aos-topic-selection

name	aos-topic-selection
description	Use when choosing or sharpening a research question for an Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS) manuscript — testing whether the question genuinely concerns the social, organizational, behavioral or institutional life of accounting, and picking the intellectual tradition the question demands. Screens fit; it does not build the theory (aos-theory-development).

Topic Selection & AOS Fit (aos-topic-selection)

When to trigger

• You have a phenomenon, a field site, or a dataset but no question AOS would recognize as its own
• You cannot decide between AOS and a sibling outlet (JAR, JAE, TAR, CAR, MAR, AAAJ, CPA)
• A coauthor asks "isn't this really a capital-markets paper?"
• You are choosing between studying an accounting practice in the field, in the lab, or in the archive

What AOS was built to publish

Anthony Hopwood launched AOS in 1976 precisely because the leading journals of the day treated accounting as a technical input to markets. AOS instead asks how accounting shapes and is shaped by human behavior, organizational processes, and social and political institutions. Its home turf: how budgets exercise power inside organizations (Covaleski & Dirsmith 1986); how costing regimes construct "governable persons" (Miller & O'Leary 1987); how accounting gains roles no textbook assigned it (Burchell et al. 1980); how preparers, auditors and investors actually judge and decide (Libby, Bloomfield & Nelson 2002); how audit and risk practices order social life (Power 2009). The core fit test: would the paper still matter if security prices never appeared in it? If yes, AOS is plausible. If the payoff is an asset-pricing or earnings-quality coefficient, you are writing for JAR/JAE/TAR.

The desk-reject genre — know it before you submit

The most common AOS misfire is a competent archival-financial-economics paper — Compustat/CRSP panel, fixed effects, identification appendix — with no organizational or social theorizing. Method is not the problem; AOS publishes archival work when the question is institutional or organizational and the theory is real. The problem is importing JAR's contribution logic into a journal whose founding editorial rejected it. If your draft's motivation section could open a JAE paper unchanged, stop and rethink before spending months on polish.

Pick the tradition the question demands

If the question concerns…	Lean toward…
How accounting is practiced, resisted, or given meaning inside organizations	Qualitative field study (interviews, observation, documents)
How individuals judge, decide, or are influenced by accounting information	Experiment (behavioral / JDM)
Attitudes, roles, or practices across many organizations	Survey (validated instrument)
How an accounting practice or institution came to exist and with what effects	Historical / genealogical archival work
An institutional or regulatory shift with organizational consequences	Archival design plus social/organizational theory

Sharpen the question

• Write it in one sentence naming the accounting practice, the actors, and the organizational or societal stake.
• Prefer a genuine puzzle (accounting doing something unexpected, or failing to do what it promises) over an unstudied empirical cell.
• Test early feasibility: field access and site anonymity for qualitative work; participant pool and IRB for experiments; archive availability for historical work.
• Check that the question rewards a theoretical answer — AOS pays for insight into accounting's social operation, not for novel data alone.

Sibling-venue triage

• MAR (Management Accounting Research): narrower — management accounting and control specifically.
• AAAJ / CPA: kindred interpretive/critical venues; AOS expects a stricter theory-evidence discipline and broader interdisciplinary reach.
• CAR / TAR: take AOS-style behavioral experiments too, but frame contribution to accounting literature rather than to social theory.
• BRIA: behavioral accounting with a lower theoretical-novelty bar. If a sibling owns the audience your answer serves, reroute now — before the framing hardens.

Checklist

• The question is about accounting's social/organizational/behavioral/institutional operation, not its pricing consequences
• The paper would survive the "no security prices" test
• A tradition is chosen because the question needs it, not because the data were convenient
• A puzzle or tension is named, not just an unstudied setting
• Access / participants / archives / ethics look feasible
• No sibling venue has a stronger claim on the intended audience

Anti-patterns

• JAR-in-disguise: capital-markets question submitted to AOS because the sample is unusual.
• Setting-as-contribution: "no one has studied accounting in [exotic context]" with nothing at stake theoretically.
• Method-first: running an experiment on a question that is really about situated organizational practice (or vice versa).
• Theory shopping after data collection — pick the intellectual tradition before the design locks in.

Output format

【Question】one sentence: accounting practice / actors / organizational-societal stake ...
【AOS fit】survives the no-prices test? social/organizational theorizing available? ...
【Tradition】qualitative-field / experimental / survey / historical / archival+theory — why ...
【Puzzle】what accounting does here that existing accounts cannot explain ...
【Feasibility】access, participants, archives, ethics ...
【Venue triage】AOS vs MAR / AAAJ / CPA / CAR — decision ...
【Next step】aos-theory-development