Message from the STR Program Chair
Michael Leiblein
The 2021 Academy of Management (AOM) annual meeting will be held virtually from Friday, July 30th through Tuesday, August 3rd. While we will miss the opportunity to convene in the historical city of Philadelphia, the virtual format affords us the flexibility to design an experience that we hope will benefit our members and allow us to move our field forward. This message outlines what we know about the virtual program at this time. The STR division anticipates that the AOM central office will provide additional information about the format of the 2021 conference in the coming weeks.
The AOM aims to advance the teaching, learning, research, and practice of management. The AOM conference theme for 2021 is "Bringing the manager back in management." As stated by AOM vice president and program chair Amy Hillman in her introduction of the 2021 theme, "it is odd how little of our focus is on 'managers,' whether at the frontline, middle, or executive level, or at the organizational, geographic, or global level." This year's conference theme challenges all members of the academy to consider the ways in which our research and teaching engages with practicing managers to better serve their needs.
The STR Division supports the AOM in advancing the creation and dissemination of knowledge in the field of strategic management. The overall conference theme invites us to consider how our theories of resource allocation, firm organization, and competitive advantage help managers at all levels think about issues of central importance to strategic management. We invite members of the STR Division to submit paper and symposium proposals that contribute to the overall theme of this year's meeting or to the distinctive questions and issues addressed by the field of strategic management. Paper and symposium proposals may address the overall theme by addressing questions such as: (1) How do managers make strategic decisions in times of ambiguity or deep uncertainty? (2) (How) Do managers affect the way organizations create and capture value? (3) What are the key tasks facing the Chief Strategy Officer? (4) Are different disciplinary theories or methodologies required to address the particular class of management problems known as strategic problems? Paper and symposium proposals may also address fundamental issues in topical areas such as behavioral strategy, competitive strategy, corporate strategy, cooperative strategy, global strategy, innovation, or leadership and corporate governance. For more information about the AOM theme and the conference in general, please visit http://aom.org/annualmeeting/theme/.
The scale of the STR Division as well as the virtual nature of this year's conference has implications for the format of our conference. Our scale allows us to combine sessions into tracks within our division. While this structure helps us to foster interaction among scholars working on similar strategic problems, engaging with particular theories, or leveraging related statistical methods, we remain mindful of the need to focus attention "across the seams" and to help integrate research in our field. In addition, we hope to organize a large number of symposia and selected shared paper sessions to encourage work in emerging areas of strategic management research and to stimulate valuable conversations across disciplines and divisions. This will give our members great opportunities to learn about new developments in different research domains and to build new connections across research streams. I will be managing the process for the 2021 conference with the help of Executive Committee members Felipe Csaszar (Michigan), Sinzi Dorobantu (New York University), and Ha Hoang (ESSEC).
Submissions: I would like to thank our continuing members and scholars who have submitted their research to the STR Division in prior years. Your contributions enrich our community. Please continue submitting your best research papers and most creative symposia! We also encourage Ph.D. students or others who have not yet submitted to the AOM or to the STR Division to do so. Many of us recognize that symposia offer wonderful opportunities for us to foster research collaborations and meaningful scholarly dialogue. The most attractive symposia are those that address important problems within the strategic management field, combine different theoretical lenses or research methodologies to examine these problems, and thus promise significant advances to our research and teaching.
Submission Deadline: The submission deadline for next year's conference is Tuesday, 12 January at 5pm EST (New York time). The AOM currently reports that its submission system will open in early December of 2020. The STR Division maintains the same submission requirements as the Academy of Management. Please consult the Academy of Management website for useful information and submission requirements as we have no further information or control over the submission process.
Reviewers Needed! We strongly encourage all who are submitting to the STR Division to volunteer to review for the STR Division. The reviewer sign-up system can be accessed at https://review.aom.org/. The AOM indicates that the 2021 Review System will open in early December 2020.
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Michael Leiblein
The Ohio State University
Columbus OH
(614) 292-0071
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