Special issues as field-configuring events

 I've been noodling around with the idea of modeling knowledge processes at the level of the field for a few years now. 

It didnt start this way; this is something I started a couple weeks before I started the PhD at McGill, as a way to start to make sense of the community I was joining- an exploration of the "A" management journals in the 21st century. As the core network data has grown to encompass all (ALL you say? how dare you.) of management research since its roots in the 1930s, it has become impossible to resist further examination. 

Kuhn's notions of normal/revolutionary science never quite fit what I saw out "in the field" or in this data, and I was always looking for alternate analytic metaphors to describe our field of management or whatever you want to call the soup of social science and/or economics flavored sub-disciplines organized under the various B-schools of the world. 

I dont want to bore everyone with the details (also maybe I want to publish something out of this?) but the directional answer lies in the idea that if ecological, evolutionary, and biogeographic processes can unfold at similar timescales (as in, ssRNA viruses, for example), interesting things happen with the math. 

Which brings me to the relational ecology of management research and the notion of research conversations as temporally bounded co-author network neighborhoods that feature highly coherent semantic structure. I'm making no fucking sense, am I? People who write with each other frequently and use words in the same way. This is important because in the social sciences, people using words in the same way is something like religion. It influences who gets to publish where, how torturous the review process is for their pubs, whether or not they get jobs in particular departments, and how they fare in the tenure process. Basically, its career defining stuff. It also makes the knowlege process fairly conservative. Its rather hard for new ideas to emerge in such a system, and even harder for any of those ideas to gain legs, and travel. 

And yet new ideas do emerge. And not just because of new phenomena (hello "AI", bane of my life). And so I've been looking to understand why. 

When the story of management research writ large is told (by me?), what would define the key story beats?

I propose: the special issue (in a leading journal).

I've been helping coordinate one for the last year. The calculus of success and failure is so different. Special issue editors explicitly have to consider the identity of the author. Still anonymous to the reviewers, but the core question discussed collectively before accepting for review is- can this person get it over the finish line in one or two revisons? This is not something considered explicitly in the regular peer review process. The result is a) papers with at least one senior/seasoned author, b) the papers get to say bolder things based on the legitimacy of the senior, without the evidenciary and contributory burdens of the regular review process. Special issues thus allow for both novel and legitimated utterances with a stronger performativity (I can measure this!). Preliminary evidence suggests that this is quite a broadly supported claim across time and sub-disciplines. Robustness checks all the way down. Fucking wild. 

Anyhow. More to follow. For now, if you're a jr scholar, find a sage for a coauthor, and submit to an A pub special issue. Say something bold. The time crunch is crushing, but I promise you its worth it.