OMT Web
Organization and Management Theory
Division of the Academy of Management
OMT Web
Organization and Management Theory
Division of the Academy of Management
Remembering Paul Lawrence
Probably most members of the OMT community have heard by now that Paul R. Lawrence died on Tuesday, November 1, 2011. The Harvard Business School has published a full and impressive obituary for him. However, I thought it important that the OMT community should mark his passing as one of the scholars who has been important in shaping our field. His early work with Jay Lorsch, published as Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration. Boston: Harvard University, 1967 was critical in laying the foundations for contingency theory. It was named the best management book of 1967 by the Academy of Management and it has been cited more than 2,000 times.
Call for Martin Trailblazer Award Nominations
The Joanne Martin Trailblazer Award is presented once every two years. The award recognizes scholars who have taken a leadership role in the field of OMT by opening up new lines of thinking or inquiry. A Trailblazer is a boundary-spanner and a conversation starter, someone who extends and builds the OMT community by shepherding new ideas and new scholarship, often in unconventional ways. Actions that may indicate “trailblazing” behavior include starting up or moving forward a journal or scholarly series, organizing a conference or workshop, and beginning or continuing a conversation about a set of OMT ideas.
As a member of the OMT division, we encourage you to nominate someone for the prestigious Martin Trailblazer award. Nominations are accepted from all OMT Division members and should include details of the nominee’s trailblazing activities and letters of support.
Please send nomination materials to Christine Beckman ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) by December 31, 2011.
A few more OMT artifact photos, courtesy of Mia Raynard... Send us your picture of the OMT artifact in use, and you could be the first to receive the 2012 OMT artifact, hand delivered to you by Candy Jones herself at the meeting in Boston! To be eligible to win, please send your best use of the artifact photo to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Oscar in pirate regalia.
In San Antonio, Mary Jo Hatch was named the 2011 Distinguished Educator. In Part 1 of this two-part series, we talked with Mary Jo about some of her contributions to teaching OMT, tips on writing for scholarly, managerial and student audiences. In Part 2, we ask about some of her scholarly contributions, what has her worried these days, and where her work is headed in the future.
One of your latest books is entitled “Organizations: A Very Short Introduction.” I am normally wary of books that call themselves short, assuming that they will not be, but this book is indeed true to its title. In fact, it is more like a pocket guide to organizing. Tell us about the inspiration for this book and the audience you had in mind when you were writing it. What kind of reception has it been getting?
It’s too soon to tell about reception, as the book only appeared in March 2011. So far what I have noticed is that people who pick up the book get big smiles on their faces and they seem to like to stroke the cover. Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction (VSI) series, of which the book is a part, does a fabulous job of making this series remarkably beautiful.
As to how it came about, when my longtime publisher OUP, decided to take their VSI series into organization and management, they contacted me to see if I was interested. I had long harbored a secret ambition to write for this wonderful series, so the invitation was a dream come true. The reason the book is so short is that OUP is strict about VSI length!
The book is intended for a general audience and is being marketed through mainstream bookstores that carry the entire VSI series. But I hope the book will also work its way into introductory courses on business management and other fields that deal in organizations and organizing, like engineering and medicine. Of course, writing for a general audience demanded another transition in my writing style, but it was surprising how easy and pleasurable this change was for me, probably because it meant writing in a more personal way.
There has been a surprising benefit to this last transition in my writing. Through reflecting on what organization is in the broadest terms, the pleasures of integrative, big picture thinking that were so inspirational during my student days returned. What is more, speaking to a general audience encouraged me to use examples with wider appeal than those from business that we use most often in our teaching, which was fun for me. For example, I used the organization of primitive society by our distant ancestors as well as the organization of wolf packs to illustrate points about structure, technology, gender and power. All this new thinking re-energized my love of OMT and its wide-ranging ideas.
In San Antonio, Mary Jo Hatch was named the 2011 Distinguished Educator. This is only the second time this biennial award has been given out. In this two-part series, we talked with Mary Jo about some of her contributions to teaching OMT, tips on writing for scholarly, managerial and student audiences, and some of her latest projects and insights.
First, congratulations on winning the 2011 Distinguished Educator Award. This is only the second time the award has been given out. According to the OMT Division, the award is intended to highlight the importance of good teaching in OMT and to stimulate discussion on how to improve our impact on business students. But rather than recognizing excellent teaching, per se, the award is a tribute to individuals who have positively influenced educational practices within the broader OMT field, such as through the design of new OMT-related courses, the authorship of widely used books or cases, the creation of new conceptual frameworks, and/or the development of innovative and widely-used educational techniques (e.g., management simulations). Given that remit, what was your first reaction to learning you had won the award?
Surprise and delight. And, of course, gratitude for the acknowledgement. It validates a choice made early in my academic career to write a textbook. When I began that project, most of my colleagues and advisors told me that it would be a waste of precious time, a foolhardy distraction from more important work, namely publishing journal articles. Finding out that the book has been notable for OMT colleagues, many of them teachers of organization theory, therefore means a great deal to me.
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The introduction of the OMT Artifact dates to circa 1993. It was "a time when the concept of organizational identity was just taking off as a useful frame" and there was a "conscious effort to create an identity for the division." The very first OMT Artifact was an OMT pin that became known as the "Dutton Button."**
Inspired by this year's bandana artifact, we are hoping to assemble a timeline and photo archive of past OMT artifacts. To make this happen we need your tidbits and photos. So, dig through your desk drawers, comb through your closets, and rifle through your book shelves.
To get things started, we thank Ray Zammuto, OMT Division Chair from 1992-1992 and Jane Dutton, OMT Division Chair from 1994-1995, for sending us some photos. If you know the dates any of these artifacts were given out, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
First OMT Artifact: Dutton Button, circa 1993
OMT Coffee Mug, date unknown, by Jim Walsh
OMT cap, date unknown
OMT Frisbee, from 1995, Vancouver, by Kathy Eisenhardt
OMT yo-yo, date unknown
**Personal Communications with Jane Dutton and Ray Zammuto.
Uses of OMT Artifact During Process of Journal Submission
The latest entry in our "best use of the artifact" contest comes to us from April Wright (University of Queensland). Thank you April!!!
Send us your picture of the OMT artifact in use, and you could be the first to receive the 2012 OMT artifact, hand delivered to you by Candy Jones herself at the meeting in Boston! To be eligible to win, please send your best use of the artifact photo to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Step 1. Sweatband when writing paper
Step 2. Lucky charm when submitting paper to journal
Step 3. Stress ball while awaiting reviewer comments
Step 4. Gag when paper is rejected
(@#$%!!!)
At the Fall 2011 OMT Executive Committee Meeting in San Antonio, new officers Peer Fiss, Martine Haas and Candace Jones were welcomed, and updates were given on a variety of strategic initiatives. For complete details, visit the meeting minutes section of OMTWeb.
This year's OMT / MOC Doctoral Consortium was organized by Bill McEvily (Toronto), OMT Division Rep-at-Large, and Shelley Brickson (Illinois-Chicago), MOC Division Rep-at-Large.
More than 20 faculty volunteered their time and expertise. And more than 45 students participated.
Things started Thursday night with a cocktail hour and dinner at Ácenar HotMex / CoolBar restaurant along the San Antonio Riverwalk.
Friday's agenda kicked off with a keynote by Huggy Rao, followed by dissertation roundtables with OMT and MOC scholars. During a working lunch, we heard from Linda Argote (Carnegie Mellon) on the publishing process, Chris Marquis (Harvard Business School) on publishing from your dissertation, and Sarah Kaplan (Toronto) on how to give a good job talk. In the afternoon we heard from the AOM ethics committee and joined up with the Junior Faculty Consortium for teaching roundtables.
The presentations from Huggy, Linda, Chris and Sarah are all available for download on the 2011 OMT / MOC Doctoral Consortium Google Site.
Generous support for the entire event was provided by Emerald.
Now that the Academy meeting in San Antonio is over, I want to give an enormous thank you to everyone for an excellent program!
Joel Baum gave a thought-provoking Distinguished Speaker presentation (click here for photos from the event and a copy of his presentation), and I encourage you to consider his data and offer ideas on the blog about how we might encourage attention to a broader set of OMT authors and research.
At the business meeting, I presented data on our paper submissions and Royston presented data on our membership trends. I want to take an opportunity to share that data here and ask our membership for reactions and ideas (click here to download the complete OMT Business Meeting presentation). In summary, OMT continues to be an international division with fully half of our membership located outside North America. Submissions reflect this trend, with more than half of our submissions coming from outside North America. Asia Pacific accounts for 17% of submissions, and Europe accounts for 36%. Of some concern, our reviewers did not match this distribution of submissions. 9% of OMT reviewers came from Asia Pacific, and 27% came from Europe. If you hail from outside North America, please help rectify this pattern next year!
My stellar doctoral student, Kenji Klein, and I looked at the distribution of research topics by country. It is interesting to note that the most popular topics in Asia Pacific used the keywords Governance & Business Strategy, and Learning, Adaptation & Routines (accounting for 32% and 28% of submissions on those theories). Europe, in contrast, accounted for a higher proportion of submissions in Innovation and Creativity (43%), Institutional Theory (39%), and Behavioral Theory (38%). Finally, North America had the highest proportion of submission for Identity and Categorization (53%), Learning Adaptation and Routines (48%), and Networks and Embeddedness (46%). I encourage you to look at the slides for more detail.
But what should we do with this information? Practically, we can use this data as we plan more paper workshop events outside of the U.S. Depending on where the event is being held, we might focus on topics of most interest to the local communities. More broadly, it raises questions about important institutional or cultural factors that underlie these different theoretical interests. We might profit from a discussion of how our ‘theory of choice’ emerges from our local experiences.
OMT continues to be the division where the top scholarly work is presented. For the second year in a row, OMT took top honors with the Newman and Carolyn Dexter Awards (click here for photos of all the award winners).
I also ask our members to offer suggestions for keywords that should be included in the submission process. As Mike Lounsbury begins work on the program, your input into topic areas or theories that should be options is important to consider. Click here to see the full list of keywords by authors and reviewers.
And finally, send in your "best use of the artifact" photos! I'd love to see the artifacts used in a good number of the 49 countries where our reviewers reside.
Monday started with the 2011 Distinguished Scholar Award and breakfast (see our earlier post for complete coverage).
By the end of the day, our room at the San Antonio Convention Center was packed again as everyone gathered to recognize all our amazing award winners.
These awards are made possible through the tireless efforts of our Research Committee, headed for the last several years by Joe Labianca, and starting this year, by Joe Broschak. If you'd like to get involved, drop Joe a line.
We also thank Sage for sponsoring the OMT Business Meeting.
First up were the winners of the Above and Beyond the Call of Duty (ABCD) reviewing award.
The 2011 Louis Pondy Award for the best dissertation paper went to Christopher Yenkey. Christopher recently completed his PhD in Sociology at Cornell University and starts at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business this fall. In addition to winning the Pondy Award, Christopher was chosen as the winner of the William H. Newman Best Dissertation Award. This is the second year in a row the OMT winner has also won the overall prize.
The 2011 Best International Paper Award went to Eric Zhao and Tyler Wry. Eric is a student at Alberta. Tyler just finished his PhD at Alberta and is now at Wharton. We interviewed these two winners in an earlier blog post. Eric and Tyler's paper also won the Carolyn Dexter Best International Paper Award. This is the second year in a row the OMT winner has also won the overall prize.
The 2011 Best Paper Award went to Jim Westphal (Michigan), Sun Hyun Park (Michigan), Michael McDonald (Central Florida) & Matthew Hayward (Colorado, Boulder). This is the third time Jim Westphal has won this award (2006, 1996).
The 2011 Best Symposium went to Forrest Briscoe and Adam Cobb. Forrest was recently tenured at Pennsylvania State University. Adam Cobb recently graduated from Michigan, and starts at Wharton in the fall.
The 2011 Best Published Paper Award went to Harland Prechel (Texas A&M University) and Theresa Morris (Trinity College) for their paper in American Sociological Review. Pictured is Harland Prechel, professor of sociology at Texas A&M.
The 2011 Distinguished Educator Award went to Mary Jo Hatch. This is only the second time this biennial award has been given out. Dick Daft was the inaugural winner in 2009.
Finally, it was time to recognize some of our outgoing elected officers. Both Damon Phillips and Nelson Phillips finished their terms as Representatives-at-Large this year.
And Henrich Greve completed his term as past division chair, joining the ranks of the OMT Division's long and distinguished list of past chairs.
With the awards all handed out, the membership all up to date, it was time for the OMT Artifact, handed out by a crew from Alberta. Pictured are Eric Zhao, Evelyn Micelotta, and Mia Yan.
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The first few photos in our "best use of the artifact" contest have arrived.
Who can resist fluffy in a bandana?
Or the bandana armband(it) catching up on some light reading?
OMT treasurer-turned-toreador Bill Dougan shows off his tie dye bandana.
This bandana has gone to the dog!
Enter your photo in the "best use of the artifact" contest, and you could be the first to receive the 2012 OMT artifact, hand delivered to you by Candy Jones herself at the meeting in Boston!
To be eligible to win, please send your best use of the artifact photo to
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.