Publishings in AMJ

• The seeds for many rejections are planted at the inception of a project, in the form of topics that—— no matter how well executed—will not sufficiently appeal to AMJ’s reviewers and readers.
• What is the anatomy of a topic that, in our opinion, creates that sort of momentum at AMJ? Our editorial will focus on five distinct criteria of effective topics: significance, novelty, curiosity, scope, and actionability.

Significance: Taking on “Grand Challenges”

• Development Goals to eradicate global poverty, disease, and hunger.
  • The fundamental principles underlying a grand challenge are the pursuit of bold ideas and the adoption of less conventional approaches totackling large, unresolved problems.

Novelty: Changing the Conversation

• one simple way to check the novelty of a topic is to consider whether a study addressing it would change the conversation that is already taking place in a given literature.
  • Does the study merely add to the momentum created by existing voices, or does it cause heads to turn as the conversation darts in an entirely new direction?
    • Sometimes that new direction is created by adding new vocabulary to the conversation, in the form of new ideas or constructs.
    • Sometimes that new direction results simply from new insights not articulated by prior voices.
  • Novel topics can often result from knowledge recombination, with something “new” being created by building a bridge between two literatures or disciplines. Fields that draw from within themselves for extensions of ideas tend to become more insular over time, reducing the likelihood that novel solutions will emerge (George, Kotha, & Zheng, 2008). The organizational theory and strat�egy literatures often refer to “knowledge recombination” as a way to generate new ideas. The premise is that organizations generate new and creative solutions by exploring new technological domains
    for inspiration and recombining the ideas that emerge with knowledge already resident in the or�ganizations (e.g., March, 1991; Rosenkopf & Nerkar, 2001). In extensions of this argument, Ahuja and Lampert (2001) found that organizations must over�come three pathologies of learning to create novel breakthroughs: the tendency to favor the familiar
    over the unfamiliar, the tendency to prefer the mature to the nascent, and the tendency to prefer solutions that are near to existing approaches, rather than completely new.

Scope: Casting a Wider Net.

• Even the best topic ideas can be undermined if the resulting study is too small.
• Anecdotally, we suspect that other submissions struggle with scope because authors slice their data too thin—trying to get multiple good papers out of a data set rather than one great one.
• The best topics set out to fully and comprehensively sample the landscape in a given domain and may even include constructs and mechanisms derived by using multiple lenses.

Actionability: Insights for Practice

• Finally, a topic should be actionable: it should offer insights for managerial or organizational practice.
  • One way to approach the actionability criterion is to consider variability in practices that our existing vocabulary of constructs cannot explain—that is, places where our scholarly language or words fail us.
  • For example, the innovation literature typically paints innovation as the result of capital-intensive research and development efforts.How, then, can we explain emergent innovations that have low capital intensity, severely restricted research and development spending, yet still create value?
• McGahan (2007) states five major ways that management studies can be actionable: (1) offering counterintuitive insights, (2) highlighting the effect of new and important practices, (3) showing inconsistencies in, and consequences of, practices, (4) suggesting a specific theory to explain an interesting and current situation, and (5) identifying an iconic phenomenon that opens new areas of inquiry and practice.