What they now want to publish. in short:
The excitement comes from the balanced interpretation of the mission “to publish empirical research that tests, extends, or builds management theory and contributes to management practice.” In broader discussions on management scholarship, there is a sense that the pursuit of theory has detracted from the contribution to practice
More recently, this contribution is achieved by adding moderators, mediators, or recently fashionable, moderated mediators, often without particular regard to an organizational problem or phenomenon that it seeks to explain. Like black cats in coal cellars, published studies are increasingly indistinguishable from previous ones, and the contexts in which these theories are tested or developed tend to fade into irrelevance. Yet, without exception, each article lays claim to a strong theoretical contribution, oftentimes oblivious to the context or the importance of the phenomenon being explained.
How does the context shape the boundary conditions or assumptions of the theories being examined? Why is this context appropriate to test your theory? These queries often appear in letters to authors asking them to critically explore how and why the context shapes the theory—the responses to these queries often amplify the “interestingness” or “novelty” of a study itself. At the heart of these queries lies a fundamental assumption that context matters.
We have also taken additional steps that might help embed this philosophy. First, in the reviewer forms for each manuscript we have added a new criterion for evaluation as “Engages an important problem for organizations” against which reviewers would score on a scale from “inadequate” to “very strong.” To refresh the reader, other criteria include (1) theoretical contribution, (2) empirical contribution, (3) interestingness, innovativeness, and novelty, and (4) clarity of exposition.
The team as a whole averages 12 articles in top journals, 3.5 articles in AMJ, and a 26-day turnaround time on their reviews!
(Take note of what they look at!)
our goal is to actively reduce the “first submission to in-press” cycle to keep it under 500 days.
Approximately 15 percent of submissions run afoul of our plagiarism checks and are desk rejected. Often the culprit is self-plagiarism from methods or discussion sections of previous manuscripts, which is entirely avoidable. Our submission process requires authors to fully disclose prior use of a dataset and related papers (see the April 2013 “From the Editors” [vol. 56: 331–333]).
http://amj.aom.org/content/57/1/1.short