May-June 2026 Issue of Organization Science

Well, I’m back perhaps far too soon, but we have a new issue to present, a few awards to note, and some updated discussion on the rescheduling of conferences outside the U.S. I hear CCC went extremely well, so congrats to all the presenters and organizers. But first I wanted to announce that, inspired by the recent brilliant legal logic coming out of Washington,1 I’ve decided to sue Organization Science for rejecting a couple of my papers last decade. I’ve concluded that these rejections must have been political since everything I write is beautiful and perfect, and that I deserve some recompense for egregious denial of publication. Fortunately, I’ve been able to negotiate a deal with my editorial board that grants me five automatic acceptances in the next decade, plus immunity from investigation of plagiarism.2 Now I will finally be able to publish my great work: “The True Theory of Organizations and Strategy: Everyone Else Is Wrong.” And I can also submit my masterpiece, “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” and immediately claim its 38,488 citations to make me the most cited Org Science editor ever.3 Oh wait. . . never mind. That won’t even get me close. Damn absorptive capacity and knowledge transfer.

Last week I wrote about the decision to move AOM out of the U.S. in future years, given the chaos and xenophobia surrounding the current immigration and visa policy here. This seemed like the natural solution to me, and so I was quite enthusiastic. But as several readers quickly pointed out, my analysis of this was far too simple.4 Although holding conferences outside the U.S. definitely helps scholars outside the country who worry about traveling there, it excludes a different set of scholars for whom temporarily leaving the U.S. is costly and risky: non-American scholars at American universities on a visa or in some cases even a green card. Such travel risks arbitrary visa revocation, the need for repeated consular interviews, and long waits or even denials for re-entry. Particularly for many with families, this is an untenable risk.

As one junior scholar at the beginning of their clock explained to me, they would likely be unable to attend AOM after 2026 until they would need to go up for tenure. So it’s not clear to me what the right solution for conferences is here. For big associations whose finances depend on conference profits, such as AOM or INFORMS, these decisions may need to be largely budget driven. For smaller conferences like the OSWC, where we lose money on each additional attendee,5 the choice is really about access and inclusion. There are no great solutions to this.

I’m sure I’ll miss some award-winning papers, so if you know of any Org Science papers that won awards, let me know. Our 2024 paper by Tim Weiss, Michael Lounsbury, and Gary Bruton received the Macro Distinguished Winner Award for Responsible Research in Management, given by the Academy of Management Fellows. I’ve talked about this paper quite a bit in pitching our Global South special issue, and it’s really one of my favorites since I became EIC. This paper was handled by former senior editor Aruna Ranganathan. How often do qualitative papers go from original submission to final acceptance in 8 months? I think we all know the answer to this. But this one did. Great authors, great paper, great editor. Tim has another paper coming out shortly, “Criminal Deception in Silicon Valley”, coauthored with Nevena Radoynovska. I love that paper too.

In the same competition, our 2024 paper by Siyu Yu and Catherine Shea received the Micro Winner Award. This paper was handled by Marissa King, and focuses on gender and status in networks. It’s a great example of careful mixed methods research across multiple studies.

Finally, a shoutout to my longtime coauthors and friends Jason Snyder and Victor Manuel Bennett, whose 2017 methods paper on the empirics of learning from failure won the 2026 Strategy Science Best Paper Award. In honor of this, I’ve included a photo of Butterburger below for Victor. The paper is highly relevant to our journal’s long tradition of organizational learning and is one of my favorite examples for why we need methods papers in top journals. If you study learning, and specifically learning from failure, this paper is an absolute must read. It is also a great example for why quantitative researchers need to read qualitative research. Here are two pure-quantitative6 researchers, writing an econometric methods paper, motivated by evidence from qualitative researchers.

Send me any awards I’ve missed so I can be sure to highlight them here.

Thank you to everyone for your patience as we work through the 339 submissions to the special issue on Organizations in the Global South. From a process standpoint, we decided to have Laura, Rodrigo, and I each go through every single submission at the deputy editor level to make sure we weren’t desk rejecting anything based on idiosyncratic tastes. The papers we desk rejected were all ones where we had unanimity in that decision, and they included submissions by many well-known scholars. A number of these desk rejects were good papers, but ones that we agreed were not going to make it into the issue. I’m sorry we couldn’t give comments on those papers. Even without those, we are just now finishing up the desk process on the last papers. I’m sure you can do the math on the time involved. Basically, we are each handling a full annual deputy editor load in 5-6 weeks. I tried to recruit Butterburger to help, but evidently the local opossums have been teaching him how to play dead when confronted with a mortal threat. And no, that crack in the sidewalk is (probably) not from his recent stress eating.

But I also want to note that, as expected, there were so many good submissions. I’m excited to see where we are after we finish the first round with reviews.

I’m off to a workshop at SKEMA tomorrow and will be traveling for a couple of weeks. I’m going to try to take a few days and disconnect from email, but until this role is finished that is practically so difficult.

-Lamar

The May/June issue is another great one, and includes our first editorial in a while, which has already been downloaded 24,000 times. We’ve successfully reduced our lead time between online publication and issue placement, so these are relatively new papers online. Check them out if you haven’t already. We’re lucky to get such submissions, and we’ve finally reached the point where the vast majority of publications (82%) were originally submitted with the current editorial team.

More Versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review by Claudine Gartenberg, Sharique Hasan, Alex Murray, Lamar Pierce

At Organization Science, AI use has driven a sharp rise in submissions and AI-written reviews since ChatGPT’s release, but mostly by producing more lower-quality, less original academic work rather than better research.

Demystifying the Black Box: Organizational Design and Contracting for Technology Partnerships by Sandip Bisui, Jeffrey J. Reuer, Harsha Tadikonda, Kun Zhang

Firms with more centralized R&D structures design technology alliances to gain deeper access to partners’ knowledge, including by securing IP rights and forming broader, more interdependent partnerships.

Social Purpose Formation and Evolution in Nonprofit Organizations by Farah Kodeih, Henri Schildt, Emma Sandström, Davide Ravasi, Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä

The study shows that nonprofit purpose develops through tension between founders’ broad visions and members’ practical work with beneficiaries, with members helping keep purpose realistic, relevant, and effective.

Bending Without Breaking: How Chinese Patent Examiners Navigate Value Tensions by Qinyu (Ryan) Wang, Yanfeng Zheng

The paper shows that Chinese patent examiners under government pressure try to preserve their core professional value of fairness by cutting back on careful diagnostic work, but this compromise can eventually undermine the fairness they sought to protect.

Roadmap or Compass? The Value of Prior Collaborative Experience in an Unfamiliar Task Environment by Julien Clement, Sarath Balachandran

Prior collaboration helps temporary teams only when the old working relationship fits the new task: tightly coupled experience improves performance in familiar settings but hurts adaptation in unfamiliar ones, while loosely coupled experience is especially useful when conditions change.

Dual Demands, Attention, and Organizational Learning: Spatial and Temporal Replication of Routines in Scaling Organizations by Dimo Ringov, Aman Asija, John Joseph, Gabriel Szulanski

The paper shows that rapidly spreading routines to new organizational units can make it harder to maintain those routines in existing units because both tasks compete for managerial attention, though experience helps organizations manage this tradeoff.

Post-M&A Retention of Top Managers: The Role of Structural Knowledge by Tingyu Du, Ulya Tsolmon

When acquiring and target firms have similar organizational structures, acquirers are more likely to retain target managers whose structural experience helps with integration, which improves post-acquisition performance, especially in more difficult deals.

These Are My (Micro)Confessions: An Episodic Theory of Employee Microconfessions by Emma Frank

The paper argues that employees use small, informal confessions about falling short at work to relieve guilt and restore a sense of being morally “good,” especially when work ideals like passion, availability, and motivation become impossible moral standards.

Trajectory Normalizing Work in Unstable Production Environments: When Adapting Production Means Appearing Authentic by Alan Zhang

When unstable conditions force organizations to change authentic production practices, they preserve authenticity through backstage work that helps producers adapt while keeping visible signals and internal standards of authenticity intact.

Knowledge Behind Firewalls: How Rivalry Among Alliance Partners Constrains Innovation Inside Firms by Navid Asgari, Deepak Nayak, Ram Ranganathan, Vivek Tandon

The paper shows that when a firm partners with rival companies, those partners’ fears of knowledge leakage can force the firm to restrict internal knowledge sharing, making its inventor network more fragmented and ultimately hurting innovation.

Advisor–Advisee Research Overlap and Its Implications for Scientists’ Early-Career Performance in the United States by Waverly W. Ding, Christopher C. Liu, Andy S. Back, Beril Yalcinkaya

Junior scientists benefit from substantial research overlap with their advisors during training because it helps them absorb tacit knowledge and win early funding and publications, but continued close collaboration after graduation can hurt their independent career success by blurring intellectual independence and creating competition with their advisors.

Lending Leniency: The Relationship Between High-Status Affiliations and Consumer Acceptance of Products in Contested Markets by Lionel Paolella, Amanda J. Sharkey, Maima Aulia Syakhroza

In morally contested markets, producers can reassure consumers by securing endorsements from high-status moral authorities, allowing them to offer lower financial returns, especially when products are complex, opaque, or less clearly aligned with strict moral standards.

Supervisory Support Shift: The Impact of Disability Inclusion on Coworker Productivity by Yanhua Bird, Qi Li, Xiaoyu Zhou

The paper shows that hiring employees with visible physical disabilities can unintentionally reduce nondisabled coworkers’ productivity when managers, out of benevolent concern and limited capacity, shift more supervisory support toward the disabled employees.

Comanaging in Multisubsidiary Firms: The Role of Complementary and Substitutive Interdependencies by Metin Sengul, Maciej Workiewicz

Firms use shared authority over subsidiaries when coordination demands are high, especially when subsidiaries are closely related or operate across the same markets, but environmental turbulence changes which kinds of interdependence make comanagement useful.

Managers Allocate Additional Tasks to Intrinsically Motivated Employees: Exploring Mechanisms, Consequences, and Solutions by Sangah Bae, Kaitlin Woolley

Managers tend to assign extra work to employees who seem intrinsically motivated because they assume these employees will enjoy the work and face less burnout risk, creating a hidden burden for people who love their jobs.

Gendered Navigation of Advice and Suboptimal Behavior in Matching Algorithms: Evidence from the Residency Match by Samuel E. Skowronek, Joyce C. He

The paper shows that even unbiased matching algorithms can produce gender disparities because men are more likely than women to seek extra advice about how the algorithm works, giving them a better understanding and improving their match outcomes.

When the Headlines Fade, the Story Goes On: Investigating How Local Newspaper Decline Affects Firm CSR Engagement by Jun Ho Lee, Zhiyan Wu, Michael Bednar

When local newspapers decline, firms’ CSR engagement depends on whether other information intermediaries remain: national media, analysts, and rating agencies can sustain scrutiny and visibility, but without them, firms are more likely to cut back on CSR.