With this blog post we aim to provide you some interesting considerations, general guidelines, readings and links we found useful when writing reviews. Please post your comments if you have any additional advice on writing reviews.

 Why reviewing?

It takes up a lot of your time and what’s in it for you? Here are a few reasons why reviewing is or can be important for your own work. First, looking at others’ manuscript in a detailed way helps you develop a critical eye towards your own work. Writing reviews trains you to read articles in a different, often more open way than when you read articles for your own research. It triggers you to keep an open mind on the subjects discussed in the manuscript, and to identify several levels of writing such as structure, argumentation, and contribution, which can come in handy when looking at your own work. Second, reviewing manuscripts gives you the opportunity to take a glance at novel insights not yet published. These might be insights that are stimulating for your own progress. Third, you are in the position to build a track record of good reviews, which can be beneficial for your reputation with others. Fourth, you are contributing to your community by enabling the peer-review process.

 Getting started

Before actually starting to review, it is important to consider whether you are able to review the manuscript that is assigned to you. It could be that the subject or methodology is not familiar enough to you to give detailed comments on. If this is the case it is better to notify the person or editor that has assigned the review to you. This person will, in the case of doing a manuscript review for a conference, often try to find you a better match.

If you review for the Academy of Management for the first time, you will be asked to take notice on the following literature on reviewing:

1. Becoming a Reviewer (Romanelli, 1996)
2. Reviewing Empirically Based Manuscripts (Schwab, 1985)
3. The Art of Reviewing (Leblebici, 1996) (source: AoM 2012)

The AoM reviewer guidelines for the conference request you to write a 1-page single spaced review covering your comments on the introduction, theory, methods, results and contribution. You can choose to divide you comments into general and detailed comments. In any case, it is useful to the authors as well as to the editor to prioritize your comments in a structured way, so it is clear which comments are more important than others.

Furthermore, a good review should have a constructive tone. Your advice should for example be interpretive, actionable, convincing, concrete, and show respect for the author’s work. By following these criteria, you are helping the editor in making an elaborate judgment on the status of the paper, and you help the author in developing his paper in a constructive way. If you are disappointed or even angry because of something the authors did or did not mention, it is often acceptable to mention this, in a professional (constructive) way. For example, it could be that the authors provide an argument that is in your opinion not well stated or even wrong in the light of recent literature on the subject. It seems that the authors are not aware of the latest work in their research field. Responding to this in a review by saying ‘This paper is absolute rubbish because the authors do not know what they are talking about‘ is not really considered constructive, convincing, concrete or respectful. Instead, a more helpful response could be to mention which particular argument in your opinion is not fully convincing, to state that recent literature gives opposing or more developed insights, and to actually provide some references to articles that the authors should take into account.  This way, you are respectfully and clearly explaining that the argument they make is according to you not valid, and you provide concrete argumentation and solution for this particular point for improvement.

The Academy of Management meeting website provides you with some more guidelines on reviewing manuscripts for the 2012 annual meeting:

http://annualmeeting.aomonline.org/2012/menu-program/menu-rev-info

Additional literature on reviewing manuscripts:

Lee, A. S. (1995). ‘Reviewing a manuscript for publication’. Journal of Operations Research 13: 87-92

Please feel free to add advice and literature on reviewing and help out your fellow PhD students!

More posts on reviewing and publishing:

Reviewing our review practices

Publishing in top journals

Call for reviewers

Full details regarding AOM 2012, including submission guidelines and procedures, can be found at the meeting’s website: http://annualmeeting.aomonline.org/2012/. The actual submission system can be found at: http://submission.aomonline.org/2012/default.asp?mode=login.

Look for more information and advice for submitting papers to AOM over the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you have any questions, just leave us a comment below!

If you have reviewed for AOM in the past, you must still sign up to be a reviewer for this year. If you are new to OCIS/AOM, this is a great opportunity to get involved. To sign up, visit http://review.aomonline.org/ and click on “Sign Up Now”. You will be able to select the divisions you wish to review for and the keywords that reflect your areas of interest and research so the program chairs can send submissions that are aligned with your domains of knowledge. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns about getting involved in the review process – we would be glad to share our previous experiences with reviewing for OCIS.

San Antonio, Texas, 12-16 August 2011, participants: 9000

This year’s  conference was my first Academy of Management annual meeting and intensive introduction to the OCIS community. I liked meeting many great people involved in OCIS and having the opportunity to learn about research from different fields. The meeting was held in San Antonio, Texas. My week started with the OCIS doctoral consortium, a two-day pre-conference workshop which offered PhD students a chance to discuss their research with faculty members and other students. The consortium was organized by Kevin Crowston. The faculty consisted of Bob Gallier, Claudia Loebbecke, Diana Burley, JoAnne Yates, Pamela Hinds, Paul Hart and Youngjin Yoo. The consortium gave me the opportunity to meet several of the doctoral students in the OCIS community and to find out about their respective research. The first morning was filled with discussion sessions in small groups on students own research. After a delicious ‘Tex-Mex’ lunch we were amused with a talk on ‘the world of academic publishing’ by Bob Galliers. In the afternoon we discussed PhD related subjects such as finishing your dissertation, what to do after your PhD and how to contribute (efficiently) to the academy. In the evening we were treated to a social dinner with the students and the faculty members in a Belgium restaurant close to the conference venue.

Some comments from students attending the doctoral consortium:

                                                                           ‘I really enjoyed the very constructive small group working atmosphere.’

                                                                            Ivo Blohm, Technische Universität München

‘The doctorial consortium was great!  I received some thoughtful feedback on my work and learned about the work of others.  I especially enjoyed meeting people from different disciplines and hearing about different theoretical perspectives.  I hope to see everyone again at future conferences.’

Sung Kim, University of Oklahoma

The next day we were given the opportunity to attend professional development workshops (PDW’s). I attended the ‘Building bridges through a socio-technical perspective’ workshop, organized by Steven Johnson and Brian Butler. We discussed socio-technical issues related to our own research, which gave us some new insights in how to approach our studies. In the end we discussed what would be the ultimate socio-technical methodology/measurement tool, not taking any investment constraints into account. This resulted in most interesting proposals and talks afterwards, such as cloning yourself as a researcher to do ethnographic studies on large scales and getting all possible Facebook data from the past 8 years.

  ‘I really liked the poster session on Saturday evening. It provided a quite unique opportunity to present our work, and actually get to talk about it extensively. I got some great feedback that evening, and appreciate the effort that went into organizing the whole thing.’

 Christine Moser, VU University Amsterdam

The end of the day was for most doctoral students the highlight of the consortium: they had to present their research in a poster session at the OCIS member networking reception. I believe this was the first year that poster sessions were organized this way, and many students and OCIS members enjoyed the session. Students rewarded people posing interesting questions with drink vouchers, which gave a funny quiz-like twist to the session.

The AoM annual event itself was full of interesting presentation sessions, discussion sessions and seminars. I made a selection beforehand by searching for sessions on topic and scholars who could be interesting for my own research and teaching. This resulted in both OCIS and other divisions related sessions on research and development, innovation, knowledge management, team work and social media. Most of the sessions I attended were full of great content, new insights, and interesting people. Besides sessions, I attended an interesting OCIS key note by dr. M. Lynne Markus, the OCIS business meeting and the social event afterwards. At the end of every conference day I was very tired (both from the great amount of info and high temperature outside), but fulfilled.

‘After almost a week of AoM I was both exhausted and energized. Exhausted because of the long days (fading into long nights , and energized because of all the ideas floating around everywhere. I know that I can use a lot of the ideas that I got during AoM in my own work, which is really the best result one could wish for!’

 Christine Moser, VU University Amsterdam

Every evening divisions and universities organized social events and parties somewhere in the San Antonio city center. Most of the parties were open to everyone, served free food and drinks, and were highly attended. I visited a couple of them on Monday night, but some of us enjoyed parties every night .

All in all, the conference was a great experience to get well introduced to the OCIS community and I am looking forward to the meeting in Boston next year. If you as a PhD student have any opportunity to submit your work for the doctoral consortium next year, I really recommend you to consider this. You will definitely gain useful feedback from experienced people and develop new insights on your own work, and you can meet many new people from your own research field.

Congratulations to all OCIS 2011 runners-up and award winners:

Best Published Paper Award

“Minding the Gaps: Understanding Technology Interdependence and Coordination in Knowledge Work.” Organization Science 21(3): 713-730.

D.E. Bailey, P.M. Leonardi and J. Chong

Best Published Paper Award-1st Runner Up

“The Process of Embedding New Information Technology Artifacts Into Innovative Design Practices.” Information & Organization 20(3-4): 133-155.

R.J. Baxter and N. Berente

Best Published Paper Award-2nd Runner

Up “Local Assimilation of an Enterprise System: Situated Learning by Means of Familiarity Pockets.” Information & Organization 20(3-4): 187-206.

E.B. Swanson, Y. Yamauchi

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Best Program Paper Award

“When Does Technology Enable Organizational Change? Convergent Feature Use and Collective Affordances”

Paul Leonardi, Northwestern University

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Best Program Paper Award – 1st Runner Up

“Knowledge Sharing in Professional Virtual Communities: Moderatorship and Social Identities”

Hongwei He and Nikita Kursov, University of Warwick Best

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Program Paper Award – 2nd Runner Up

“A Call to Arms: A Social Movements Perspective on ‘Issue’ Surfacing on Social Media”

Sung Won Kim and Shaila Miranda, U. of Oklahoma

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Best Interactive Paper Award

“Patterns of Technological Search: Institutional and Behavioral Triggers of IS Investment”

Torsten Oliver Saige, Ruhr-University Bochum and Rajiv Kohli, College of William and Mary Michael Barrett, U. of Cambridge

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Best Student Paper Award

“Tacit Knowledge Sharing between IT Workers: the Role of Culture, Personality, and Social Environment”

Renata Borges, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

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OCIS Best International Paper

“Co-mingling Contrasting Institutional Logics”

George Kandathil, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad , Sue Newell, Bentley University Erica L Wagner, Portland State University

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DeSanctis Award

“Asset Transfer: Divesting Commodities or Inviting Investment?

Kiron Ravindran , Instituto de Empresa Business School

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Best Reviewer Award

Michael Boyer O’Leary, Georgetown University

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OCIS lifetime service award

Bob Zmud, University of Oklahoma

The OCIS division will have representatives attending the NDSC to disseminate information about our division and to talk with students interested in information systems and communication.  This will be an excellent opportunity to meet some of the OCIS executive committee members and to ask questions about our division as well as the Academy as a whole.

For more information and registration for this event, please visit http://group.aomonline.org/ndsc/.  I hope to see you at the NDSC and at other OCIS events in San Antonio.

Whether studying wikis or workflow systems, e-government or
e-commerce, scientific collaboratories or health information exchanges
– researchers from many disciplines have recognized the need for
interdisciplinary approaches to the design, management, and
understanding of socio-technical systems. The socio-technical
perspective acknowledges that information and communication systems
are not reducible to either social or technological components.
Instead, the design and implementation of technologies and management
of organizations, and groups are activities which are interwoven in
complex, often unexpected ways.

In this pre-conference workshop we will work to build
interdisciplinary dialogue and advance socio-technical agendas through
discussions grounded in ongoing and developing socio-technical
research projects. By participating in this socio-technical research
workshop you will have the opportunity to:
• Get feedback on your developing and ongoing socio-technical research
projects from a diverse group of colleagues
• Learn about new theoretical perspectives, empirical studies and
methodological approaches that can be applied to your own work
• Meet potential collaborators, reviewers, and colleagues interested
in studying complex socio-technical phenomena
• Identify potential audiences for your work and get insights about
crafting papers for publication in high-impact outlets in those
communities

Join us for an opportunity to share your developing studies of
socio-technical phenomena and build connections with others who work
in this diverse, yet essential domain.

To register for the workshop visit:

https://secure.aomonline.org/pdwreg/logon.asp

The workshop registration code is: 4s4i2c6o1

If you have any questions (or any trouble with the registration
process) please contact us.

Steven Johnson, Temple University — steven@temple.edu
Steve Sawyer, Syracuse University – ssawyer@syr.edu
Brian Butler, University of Pittsburgh – bbutler@katz.pitt.edu

We look forward to seeing you at the workshop!

Thank you,

Steven L. Johnson
Assistant Professor, Management Information Systems
Director, Social Media Programs and Research
Temple University Fox School of Business

http://stevenljohnson.org

Why should communication students get involved in OCIS?

I think that involvement in OCIS helps to broaden the perspective that people studying communication have. Organizational communication is a smaller field and there is often reproduction in the theoretical development and questions that org comm scholars ask. So broadening their view (what are the intellectual traditions used and other interesting theoretical and empirical questions being asked) expands their ability to develop good theory and good insights for practice and to be able to speak to broader audiences. As a direct consequence of my participation in OCIS, I have developed a better ability to speak to multiple communities. I have published papers in communication journals, IS journals and management journals and I think being around those different types of intellectual conversations and understanding how different disciplines put different spins on similar questions or how they ask different questions in general has helped me to be more precise about the questions I want to ask and to have more perspective on where reviewers are coming when they are reviewing my papers. I can head reviewers off at the pass if they are suggesting something completely out of line with my perspective by recognizing the perspective they are coming from and then clearly articulating where my perspective might be different. So communication scholars have a lot to gain by talking with OCIS members just as IS and management scholars have a lot to gain by talking with individuals in the communication field. It’s a nice interdisciplinary melting pot in the OCIS community.

What advantages might students gain from attending OCIS/AOM meetings above and beyond what communications conferences currently offer?

I think that one of the advantages of attending communication conferences is that if you are asking process based research questions, communications is very much a process-oriented discipline. They study the process of communication – how do people talk to one another, how is meaning formed, how do interpretations happen, how does information move through networks. So for people interested in these process-based studies, they can learn a lot from communication scholars. Longitudinal studies and process-based studies are increasing in publications by OCIS members and therefore the field of communications really has a lot to offer.
Also because communication is a meso-level of field, looking at people’s interactions with one another, there is a lot to offer there because it offers an area that is in between.

What advice would you give PhD students who are considering a multi-disciplinary dissertation or research stream?

I don’t know that it really behooves anybody to plan to be a multidisciplinary researcher. I fell into it because I found that the questions I was interested in answering were questions that were being asked by a number of different disciplines and they all had different ways to answer them. What I found was that no one way of answering those questions was satisfactory but there was much to learn from working across those various disciplines. So I think that if people find themselves in that situation they should always look to the phenomena that they are interested in as a good guide. If you really stick to the notion of identity or are really interested in the interaction between distributed team members or the role that technology plays in social networks, then try to interrogate that phenomenon in the most robust way you can by looking at how different people have talked about it. As you start to see similarities and differences in the ways different people have talked about it, figuring out how you can usefully import concepts from one place to another or find solutions to problems in other places is probably the best strategy for dealing with that issue. If you are good at doing that, then your work can speak to multiple communities and that is something that I have found very rewarding. It becomes a virtuous cycle. Because I can speak to the communication, management and IS communities, I am invited in equal measure to give talks at schools in each of those areas. I get asked questions that are different in those places. I get posed problems from different theoretical perspectives from each of those three places and that gives me a broader toolkit with which to interrogate the issues that I am interested in. And so it becomes easier to do over time if you are able to figure out, at least initially, what is the phenomenon that sits at the nexus of these different communities and how can you go about intelligently trying to study it.

What other advice would you give PhD students as they prepare to transition to a faculty position?

As you transition into a faculty position my big advice would be that you really want to hit the ground running. Think about, as you are finishing up your dissertation and research projects as a doctoral student, what kind of papers might these studies turn into and get a start on the draft of some of those. As you move into your faculty position, you will have some very concrete items that you can work on. You could have three drafts of papers, all of which need work, but you can focus on one, get that out, then the second, get that out, and then the third. Once you can figure out how to balance the new time pressures of teaching and service and working with students with doing papers, you’ll be in good shape and it will be more helpful if you go in with something that you can start with rather than trying to create a new paper from scratch or start on a new research project right at the beginning. It just seems cognitively overwhelming and your likelihood of failure is probably higher in that regard.
Also, just be nice. I think being nice is important. Go to conferences and just talk to people and don’t have an agenda where you feel like you need to meet this person or learn this. Be nice, talk to be people, see what they are doing and you’ll learn a lot by listening. There are tons of interesting people all over the conferences. Keep in mind that when you are first starting out, conferences can be lonely places. Because you show up and it looks like everybody knows each other and you’re like “I don’t know anybody!” You start to get to know people by just being nice and talking with people. You find out that you have this in common and that in common and you see these people at another conference or you see them the next year and very quickly you start to build a community of people that you see regularly and you start to plan dinners with them and things like that and the conference experience becomes much more fun.

Paul Leonardi is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University where he holds the Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Junior Chair in Design. He has been an active member of OCIS for several years and was willing to share his experiences and provide advice to students. Due to the length of this interview, we have decided to split it into two separate posts.

Why did you decide to get involved in OCIS in the first place?

I have a Masters degree in organizational communication and was interested in technology implementation and how it changes organizations. I quickly discovered the OCIS community as I looked around the academy of management to see what might be a good fit and saw the names of lots of people on the program that I was reading and whose articles I really liked. That’s what initially drew me into looking at OCIS – as a masters student. Then, I got my doctoral degree in management science and engineering: it was kind of like a management program in the school of engineering that was specifically focused on trying to understand issues around technology development and technology implementation in organizational settings. This was when I joined OCIS – as a doctoral student. What I quickly found was that it was a nice community because it bridged those two areas. There were people who came from the field of communication studies and people who came from management and MIS departments who were all in some way interested in technology and how technology shaped people’s behaviors. So it was a nice meeting ground for these different areas of study.

How has membership in OCIS helped you in your career?

I think that it has given me access to a number of different theoretical perspectives and exposure to a number of different research methodologies. For example, in my doctoral studies, going to Communication conferences and other divisions in AOM, I would have never heard of TAM (the technology acceptance model). So this is one example of how someone from the communication and the management side was learning more about IS scholarship. I could also list off a long number of things I have learned that I would not have otherwise learned had I not attended OCIS meetings. For me, acting as a member of this community has been very helpful because it has allowed me to see connections amongst things that were dominant perspectives and questions in the field of communication and management more generally and then have been able to say “well IS scholars are interested in this issue, but they have not considered it from the perspective that communication studies scholars have” – so I could provide that perspective to an IS journal. And many of the things I have discussed in papers in those journals are studies I have pulled from the field of communication.
Understanding different theoretical perspectives, what issues people from different fields are grappling with and putting those together has been very useful to me. And this is not unlike scholarship that people in the OCIS division and other divisions do; like looking at innovation as an import/export business where you are bringing solutions from one context into another. I feel like I’ve lived that experience as a member of the OCIS division.

How does communication fit into AOM in general?

In the field of Organizational Communication there are two dominant perspectives or ways of thinking about the role communication plays in organizations. The first role is the one that management and IS scholars are more familiar with – the transmission model of communication. You are trying to study message delivery and how people come to agreement on particular issues. This model involves a sender, some sort of channel, and a receiver on the other end. In general, a number of scholars in the Academy at large study these issues. In OMT, they might study issue selling based on a transmission model. In TIM, they might study the formation of strategy. Media richness theory or the research on distributed teams that would happen in OCIS is often framed in the transmission model
The second way organizational communication scholars think about their phenomena of study is that communication is not something that happens inside of organizations but that communication is a vehicle through which organizing is accomplished. This is what we call the constitutive model of communication. Here, people are not interested in studying how receivers get the messages that senders intend, but instead it focuses on what role communication and communication practices play in the formation, perpetuation, and changing of organization structures. It’s in this perspective that I think communication has a lot to contribute to many of the divisions of AOM, particularly OCIS in ways that most management scholars don’t realize. For example, many of the perspectives on network dynamics come initially from the field of communication. Trying to understand what the informal economy of an organization looks like is constituted by the repetitive patterns of people’s communication and we can measure those in various ways through communication networks. It’s becoming more popular across several other academy divisions, particularly OMT, to talk about a micro-sociology and I laugh when I hear that term because micro-sociology is really the study of communication as a constitutive phenomena. People generally draw on Garfinkle or Goffman or Collins and they are really interested in interaction as a site of meaning production and this is really what this constitutive model is all about. So through people’s dyadic or group interactions, meanings are produced, interpreted and sustained and communication is the driver for the formation of those symbolic formations. As that perspective becomes more popular because it doesn’t vacillate between the horns of macrosociology and micro level sociology – it falls between – and as people look in that meso level I think that this constitutive model of communication has a lot to offer – especially in OCIS where people are interested in understanding interpretations of technology, how technologies are folded into the fabric of organizing and how they change communication structures within organizations. This will be a useful framework and helpful in sorting those details out.