CROSSROADS—Organization Research as an Applied Science: Lessons from Fields That Shape Practice and Policy

Numerous calls over decades have urged scholars to pursue research that is more relevant to problems faced by organizations and their members. Yet the relevance and impact of our field remains limited compared with other applied sciences. Whereas individual aspects of our research practice, such as expectations about methods, theoretical novelty, and motivating a study, are frequently discussed in our field, less attention is paid to the publication system. Our perspective is that to bring about a field-wide change would require us to identify and address the systemic sources of the issue. Accordingly, we compare publication systems across applied sciences, contrasting organization research with those of impactful applied sciences, such as health sciences, engineering, economics, and design science. We focus on four fundamental elements of publication systems: balance between evidence and theory, diversity of research types accommodated, system responsiveness to real-world challenges, and relationship between exploration and replication. These elements are interdependent, and understanding them together reveals how publication systems can enable or constrain what gets published and its impact, enabling us to identify pathways to reorient publication systems in our field to become a more impactful applied science.