---
name: aos-review-process
description: 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).
---

# 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)
```