Yan, Kai Chi Yam
We examine a neglected group of individuals—employees who are able to develop high-quality relationships and are closely associated with their abusive supervisors. Specifically, we found that observers tend to perceive employees who are closely associated with an abusive supervisor to be less moral and trustworthy for seemingly sharing a similar set of unethical values and beliefs, even though this might not necessarily be true in reality.
Striking Out Swinging: Specialist Success Following Forced Task Inferiority by Brittany Bond, Ethan Poskanzer
We find robust evidence that specialists’ performance can be enhanced, rather than diminished, after work outside their specialization.
A Microstructural Approach to Self-Organizing: The Emergence of Attention Networks by Marco Tonellato, Stefano Tasselli, Guido Conaldi, Jürgen Lerner, Alessandro Lomi
We contribute to this line of inquiry by reframing organizational attention as the outcome of a concatenation of self-organizing, microstructural mechanisms linking multiple participants to multiple problems, thus giving rise to an emergent attention network.
The 2024 Organization Science Winter Conference
It’s now been a month since the OSWC in Zurich, and by all reports, it was a smashing success. I think we all agreed afterward that alternating between Europe and N. America is a great plan moving forward. With about 110 people attending, it was quite a bit larger than before, but this size, along with the location, allowed for broader participation across schools, countries, and ranks. I loved getting to learn more about a different set of researchers and their work. The conference was a nice blend of tradition and innovation.
We were fortunate that some of the former EICs were able to make it out, including journal founder Arie Lewin, who started the OSWC with Linda Argote.
Stefano Brusoni and the entire ETH team put together a beautiful venue for us, and we are grateful to Zurich Insurance for providing that opportunity at a subsidized cost that made conference fees accessible regardless of research budget. The lounge with the free prosecco was appreciated too, as were the entire team’s efforts to accelerate the emergence of so many flowers just in time for the event. Despite the larger conference size, both the single presentation track and poster sessions provided a wonderful format for an important exchange of ideas.
We were also excited to hold a doctoral workshop the morning before the conference, designed and hosted by Daniella Laureiro-Martinez at ETH Zurich. This was a great way to connect with a new generation of scholars and to learn who was capable of throwing a (we were told plastic) brain across the room without decapitating someone during the initial icebreaker.
Unfortunately, my Wash U department chair, Dan Elfenbein, tracked me down to publicly lecture me on skipping a week’s worth of undergraduate classes. I’ve got to applaud his dedication to the students, though, for chasing me across the Atlantic.
We’ve begun initial plans for the 2025 conference, which will be in North America, so stay tuned!
—Lamar
Conflicts of Interest in the Organization Science Review Process
Journals take a variety of approaches in how they define conflicts of interest (COI) and how they address them. We take a pretty strong stance on this issue, and not because I write a lot of papers on misconduct. Trust in the review and editorial process is crucial for the legitimacy of research journals, and we are increasingly aware of how conflicts of interest exacerbate inequity and produce the wrong outcomes in publication decisions. When I was appointed EIC, I had an existing paper that I was revising for a second-round submission at Organization Science. Although I’m sure many of our editors would be very comfortable (if not excited) rejecting my paper, my coauthors and I agreed that we didn’t want to put them in that situation, so we withdrew the paper from the journal. I’m fortunate to be at the point in my career where this wasn’t a costly decision, but I’m certain it was the right one. The misconduct researcher in me can ramble on about power relationships, but in the end, it felt like the right thing to do in my gut. That’s not the best decision-making process, but it’s a pretty good warning system for where things might go wrong.
For the same reason, all senior editor papers are now handled by deputy editors, and I handle deputy editor papers. My papers are handled by some unfortunate editors at the other journals I submitted to. As I mentioned, I’m sure most of us are very willing to reject each others’ papers. We simply don’t want anyone to ever doubt that.
It’s impossible to completely eliminate COI, particularly given that social relationships and emotional attachments are difficult to clearly define and power relationships are not always obvious to third parties. However, there are some dimensions on which we can define COI, and we encourage authors to review these when submitting a paper: https://pubsonline.informs.org/page/orsc/submission-guidelines. Please ignore the missing apostrophe that I just noticed there. The basics are:
No current or former coauthors
No current or former colleagues (at the university level)
No former advisors (including committee members)
No current or former pickleball or hot yoga partners
Well, maybe I just made up the last one, but it does indicate that you might self-identify other COIs. Technically, our policy has expiration dates on these relationships, but honestly, ask yourself if you feel they should. I personally don’t feel comfortable handling any of my past coauthors’ papers. But I may just be weak-willed.
Given some of the obvious COIs that we’ve caught whom authors recommend as editors and reviewers, we thought it important to emphasize a few things beyond the formal policy:
The COI policy applies to all the authors. Submitting authors should look for COI for their coauthors on the paper. Please don’t recommend your coauthor’s advisor, coauthor, or colleague. We don’t want to have to investigate everyone’s CV and life history when assigning papers. We assume these mistakes are because you didn’t do the background checks, so please do. These COIs are much harder to unravel if we discover them later in the review process.
Have an honest discussion with yourself about whether you think someone can objectively evaluate your paper. I have a number of friends with whom I have no COI, but I would never review their papers because I don’t trust myself to be objective. COI is not primarily about hyper-agentic reviewing if “hyper-agentic” is actually a word. It’s heavily about how hard it is to separate our personal feelings from our professional decisions. Also, ask yourself how the recommended reviewer would feel if they found out later that they had reviewed your paper. Err on the side of caution.
Organization Science operates on a double-blind system, but because of conferences and preprints, reviewers sometimes know who the authors are. That in and of itself isn’t grounds for recusal. Some of the best reviewers are likely to be the ones who are aware of all the emerging research in their field. Similar to authors, just ask yourself if you feel you can objectively evaluate the paper, given who the authors are. Admitting you can’t isn’t a mark of moral weakness but rather of moral awareness.
If any authors, reviewers, or editors discover a COI later in a review process, such as after a revision request or even later, just reach out and let the editor or me know. Mistakes happen, and there’s no attributed guilt here. Part of our job as the editorial team is to unravel these types of problems, and we’ll come up with a reasonable resolution. What WILL concern me, however, is if you don’t report a COI after an R&R but then do complain about it after a second-round rejection. True story. Appeal not granted.
Just remember that if you have a question or realization about COI, you can always reach out for clarification or guidance, regardless of the circumstances.