Abstract
The times, they are a-changing for Strategic Organization. As we shared with you last year, we have seen considerable change in our editorial team, with Ann Langley slowly rolling off and Charlotte Cloutier and Margarethe Wiersema coming on board. We are delighted to report, thanks to our ‘one-major-revision-only’ policy, we have seen those new team members already awarding their first conditional acceptances! But those are not the only updates we wish to share with you in this brief editorial note – you will also find further announcements about the editorial team, annual awards, journal statistics, and upcoming special issues. Also, please stay tuned for the editorials in the upcoming issues – in those, we will share more information on the editorial processes at Strategic Organization and provide some insights into what kind of papers have been particularly successful, and which forms of reviewing we found especially helpful.
Editorial team
The year 2023 has seen lots of developments for Strategic Organization and our editorial team. Not only has Ann Langley moved to a consulting role; Luca Berchicci, Glen Dowell, Paula Jarzabkowski, and Amit Nigam also completed their terms as editors. Of course, all of those will be completing the assignments they are involved with, and Glen Dowell will oversee the completion of the special issue on ‘Impact Driven Strategy Research for Grand Challenges’ (see more below).
Luca Berchicci, Glen Dowell, and Paula Jarzabkowski had originally joined the editorial team in 2018 – Amit Nigam followed in 2020. Altogether, this group handled hundreds of papers over the last view years and accepted a total of 209, including 70 SO!apbox essays. They also led numerous special issues – including the very one in this issue of Strategic Organization. They did all that with such grace and modesty – their dedication to their editorial role, and to helping the submitted papers become the very best version of themselves is going to continue to be an inspiration to us all. Thank you for all your efforts.
We have been fortunate to be able to prepare for this transition, having added new editors already at the beginning of last year. In addition, we are delighted that Matthew Kraatz has joined our editorial team effective July 1, 2023 – he is already handling his first manuscripts.
The 2024 SO!WHAT awards for scholarly contribution
The SO!WHAT awards for scholarly contribution were launched in 2008 to recognize the most outstanding article and the most outstanding essay published in SO! 5 years earlier – this year, that refers to papers published in 2019.
Award winners are selected by the co-editors, taking into account citations in the Web of Science and Google Scholar, downloads from http://journals.sagepub.com/home/soq, and qualitative evidence of the publication’s importance and impact on subsequent research. SO!WHAT Award-winning papers back to 2008 are posted in a separate section of the journal website and are available free to download and enjoy.
This year’s winners are:
Best paper award winner
Alexiou K and Wiggins J (2019) Measuring individual legitimacy perceptions: Scale development and validation. Strategic Organization 17(4): 470–496.
A rare find in Strategic Organization, this paper develops a novel scale to capture legitimacy perceptions by individuals. As the authors note, while there is a lot of work around legitimacy, what legitimacy really is and how it should be captured are often somewhat opaque and inconsistent. If empirically measured at all, different measurement approaches are focusing on different types of legitimacy, different actors being evaluated, and different evaluators. In their paper, across seven meticulously exercised studies, the authors develop a scale that holds the potential to capture this complex construct in its entirety, promising a meaningful opportunity for empirical work to shed more light on a key construct in strategic organization that has sometimes remained as empirically nebulous as it is conceptually important.
Best SO!apbox essay award winner
Cunha MPe and Putnam LL (2019) Paradox theory and the paradox of success. Strategic Organization 17(1): 95–106.
Issue 1 (February 2019) featured a collection of particularly impressive essays as part of a SO!apbox form on ‘Paradox, Dialectics and Strategic Organization’. Among this impressive set, the essay by Cunha and Putnam still stood out clearly. Interestingly, this essay on paradox theory describes a paradox in the theory itself – that it may have become too successful. The authors aptly point to evidence of their idea of a ‘paradox of success’ and how it may be holding back the further development of this important literature. In turn, they also present various approaches in how to overcome the problems of converging too early, in a way a series of scholars have found inspirational to follow on their call.
Congratulations to all award winners!
Journal statistics
For the 424 new submissions to Strategic Organization between 1 September 2022 and 31 August 2023, 67% were desk-rejected (i.e. returned to their authors without review, on average within 5.2 days; to be precise, 63% of articles received a desk-rejection, 4% were sent back to the authors for clarifications and potential resubmission) and 20% were rejected after blind review; 3% of articles have been accepted already, and the remaining 10% are still undergoing revision. Our average turnaround between first submission and initial decision for non-desk rejected articles was 73 days.
It is difficult to assess recent acceptance rates because submissions have not yet all worked their way through the system. However, of papers first submitted in 2021 the overall acceptance rate is 8.8%. 60% of articles invited for resubmission were eventually accepted. For these accepted articles, the average time from initial submission to final acceptance was 458 days (about 15 months), including both time with the reviewers and time with the authors working on revisions (i.e. from first submission until final acceptance). Our strict ‘single major revision’ review policy makes this possible. We believe that this policy in which we make a decision after the first revision has been reviewed is fairer and faster for authors.
We are happy to note how our submission intake has been stable. Focusing only on research papers submitted (i.e. excluding special issues and essays), we have seen about 390 new manuscripts until the end of November 2023 – more than for the entire year of 2021 (361) and 2022 (371).
We continue to monitor closely the development of our acceptance rate, as well as that of our impact factor. Regarding the latter, we have reaffirmed the decision of prior editorial teams not to publish literature review in Strategic Organization – well aware of how that may lead to a lower impact factor score. Instead, we hope that two different focus elements we have introduced will help showcase the impact we want to continue to have on the field of strategic organization. First, thanks to the efforts of our social media editor Lorenzo Skade, we support our special issue editors to convene professional development workshop or symposia at conferences like the Academy of Management. Second, in particular our essay format is suitable for authors to push the boundaries on topics, and set the stage for meaningful discussions of emerging topics as well as issues of concern in the field. The latter also includes papers that may lay out difficulties and advances around research methods, providing hands-on guidance on how to navigate what are sometimes rough waters. Interested readers may also find a collection of those methods papers on our website!
Special issues
The current issue of the journal is also a Special Issue on ‘Research Frontiers on the Attention-Based View of the Firm’ edited by Willy Ocasio, John Joseph, Daniella Laureiro-Martinez, Amit Nigam, and Claus Rerup. This team has curated a highly interesting set of eight papers which help advance the attention-based view in numerous ways, as the team points out in their special issue introduction that follows. The special issue on ‘Impact Driven Strategy Research for Grand Challenges’ edited by Amanda Williams, Gail Whiteman, Judith Walls, Bill Harley and Glen Dowell has entered second round review with several very promising articles under consideration. Finally, our next special issue on ‘The question of intelligent technology’, led by Anastasia Sergeeva, Linda Argote, Oliver Alexy, Paul Leonardi, and Samer Faraj, is about to close (January 31, 2023). A call for a new special issue is currently in preparation and will hopefully be part of the next issue of the journal.
In addition to regular special issues, we publish SO!apbox Forums on topics that reflect the positioning of the journal at the intersection of strategic and organization theory. If you have an idea for a future Special Issue or SO!apbox Forum, please do not hesitate to contact one of the co-editors. And keep the regular articles and essays coming in too.
Special thanks to our reviewers and editorial board members
A very special thanks to all the editorial board members and reviewers who continued to support the journal in 2023. We very much appreciate your dedication!