aos-review-process

Research

Use when you need to understand how Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS) evaluates a manuscript — triage by the joint Editors-in-Chief, double-anonymized review by interdisciplinary referees, the meaning of each decision type, and how to read the editor's letter. Explains the process; it does not draft the revision response (aos-rebuttal).

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Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills/blob/HEAD/Accounting-Organizations-and-Society-Skills/skills/aos-review-process/SKILL.md

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Review Process (aos-review-process)

When to trigger

Calibrating expectations before or just after submitting to AOS
A decision letter arrived and its signals need decoding
You want to anticipate the reviewer mix an interdisciplinary journal will assemble
You are deciding whether a rejected paper should be reworked for AOS or rerouted

How AOS handles a submission

Triage by the joint EiCs. Three Editors-in-Chief share the desk (verified 2026-07-16: Marcia Annisette, Martin Messner, Hun-Tong Tan), with profiles spanning the journal's traditions — critical/interpretive, management accounting/qualitative, and experimental/JDM. Your paper will be read first by an editor fluent in its tradition; scope misfits are desk-rejected quickly, and the capital-markets-without-theory genre is the most frequent casualty.
Double-anonymized refereeing. Reviewers are chosen for the paper's tradition and its theory: a field study using institutional theory may draw one accounting-field-study specialist and one reader closer to organization theory; an experiment draws JDM expertise. Expect referees who know the imported theory's primary sources.
Decision types. Desk reject (scope/quality triage); reject after review; revise-and-resubmit in major or minor form; conditional accept. As across elite journals, acceptance is normally reached through one or more substantive revision rounds.
Timelines vary with reviewer availability; the portal shows status. Re-check any process fact on the official Elsevier pages — this pack records durable structure, not current queue speeds.

What each referee archetype presses on

Archetype	Standard objections
Interpretive/field specialist	Depth of engagement; traceability of interpretation; theory doing work
Social-theory reader	Fidelity to the imported tradition; primary sources misread or thinned
Experimental/JDM reader	Confounds, process evidence, participant-pool fit, effect inflation
Generalist accounting reader	Why accounting is central; what the field's conversation gains

Write and revise anticipating two archetypes at once — the classic AOS tension is satisfying the theory reader without losing the accounting reader.

Reading the decision letter

The editor's own paragraphs outrank the reports: where the editor restates your contribution, that restatement is the target the revision must hit; where the editor selects among conflicting reviewer demands, follow the selection rather than averaging.
Classify every reviewer point: (a) misunderstanding you caused — fix the writing; (b) substantive gap — new analysis or fieldwork returns; (c) paradigm disagreement — argue it respectfully once, with sources.
A "reject with encouragement to submit new work" is not an invitation to resubmit the same paper lightly edited; AOS editors remember manuscripts.

If the decision is negative

Diagnose which bar failed: scope (wrong journal), theory (lens decorative), or evidence (thin engagement/underpowered design). Reroute scope failures to a sibling venue (MAR, AAAJ, CPA, BRIA, CAR) rather than re-arguing AOS's mission.
Salvageable theory/evidence failures may return to AOS as genuinely new papers after substantial rework — flag the history honestly in the cover letter.

Before you submit: the two-referee dry run

Give the draft to two colleagues playing different archetypes from the table above (one theory reader, one accounting/method reader) and collect their objections cold. Papers that survive this dry run rarely meet a review surprise; papers that skip it usually meet both archetypes for the first time in round one.

Checklist

Submission matched to the tradition an EiC can champion
Manuscript survives both of its likely referee archetypes on a cold read
Decision letter mapped: editor's frame identified; points classified (a)/(b)/(c)
Conflicting reviewer demands resolved by the editor's steer, not by averaging
Negative decision diagnosed (scope/theory/evidence) before any next move

Anti-patterns

Averaging incompatible reviewers instead of following the editor's synthesis.
Relitigating scope with an editor whose desk rejection was about the journal's mission.
Resubmitting a rejected paper barely changed under a new title.
Reading referee tradition-blindness as malice — write the bridge paragraphs instead.

Output format

【Stage】pre-submission calibration / decision received ...
【Likely referees】archetypes and their objections ...
【Editor's frame】the contribution as the editor restates it ...
【Point classification】(a) writing / (b) substance / (c) paradigm ...
【Diagnosis if negative】scope / theory / evidence → reroute or rework ...
【Next step】aos-rebuttal (on R&R) or aos-topic-selection (on reroute)