Individual skill
aos-topic-selection
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).
Accounting-Organizations-and-Society-Skills/skills/aos-topic-selection/SKILL.md
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# 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