Accounting, Organizations and Society Workflow (aos-workflow)

Overview

This is the router. It never does the stage work itself; its only job is to name the one aos- skill you should open right now*.

Default target: Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS) — the flagship interdisciplinary accounting journal, launched in 1976 by Anthony Hopwood and published by Elsevier (ISSN 0361-3682). AOS exists to study accounting as a social, organizational, behavioral and institutional phenomenon, not merely as an input to security prices. Its pages mix qualitative field studies, experimental/behavioral work, surveys, historical and critical scholarship, and archival designs that carry genuine organizational or social theorizing. What AOS is not is a capital-markets outlet: a JAR/JAE/TAR-style archival-financial-economics paper with no social or organizational theory is the journal's canonical desk reject. Every routing decision below therefore starts from which intellectual tradition your paper works in, because the rigor bar, exemplars, and reviewer pool differ sharply between a Bourdieusian field study and a judgment-and-decision-making experiment.

Current masthead (verified 2026-07-16): joint Editors-in-Chief Marcia Annisette (Schulich School of Business), Martin Messner (University of Innsbruck), and Hun-Tong Tan (Nanyang Technological University), supported by a large interdisciplinary editorial board. Submissions run through Editorial Manager (editorialmanager.com/AOS) under double-anonymized review. Editors and portal details change — re-check the official Elsevier/ScienceDirect pages before relying on any of this.

When to trigger

• "What should I do next?" with a half-built AOS manuscript
• You have rich field material or clean experimental results but no argument about what they say to AOS
• A reviewer challenges your theorizing (qualitative), your construct operationalization (experimental), or your paper's fit with the journal's social/organizational mission
• An AOS decision letter arrived and you must switch into response mode
• You keep oscillating between coding data, reading theory, and rewriting the front end

Routing table

Current symptom	Next skill
Unsure the question is about accounting's organizational/social life at all	aos-topic-selection
Data exist but no theoretical lens (or the lens is decorative)	aos-theory-development
Front end lists citations without joining an AOS conversation	aos-literature-positioning
Field access, case selection, experiment design, or ethics unsettled	aos-methods
Material collected; coding, analysis, or statistical treatment unclear	aos-data-analysis
Findings exist but the theoretical "so what" is thin	aos-contribution-framing
Exhibits (data-structure tables, cell means, figures) weak or absent	aos-tables-figures
Prose reads like a hypothesis-mill or buries the argument	aos-writing-style
Ready for Editorial Manager; need the preflight	aos-submission
Want to understand how AOS editors and reviewers will treat the paper	aos-review-process
Revise-and-resubmit received; must plan the revision and letter	aos-rebuttal

Default order

1. aos-topic-selection — confirm the question belongs at the accounting–organization–society intersection
2. aos-theory-development — commit to a theoretical tradition and make it do real work
3. aos-literature-positioning — enter a live AOS conversation (the journal has 50 years of its own canon)
4. aos-methods — design the field study / experiment / survey / historical inquiry, with ethics settled early
5. aos-data-analysis — code, analyze, or estimate to the standard of your tradition
6. aos-contribution-framing — state what the paper changes in how we understand accounting's social life
7. aos-tables-figures — build exhibits that carry evidence, not decoration
8. aos-writing-style — polish the argumentative, theory-carrying prose AOS expects
9. aos-submission — Editorial Manager preflight (anonymized files, declarations, title page)
10. aos-review-process — calibrate for triage by the joint EiCs and interdisciplinary referees
11. aos-rebuttal — after an R&R, revise substantively, then draft the response

Steps 7–8 are polish. Touching them while the theoretical lens or the empirical design is still moving wastes the work twice.

Decision shortcuts

• "I have 60 interviews and no story" → aos-theory-development, not more fieldwork
• "My experiment works but reviewers may ask why it matters beyond psychology" → aos-contribution-framing
• "Is my archival tax paper an AOS paper?" → aos-topic-selection (probably not, unless the theorizing is social/institutional)
• "Which Foucault/Bourdieu/ANT sources does AOS itself rely on?" → aos-literature-positioning
• "Submitting this month — what does Editorial Manager want?" → aos-submission
• "Two reviewers from different disciplines disagree" → aos-review-process then aos-rebuttal

Stage tracker (fill and re-run the router)

The tradition row governs everything downstream — a field study and an experiment share almost no stage-level standards at AOS. Set it first; then the top unfinished stage names the next skill.

AOS MANUSCRIPT — stage tracker
question   : [one sentence: which social/organizational aspect of accounting?]
tradition  : qualitative-field / experimental-behavioral / survey /
             historical-critical / archival-with-social-theory
target     : AOS (vs MAR / AAAJ / CPA / CAR / BRIA)  fit=[yes/borderline/no]

stage                             status        next skill
--------------------------------  ------------  ---------------------------
scope & tradition                 [done]        aos-topic-selection
theoretical lens                  [in-progress] aos-theory-development
conversation entry                [todo]        aos-literature-positioning
design, access & ethics           [todo]        aos-methods
coding / analysis / estimation    [todo]        aos-data-analysis
theoretical contribution          [todo]        aos-contribution-framing
exhibits                          [todo]        aos-tables-figures   (late)
prose                             [todo]        aos-writing-style    (late)
Editorial Manager preflight       [todo]        aos-submission
decision / R&R                    [—]           aos-review-process → aos-rebuttal

rule: the theoretical lens and the design must both be settled
      before any (late) row is touched.

Anti-patterns

• Do not run a capital-markets manuscript through this stack hoping polish will fix the scope problem — AOS desk-rejects the genre, not the sentences.
• Do not give a qualitative field paper and a behavioral experiment the same analysis advice; their evidence logics are incommensurable.
• Do not open aos-writing-style while the paper still has no theoretical argument to express.
• Do not draft a rebuttal before the manuscript itself has actually changed.