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The Academy of Management Journal (AMJ) provides a broad platform for empirical management research that encompasses diverse topics, methodologies, and data types. Despite the wide array of studies published, successful research projects share key elements, such as an intriguing research question, a structured theoretical foundation, and a suitable research setting. This From the Editors piece introduces the AMJ Management Research Canvas, a guide for scholars to systematically address these core elements. By helping researchers align their studies with essential design and theoretical criteria, the canvas aims to improve the quality and coherence of submissions, benefiting both novice and experienced scholars in management and organizational research.

This editorial discusses the key factors behind successful research collaborations. The editors of the 'Academy of Management Journal' conducted a survey among a randomly selected group of their authors to understand their collaboration experiences. According to the survey results, essential elements for successful collaboration, irrespective of location, include selecting the right partners, establishing clear expectations, meticulously managing the process, maintaining frequent and transparent communication, and ensuring equal access to data and participation in the analysis. Additionally, the respondents noted that being receptive to diverse ideas and suggestions enhances the quality of collaboration.

Unexpected observations from a study of ultra-centenary Japanese firms suggest that organizational longevity might affect how managers relate to past, present, and future, and how they approach change and innovation. To account for these observations, we borrow the notion of historical consciousness, originally developed at the intersection of philosophy and historiography, to indicate the continued salience of history in the present. Our findings suggest how historical consciousness might induce an approach to change—which we refer to as bounded imagination—that is simultaneously conservative and creative. These revelatory insights contribute to our understanding of how history and tradition can be mobilized as resources for action. They invite us, more generally, to expand our conceptualization of history in organizations—not only as a set of objective conditions and events (as in theories of imprinting and path dependence) or a discursive representation of the past (as in rhetorical history) but as subjective experience and interpretive frame shaping action in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we track long-term patterns of continuity and change in the organizational identities of four nonprofits. Our findings reveal two trajectories, explained by the different means–ends structure of identity claims at each organization's founding and the different pattern of identity work that they subsequently carry out. Our observations suggest that not all the attributes members use to make and give sense of "who we are" as an organization are equally consequential for members' decisions. Claims used to define organizational ends are more likely to shape long-term patterns of identity change and continuity than are claims used to define the means used to pursue these ends, because they affect members' relative compulsion to conform to categorical expectations as well as the latitude of their pursuit of opportunities for growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research on how organizations engage with their histories has shown that organizational members revisit history in the light of present-day concerns to inspire or legitimize future courses of action. Studies of the processes through which organizational history is brought to bear on the present and future, however, remain rare. To uncover the processes and practices through which organizational members systematically engage with history, we investigate uses of material memory in four corporate museums. Our analysis uncovers three distinct modes of engagement, reflecting different temporal perspectives on organizational identity, involving different cross-temporal interpretative processes, and influencing action in different ways. Our theoretical insights have significant implications not only for understanding the use of history in organizations, but also for research on organizational identity and organizational memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors of an article published in the journal on the topic of social media and its influence on traditional mass media outlets concerning the establishment of organizational reputation respond to a critique of their piece.

The rise of social media is changing how evaluative judgments about organizations are produced and disseminated in the public domain. In this article we discuss how these changes question traditional assumptions that research on media reputation rests upon, and we offer an alternative framework that begins to account for how the more active role of audiences, the changing ways in which they express their evaluations, and the increasing heterogeneity and dynamism that characterize media reputation influence the formation of organizational reputations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]