Call for Submissions
Critical Management Studies Division (CMS)
2026 Call for Scholarly Program Submissions
Division Program Co-Chairs: Seray Ergene, University of Rhode Island, USA and Jennifer Manning, Maynooth University, Ireland
The Critical Management Studies Division (CMS) invites proposals for the 86th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (AOM), to be held in person from 31 July to 4 August 2026, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. The CMS Division’s main scholarly program welcomes papers, symposia, and poster submissions on topics relevant to the CMS community. With no overarching theme imposed by AOM, we have the opportunity to curate a program that reflects and celebrates the full spectrum of critical scholarship.
We encourage submissions that align with the political and ethical commitments of CMS, particularly in light of pressing social, environmental, economic, and political challenges. These call for renewed attention to CMS’s commitment to emancipation and justice. We welcome submissions that seek to dismantle oppressive systems that address the social and ecological crises, including critiques of capitalism.
We look forward to developing a scholarly program that broadly addresses, but is by no means limited to:
- Critical explorations of exploitative, patriarchal, colonial, and anthropocentric relations operating in current organizations, economies, and societies.
- Relational ontologies and critical epistemologies as well as new theoretical and methodological approaches that help us better understand our current historical conditions.
- Implications of critique for imagining non-exploitative organizing, alternative to dominant capitalist form, driving societal transformation.
- Academic Activism and what it means to be a business school scholar in this historical moment.
- Exploring inclusivity from diverse perspectives and illustrating how power and inequity manifest in various organizational and societal settings.
Furthermore, the CMS community has a strong tradition of critical management pedagogies that challenge conventional approaches to management education – approaches that often prioritize cost reduction and profit maximization, reinforcing social and economic inequalities. We welcome submissions that explore critical management education as a pathway to emancipation and as a means of fostering more just and conscious societies.
Overall, we invite contributions that reflect the CMS commitment to addressing oppression, ecological crises, systemic injustices, and violence and that theorize pathways toward a more equitable and just worlds. We encourage scholars to build on established CMS areas of study, such as neoliberalism, (anti)racism, neocolonialism, and patriarchy, while also introducing new and underexplored topics. The main scholarly program includes papers, symposia, and poster presentations, and we welcome submissions in these formats.
In collaboration with select critical journals, the CMS Division offers several awards to recognize outstanding contributions to our scholarly program. A dedicated award for Best Developmental Reviewer is also available, and we encourage members to register as reviewers. The success of our program depends on the commitment of both submitters and reviewers, and we greatly value this collective effort.
Submission deadline: 13 January 2026 at 17:00 ET (GMT-5/UTC-5)
Program Schedule
- Professional Development Workshops (PDWs): Friday, 31 July – Sunday, 2 August 2026
- Scholarly sessions (papers and symposia): Sunday, 2 August – Tuesday, 4 August 2026
- Poster sessions: Friday, 31 July – Tuesday, 4 August 2026
We look forward to receiving your submissions. For more information about the CMS Division scholarly program, to discuss potential submissions, or to volunteer as a reviewer, please the Division Program Co-Chairs by email.