Topic Selection & Venue Fit (orgsci-topic-selection)

When to trigger

• You have a phenomenon, dataset, or field access but no sharpened question
• You are unsure whether the idea belongs in Organization Science vs. a sibling venue
• A colleague asks "what is the organizational theory here?"

What Organization Science wants

Organization Science publishes theory-driven research about organizations — their processes, structures, technologies, identities, capabilities, forms, and performance — and is deliberately interdisciplinary, drawing on organization theory, strategy, sociology, economics, and psychology. A strong topic lives where an organizational phenomenon meets a theoretical conversation, and it can sit at any level: individual/team (micro), the organization (meso), or fields/populations (macro). Cross-level questions — how micro behavior aggregates to organizational outcomes, or how macro structures shape micro action — are especially welcome.

The bar is overall contribution, not novelty for its own sake: "theoretical novelty is neither necessary nor sufficient." A good question promises a contribution from at least one credible source — new theory, new data, methodological insight, a new setting that tests generalizability, a clearer mechanism, or relevance to a social problem or grand challenge.

Fit test (run before you invest)

• Is it about organizations and organizing? Not just an economics or psychology question that happens to use organizational data.
• Is there a theoretical engine? You can name the conversation it joins and the mechanism it implicates.
• What is the contribution source? New theory / data / method / setting / mechanism / social relevance — at least one, stated plainly.
• Does the level of analysis match the claim? Micro, meso, macro, or an explicit cross-level bridge.
• Could it draw a fresh inductive insight? The journal's openness to qualitative work makes a phenomenon-rich question a feature, not a liability.

Venue routing

• Organization Science: theory-driven organizations research, eclectic methods, qualitative/inductive welcome; overall contribution over novelty.
• ASQ: deep contextual/qualitative work and bold framing, but the Cornell/SAGE venue, not INFORMS.
• AMJ: AOM empirical journal demanding equal empirical + theoretical weight under a page limit.
• Management Science: INFORMS sibling, more identification-leaning, with a code-and-data disclosure mandate.

Anti-patterns

• A dataset in search of a question with no organization-theory engine.
• Forcing a causal-identification framing the data cannot support — the journal values mechanism and design logic over identification.
• Pitching pure novelty ("no one has studied X") instead of a contribution.

Fit pass for Organization Science

Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock a level map, a mechanism paragraph, and the cover-letter contribution statement; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: interdisciplinary organization reviewers who ask whether the mechanism travels across levels of analysis.

• Do the pass: Score the manuscript on venue fit, novelty, evidence readiness, and audience ownership; reject a prestige-only target when a sibling venue owns the contribution more directly.
• Return a ledger: give claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.
• Sibling guard: compare against AMJ for empirical management framing, ASQ for organization-theory depth, Management Science for formal/quantitative operations; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
• Submission-ready gate: do not give final advice until the pack's resources/official-source-map.md has been checked for upload-week rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.

Output format

【Question】one sentence, theory-driven
【Level】micro / meso / macro / cross-level
【Conversation】organization-theory literature it joins
【Contribution source】new theory / data / method / setting / mechanism / social relevance
【Venue verdict】Organization Science vs. ASQ / AMJ / Management Science — why
【Next step】orgsci-theory-development