NARTI Online Training & DevelopmentMaking a Contribution to TheoryWith Professor Roy SuddabyTuesday 3rd February 2026 (14.00-17.00 BST) Online via Zoom (Note: your school may need to be a NARTI member for you to participate) Summary: One of the most challenging issues in publishing research in top management journals is demonstrating that your study makes a “contribution to theory”. It is the most commonly stated reason for rejection by reviewers and editors, and yet it remains a vaguely defined standard based on tacit rather than explicit knowledge. That is, it is a standard that is easier to demonstrate through “hands on” experience than it is to articulate “a priori”. Like US Supreme Court Justice Stewart’s famous statement on obscenity, a contribution to theory is hard to define in advance, but one “knows it when s/he sees it”. The intent of this workshop is to give junior and mid-career scholars and third year PhD students an opportunity to see how reviewers and editors construct their assessment of a contribution to theory. The process used to accomplish this is to give participants a rare “behind the scenes” view of how reviewers, editors and successful authors engage in the debate about what constitutes a contribution to theory. The key learning objective of this session is to make the somewhat elusive concept of a “contribution to theory” more accessible by working through an actual set of reviews. We hope that, by the end of the session, participants will have a working knowledge of what the concept involves and how it can be articulated both in the manuscript and in the interaction between authors and editors/reviewers. Date/Time: Tuesday 3rd February 2026 (14.00-17.00 BST) Location: Online (Zoom details to follow) Audience: PGRs, ECRs and all faculty Advanced Preparation: Participants will be given a paper to review three weeks in advance of the session (The paper will be a theory paper previously published in Academy of Management Review. Participants should read the paper and draft a review in advance of the session. The review should assess the major flaws in the paper with a view to determining if the paper makes a “contribution to theory”. Prior to the session, the reviews will be collated and the organizers will aggregate reviewer attention to the component categories that, cumulatively, construct a contribution to theory. Speaker bio: Roy is the Winspear Chair of Management at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business at the University of Victoria, Canada and Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Carson College of Business, Washington State University. He is a past editor of the Academy of Management Review, past Associate Editor at Academy of Management Perspectives, and currently serves as Associate Editor for the Academy of Management Collections and the Human Resources Management Journal. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and the Irish Academy of Management. If you would like to join the workshop and can fully commit to participating, please register via the link at the top of the page. Regards, Jo Jo Garrick Researcher Training and Development Manager You're currently a free subscriber to Organizational History Network. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
Wednesday, 14 January 2026
Making a Contribution to Theory
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