Introduction: on making a life in the organizational sciences

✍ Scribed by Paul E. Spector

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 35 KB
• Volume: 29
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-3796
• DOI: 10.1002/job.535

✦ Synopsis

by Glick, Miller, and Cardinal ''Making a life in the field of organizational sciences''. Their major theme is that ours is a weak paradigm field in which there is no consensus about the methods and problems that should be addressed in our research and scholarship, compared to the natural sciences that have strong paradigms widely accepted throughout the field. The ramification of weak paradigms is that it leads to arbitrary and capricious decisions by peer reviewers, and those decisions make or break one's career through acceptance or rejection of one's work. Thus success, particularly early in one's career, is determined too much by arbitrary factors beyond anyone's control (Glick, Miller, & Cardinal, 2007).

In this point/counterpoint exchange, we have three contributions by a very distinguished group of scientists who combined have more than a century of experience with the publication enterprise as reviewers, editors, and successful authors. All three agree with much of what Glick et al. had to say, particularly that success in the sciences is challenging, that reviewers and others do not always agree about people's work, and that often luck enters into the outcomes of peer review. However, there were areas of disagreement as well.