Topic Selection & Fit (asq-topic-selection)

When to trigger

• You have an interesting phenomenon but are unsure it rises to an ASQ-level puzzle
• The idea feels descriptive ("X happens in organizations") rather than surprising
• You can describe a finding but not yet say why a smart org-theory reader would be wrong about it
• You are choosing between ASQ and AMJ/SMJ/Organization Science as a home

What ASQ rewards

ASQ publishes deep, often counterintuitive insight about organizations and the social structures around them. Since its 1956 founding (by James D. Thompson at Cornell), the journal has prized organizational ideas drawn from sociology, psychology, political science, economics, anthropology, and management — not a single home discipline. The bar is not "is this interesting?" but "does this change how we understand organizing?" A finding that merely raises firm performance (the SMJ test) or cleanly tests a hypothesis in a new sample (a common AMJ profile) is not yet an ASQ paper.

Fit test — a strong ASQ paper usually has all four:

1. A puzzle, not a topic. There is a tension, anomaly, or contradiction that existing theory cannot explain or predicts the opposite of what you find.
2. An organizational/sociological core. The phenomenon is about organizations, organizing, fields, categories, identity, status, networks, institutions, careers, or coordination — not a generic psychology or pure-economics question.
3. A surprise. The reader's prior is overturned or meaningfully complicated.
4. Generativity. The insight opens new questions; it is a theoretical lever, not a one-off finding.