AMP Call for Special Issue Papers: Managing for Our “New Normal”

Scope and Open-Ended Research Questions

For this special issue, we welcome submissions of relevant, rigorous, and readable papers that address a broad range of enduring and/or recurring extreme events, including but not limited to: wars and armed conflicts; refugee movements and forced displacement; natural disasters and climate events; public health crises and pandemics; terrorism and political violence; economic disruptions and financial crises; technological and cybersecurity crises; social unrest and protests; industrial and environmental accidents; complex crises (polycrisis). Our aim is to develop actionable, evidence-based insights into how to better organize for the new normal of extreme events, we focus on eight major themes and suggest several areas of inquiry for each. The open-ended questions suggested for each theme offer tentative starting points and are neither comprehensive nor exclusive of alternative perspectives or phenomena.

Facing Undesirable Futures: How can organizations or occupations come to see and make futures when they expect extreme events to recur with greater intensity and frequency? How should actors reconsider their values and positions when futures become riskier and/or more uncertain? Which collaborative processes best allow for course corrections?

Bracing for Impact: How can practitioners brace for the psychological injury that may accompany exposure to different types of crises? How should protagonists overcome fear to act courageously? How can decision-makers sustain hope and stave off despair when extreme events keep unfolding? What are the best ways for decision-makers to reflect, collect, and communicate key lessons to their stakeholders?

Sustaining Sense and Meaning: How should protagonists engage the moral tensions that often accompany recurrent extreme events? How can dynamics of sense breaking and sense making, sense contracting and sense expanding, or sense asking and sense giving influence learning before, during, and after extreme events? How do vulnerable parties hold on to meaning when catastrophes loom inevitable?

Evolving Supply Chains: How can the thresholds of supply chain vulnerability for different types of extreme events be determined? How can buffers be designed to anticipate critical disruptions? How should vulnerability and resilience be reconceptualized?

Climate-Proofing Systems. How can actors ready their operations, organizations and occupations for climate change? How should preparations vary with different types of events?  How can policy makers trigger or renew commitment to regeneration? How can the type of actor (e.g., celebrities, more-than-human actors) influence responses to climate-related extreme events?

Organizing in War and Peace: In wartime vs. peacetime, how can altruistic decisions be promoted over self-interest? How should stakeholder interactions change when peace turns to war? How can the interests of stakeholders be protected when wartime extreme events jeopardize entire categories, markets, or economies?

Bearing the Losses. How should rights and responsibilities change after losses have been incurred? How should rights and responsibilities be fulfilled when extreme events are considered natural disasters versus when they are understood as so-called normal accidents, preventable through high reliability organizing? Through what mechanisms should losses be deemed inevitable and acceptable, perhaps even insurable?

Organizing Far from Equilibrium: How should organizations and occupations anticipate or adapt outside the limits of current knowledge and outside their domains of expertise? How can novel, counterintuitive or alternative forms of anticipation and action become routinized?

We welcome both conceptual and empirical papers that are grounded in rigorous analysis and directly support specific and significant managerial and policy actions. We welcome accounts of embodied, lived experiences of extreme events and use of reflexive methodologies. Quantitative analyses of large databases, qualitative comparative analyses, and extensive data analysis using linguistic programs and algorithms are also needed. In short, we want papers that show what can or does work, in ways that managers and policymakers can use.

Deadline, Submission, and Review Process

The deadline for submission is 31 January 2026 at 23:59 ET (DST+1,UTC-4). All submissions must be uploaded to the AMP Manuscript Central website between 1 January and 31 January 2026. 

All papers will be reviewed according to the current policies of Academy of Management Perspectives. AMP papers should be grounded in evidence or robust conceptual frameworks, address relevant real-world managerial and policy issues, offer actionable insights, avoid theory fetish, and be written in a style accessible to non-specialists and practitioners.

We intend to host a Paper Development Workshop at the 2025 AOM Conference in Copenhagen for selected authors to further develop their manuscripts. Participation in this workshop is neither a guarantee nor a prerequisite for publication.

Endnotes