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Social Issues in Management Program Chair Report
Barry M. Mitnick SIM2009@pitt.edu

Reviewer Sign-up!!!

The annual cycle of constructing the SIM Program has begun. The most critical part of that is the work of our reviewers. Unlike the practice in ancient SIM times, the new millennium Academy creates its pantheon of reviewers anew each year as a result of online sign-ups. That means that you, our utterly essential reviewers, must go online and declare your interests in reviewing. The link is
 
http://review.aomonline.org/

Memorize it and teach it to your children in order to aid the work of my successors. Really – there is nothing more important to our success in building a great program.
 
When you get online, you click the "Sign Up Now" button, taking you to contact information and profile pages. Be sure to indicate the types of papers you are most comfortable reviewing (conceptual, qualitative, quantitative). The next page asks which Division(s) you want to review for (you can pick up to 3). Next you get to the keywords identification page.
 
With strong urging from my predecessors, I've revised our keyword list for 2009. The Academy template has the page set up as a two stage selection – general topic and then specific keyword, arrayed in two columns. Our old keyword organization reflected the SIM Division domain statement so that the general topics were not as meaningful as they could be ("environments" does not really help), and the specific keywords were not grouped as usefully as they might have been. The topics/keywords were arrayed in the Academy dual-column template, which converted the problems in logical organization into a more difficult-than-necessary problem in finding relevant keywords.
 
I've now recast this as a single alphabetical list of keywords, with the general area grouping term first. This allows you to quickly and easily scroll down to select keywords that can classify your preferences for reviewing. The keywords were revised after reference to topics covered in last year's SIM program and also include content from the old keyword list. I hope my successors will review and tweak the list each year to reflect changing research foci.
 
The Academy template could not be removed entirely; you will see an irrelevant instruction that "you can select all keywords for an entire topic by clicking on the orange box." This does not apply to us; we don't have "topics" to select. The Academy was unable to expunge this line from our page.
 
Once on the keyword page, you will select at least 5 keywords, and rank them in order of your preference for reviewing. The signup windows conclude with some questions about your willingness to take on additional roles, such as session chair, facilitator, or discussant.
 
Please note that when you do get your review forms to fill out with the papers to review, the basic set of questions on those forms was not chosen by SIM. In fact, I do not support the language used – it does not in general meet standard research norms for surveys. But we are obliged to use them. I have already written to Academy staff about this issue (all 24 Divisions must agree to changes, making such changes difficult), and I will try to get changes in place for next year.
 
New Academy Schedule!!

This year's Academy of Management meeting, August 7-11, 2009, in Chicago, features a new schedule. Gone is the familiar Friday afternoon through Sunday morning PDW weekend, followed by the crowded Monday through Wednesday parade of program sessions. Many of us have had the frustrating experience of a terrific, but poorly-attended panel early Wednesday afternoon. A good friend of mine was on a panel on Wednesday afternoons three years in a row.
 
Under the new schedule, the PDW weekend begins on Friday morning and runs through Saturday. Sunday is set aside for all-Academy activities, as well as some Division functions on Sunday evening. The regular program activities run essentially all day on Monday through Tuesday, with all panels now equal in length, at 90 minutes, with 15 minute transit times between the sessions. Division activities can also be scheduled from late Monday afternoon into the evening. The all-Academy reception occurs Tuesday evening, after the regular program concludes. The Academy leadership believes, based on a study of departure times, that the cases in which attendees will need to pay for an extra evening at the meeting hotel because of an inability to fly out late on Tuesday will be relatively small in number. As they say, your experience may vary.
 
The Academy hopes that more of us will be able to attend the regular program panels throughout Monday and Tuesday, and that having the PDWs begin in the morning on Friday and be scheduled on two whole days, rather than being stretched from late Friday to Sunday morning, will make them easier to schedule and contribute a better experience.
 
The first comment I would like to make about the new program is to ask members to give it a chance. The Academy leadership did not make the change arbitrarily, and, based on the discussion I heard, did in fact investigate a number of factors, such as departure times, before making the change. The things that some of us fear regarding the change may turn out to be baseless. I'll lay out some personal concerns, but I am expressing them to generate discussion, not to generate dissatisfaction with the Academy. We may also need to think of ways the Division can respond to the changed schedule in order to make best use of it. I encourage the membership to communicate with me and the other SIM officers so that we can better understand the impacts of the changes on our members.
 
One of my speculative concerns is that the new schedule could increase the costs of attendance for some members (not all) and lead to lower attendance at some PDWs. Under the past schedule, Academy attendees who wished to attend the full set of PDW and regular program events would need to stay five nights (Friday-Tuesday) at one of the meeting hotels. A member would arrive during the day on Friday, possibly attend the Doctoral Consortium or the PDW of a different Division late Friday, but would at any rate be able to attend PDWs all day on Saturday and be able to attend the SIM PDWs on Sunday morning. Departure would be late on Wednesday.
 
Because the new schedule begins with a full PDW schedule Friday morning, arrival must be on Thursday. Departure is to be on Tuesday evening, after 5pm and later if the member wants to attend the All-Academy Closing Reception. The hotel stay is thus Thursday-Monday, which is also five nights. The model assumes that members will fly out Tuesday evening. Of course, this will certainly not provide as much flexibility in travel choices as the option of leaving earlier on a Wednesday, however much we may regret early departure. Those who travel by means other than air, or who need to make late transfers/connections elsewhere, e.g., for international flights, may find it necessary to stay the extra night either in an Academy hotel or somewhere else on the return trip. Now, it is not possible to have it both ways –either we lose attendees early, or we raise costs for some people. The Academy's solution may be viewed as a reasonable one to try.
 
But there is an additional complication: The Academy inserted the all-Academy day between the two PDW days and the two regular program days. That will be the day for all-Academy events, such as a new all-Academy welcome breakfast (instead of the lunch), presidential address, awards, all-Academy theme panels, training sessions for new Division leaders, Division executive board meetings, editorial board meetings, and such. To those who are not currently in the leadership, or who have no particular interest in the theme or the all-Academy panels (and past experience suggests that this is a large set of people), it means that Sunday is a virtually empty day. In the old days, before the PDWs filled half of Sunday, we would all troupe over to the local major league ballpark on Sunday; my memories of those days are among the best of my years of association with SIM.
 
Thus, if you arrive "early" for the PDWs, you have a "wasted" day in the middle before the regular program starts. Some members with more limited budgets or time obligations elsewhere may then opt to arrive Sunday afternoon, and depart Tuesday afternoon or evening, cutting short their Academy experience. Attendance at the PDWs would fall. So would hotel bills, because the Academy stay would shrink to two nights. I wonder if such brief stays at the meeting would lead to a loss in the sense of SIM community that we have built over the years.
 
That's why one of our aims as a Division ought to be to explore how to make best use of that day in the middle, Sunday. We won't be permitted to run PDW or regular program sessions. But perhaps we can find innovative ways to serve our academic and community interests. One small example is scheduling a session in which the winner of the Best Book Award from the previous year meets his or her critics (postive and negative).  We could not take time from the regular program to schedule a book session on Monday or Tuesday, but perhaps the Academy will allow us to schedule it as part of the Division time on Sunday. What if SIM were able to run or host a small research conference on Sunday? What if service learning or practitioner outreach sessions were run on Sunday? That's where your ideas and suggestions could make a difference as we transition to the new model. We may find that the ability to use Sunday in innovative and highly valuable ways will make the new Academy schedule better for SIM than the old.
 
There is also a potential complication from the scheduling of the Society for Business Ethics meeting, which in the past has overlapped the Academy meeting through the PDW weekend. With the PDWs starting earlier, it may be harder to attend both SBE and SIM PDWs. It's also something to explore.
 
The scheduling of 2009 SIM Division activities is not yet set. In the past, the business meeting was late Monday, with a reception shared with one or two other Divisions (recently, ONE and PNP) following. The Keynote Address, shared with the Society for Business Ethics, was Saturday evening. We may well try to maintain this schedule, and add some other activities Sunday evening, but you should be sure to check next Spring before locking your travel plans in place.
 
Here is the Call for our Division as published by the Academy:
 
Research Communities: The SIM Division features a set of active research communities that investigate a wide range of topics concerned with the impacts of management behaviors on, and their interactions with, the diverse stakeholders of business organizations. Members of the Division do innovative theory-building to understand these impacts and interactions, their institutional settings, and the issues that shape managerial problem-solving in such contexts. Members also seek empirical support for these theories using the methods of modern social science. In addition, members actively seek to bridge scholarship to applied social practices, developing the understanding and methods to promote social repair. The common logic of scholarship in the SIM Division is our shared interest in understanding responsible behavior by organizations and by the people and groups working in them. The investigation of such areas leads us to ask fundamental questions about the roles, functioning, and legitimacy of business institutions.
 
Sample areas of focus of research within the Division include, among others, both behavioral and philosophical approaches to business ethics, corporate social responsibility and social performance, corporate citizenship, corporate philanthropy, stakeholder theory and stakeholder relations, corporate governance issues, public affairs management and lobbying, government regulation, and corporate corruption and compliance.
 
Special Instructions: Papers and symposia that develop new theory, develop integrating theory, report on compelling and rigorous empirical studies, and/or link basic theoretical and empirical scholarship to methods and instruments of social repair are especially welcome. Papers and/or symposia that link scholarship within SIM to the conference theme of Green Management are invited. SIM strongly encourages symposia submission to multiple divisions.

Division Awards:  The division sponsors awards for best competitive paper, best dissertation, and best book.  Announcements of submission formats and deadlines will be made both in Academy publications and on the field's major listservs.
 
Contact information:
I've set up a special email address for communications with me regarding the Academy meeting, sim2009@pitt.edu
 
Please note that I've had some serious email problems at my University, was completely offline for a few days, and did not receive some email. These issues are supposed to be resolved now. If you suspect I have not received a message, please re-send it.
 
My mailing address and other contact information is:
 
Barry M. Mitnick, Ph.D.
Professor of Business Administration and of Public and International Affairs
Katz Graduate School of Business
University of Pittsburgh
261 Mervis Hall
Pittsburgh, PA  15260
Tel.: 412 648-1555
Cell: 412 551-9956
Email: SIM2009@pitt.edu
           mitnick@pitt.edu
 
 


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