Dear members of the IACMR:

In this letter I wish to share with you MOR plans for the 2018 IACMR Bi-Annual Conference in Wuhan and two new initiatives.

2018 IACMR Conference in Wuhan

I am pleased to share that 12 or more MOR Editors (Deputy Editors and Senior Editors) and as many as 10 AMR Editors will participate at the conference. On June 13 the AMR-MOR team will participate in a pre-conference Paper Development Workshop that Professor Jay Barney, Editor in Chief of Academy Management Review (AMR), and I have organized. The focus of the PDW is on theory development and preapproval. See details below.

On June 15 and 16, MOR Editors will also offer Breakfast Cafes on specific topics. This is a new initiative. The conference program will list the specific topics along with the name of the designated MOR Editor leading the discussion.

In addition, during the conference days there will be opportunities for authors to meet one-on-one with MOR Editors to discuss specific research ideas or draft papers. Further details will be available in the conference program.

AMR–MOR Paper Development Workshop (June 13th 13:00–16:30).

The program:

13:00–14:00:  Panel of AMR and MOR Editors. This session is open to all registered conference participants. Location will be listed in conference program

14:00–16:30: Mentoring sessions with teams of AMR and MOR Editors.

Interested authors are asked to submit drafts of papers (theoretical/ conceptual, qualitative as well as inductive and deductive). To be selected, authors should articulate what theoretical debates the research the paper addresses and how the outcome of the research will advance theory or society. Theoretical significance, knowledge impact, and thoroughness and rigor of the research plan are the major selection criteria for the mentoring session. Selected papers should not include any data analyses, but papers should discuss ideas for potential data sources and the empirical approach that the research might follow. In the best of cases authors may be invited to submit the paper to MOR for preapproval or invited to submit paper to AMR.

Deadline for submitting papers is April 13, 2018. Invitations to mentoring sessions will be issued by May 18, 2018. Please submit papers to Ms. Stefanie McAdoo at Stefanie.mcadoo@duke.edu. Subject line should read AMR.MOR.PDW

New MOR Initiatives
1. MOR Preapproval Custom Paper Development Workshops
Much progress was made this past year with the preregistration and preapproval initiative introduced in volume 13. Authors who made their research instruments, protocols, and datasets available for replication studies (Li & Cui, forthcoming; Zhang & Wei, 2017) were formally acknowledged. However, theory development and venturing to study breakthrough research questions represent perhaps the greatest challenge faced by authors submitting papers to MOR.

MOR is offering to run custom Professional Development Workshops (PDWs) at the invitation of a school or a consortium of schools. The typical workshop requires 3 days. However, the design of each workshop will be customized to fit the needs of the sponsoring school.  Once a workshop is announced, authors will apply to participate. Those admitted will be treated to an immersive workshop. The goal is that many of the manuscripts will emerge from the PDW ready for a Conditional Acceptance, granted under the new MOR editorial policies for preregistration-preapproval manuscripts (see Lewin, Chiu, Fey, Levine, McDermott, Murmann, & Tsang, 2016 and our webpage). The Editors and I strongly believe that the MOR proactive preapproval PDWs will greatly impact the relevance and rigor of papers published in MOR going forward. The specific requirements and application details will be released in MOR 14.2.

2. MOR Engaged Indigenous Scholarship
Professor Andrew Van de Ven (University of Minnesota) has joined Management and Organization Review as Deputy Editor for Engaged Indigenous Scholarship. This signals the journal’s renewed commitment to publish empirical studies of indigenous phenomena related to management and organizations in the context of all transforming economies.

Engaged Indigenous Scholarship entails a fundamental shift in how we as researchers define our relationships with the stakeholders (other researchers, students, and practitioners) in the indigenous communities being studied. It begins with the recognition that, because each of us is a product of a certain history, culture, and disciplinary training, we inevitably examine a topic or issue from a limited perspective. We can understand these topics better if we engage other relevant stakeholders in research problem formulation, theory building, research design, and communicating and applying research findings. Engagement entails humility in recognizing one’s own limitations and profound respect for other kinds of knowledge producers.

Further details on this initiative can be found in the journal’s ‘General Call for Engaged Indigenous Scholarship Papers’.
Andrew H. Van de Ven is Professor Emeritus in the Carlson School of the University of Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1972, and taught at Kent State.

Best wishes,

Arie Y. Lewin
Editor in Chief
Management and Organization Review