When a Flagship Conference Stops Caring: The Case of the AOM Annual Meeting

Abstract

This provocation argues that the Academy of Management's Annual Meeting has become increasingly misaligned with the organization's stated commitments to inclusion, sustainability, and scholarly development. While AoM remains a vital institution, its flagship conference—now routinely exceeding 10,000 participants—undermines meaningful intellectual exchange and community formation through fragmenting scale, superficial paper sessions, and status-driven sociality. Two recent disruptions—the Covid-19 pandemic and the growing Trump-driven political precarity of the United States as a host location—have exposed the costs of organizational inertia and the normalization of risk and exclusion. Drawing on existing alternatives, including developmental formats within AoM and elsewhere, as well as confederated and hybrid approaches, the essay contends that the limitations of the current meeting can and should be addressed. Reimagining the conference as smaller, more developmental, and genuinely hybrid would reflect institutional care and align AoM's most visible event with its professed values.

The Academy of Management Annual Meeting occupies a peculiar position in our field. It is indispensable—and in its current form, increasingly indefensible. As a professional society, AoM is a vital global infrastructure. Its journals anchor scholarly conversations. Its divisions and interest groups connect researchers across continents. Its workshops, doctoral consortia, and service roles sustain professional communities that would otherwise fragment. For many of us (myself included), AoM has shaped careers, collaborations, and scholarly identities.

On the other hand, AoM's annual conference—the organization's most visible and resource-intensive activity—has become a dinosaur. A core AoM aspiration is to “provide a dynamic and supportive community for all of our members, embracing the full diversity of our backgrounds and experiences.” Large, unwieldy, environmentally hostile, socially exclusionary, and intellectually thin, the annual conference now stands in open contradiction to the very values AoM claims to champion: inclusion, sustainability, leadership, and scholarly responsibility.

The problem is highly salient and pervasive. And it is past time to stop pretending otherwise. The difficulties with the AoM annual meeting are widely recognized by those who attend. At a minimum, the meeting struggles along three interrelated dimensions: fragmenting scale, thin intellectual exchange, and elitist sociality. Together, these dynamics point to a deeper problem not only with the meeting itself, but with how our field organizes scholarly exchange.

The Conference That Everyone Knows Isn’t Working

First, its sheer size undermines meaningful interaction and community formation. Attendance routinely exceeds 10,000 participants, making it by far the largest academic management conference in the world. Scale, however, has not produced dynamism, inclusiveness, or supportiveness. Instead, it has produced fragmentation. This scale disperses participants across hundreds of simultaneous sessions, venues, and events, making cross-specialism encounters rare and keeping social interaction largely within familiar circles.

Second, traditional paper presentation sessions—ostensibly the intellectual core of the conference—are increasingly non-developmental, characterized by low attendance and superficial engagement. Presenters routinely deliver work to sparse audiences, receive minimal feedback, and move quickly on to the next obligation. This format does little to support the development of early-stage ideas or of early-stage scholars, encourage intellectual risk-taking, or foster sustained engagement with scholarship in progress.

Ironically, the most vibrant and intellectually generative spaces at AoM—pre-conference workshops, professional Development Workshops (PDWs), and doctoral consortia—operate on fundamentally different principles: extended interaction, mentoring, and collective investment in improving work. That these developmental formats remain peripheral to the main conference program is not accidental. It reflects a conference design that privileges throughput over learning, visibility over cultivation, and formality over scholarly growth.

Third, elite, resource-intensive receptions have become a central feature of the meeting, reinforcing status hierarchies while sitting uneasily with commitments to inclusion and sustainability. At each conference, the more tech-savvy and well-networked attendees develop lists of the most appealing receptions and engage in the nightly ritual of hopping from event to event. These receptions are socially exclusionary (not everyone is invited or permitted to attend), intellectually vapid, and occasions to send signals about prestige—after all, only the wealthier schools can afford to splash out the cash for these events. Furthermore, many colleagues admit (especially those of us who are more established), that they attend AoM mainly to catch up with friends, and we typically do so on the sidelines of the conference. So, the networking that is happening occurs largely despite the formal conference structure, not because of it. This structure does little to include those who could benefit the most from the networking—junior scholars and those based in less prestigious universities.

When the Status Quo Became Untenable: Two Missed Opportunities for Reckoning

First, the Covid-19 pandemic transformed AoM into an annual super-spreader event for management academics. Post-conference email exchanges now routinely include reports of infections, lingering symptoms, and disrupted teaching schedules. That this has become normalized is itself astonishing. Several other major scholarly associations—many with fewer resources than AoM—continue to provide hybrid participation, explicitly frame health as a collective responsibility, and design conferences to reduce unnecessary risk. The issue is not feasibility but priority. In response to pleas to retain more hybrid offerings, AoM has indicated preference for returning to a 2019 version of “normal,” rather than incorporating new learning that can make the conference safer and more inclusive.

Second, the return of Donald Trump to the White House and the rapid, Trump-led lurch toward authoritarianism have made the United States an increasingly unsafe—and in many cases inaccessible—conference destination for a significant portion of AoM's global membership. For scholars who are immunocompromised, LGBTQ+, pregnant, undocumented, citizens of targeted countries, or any foreigners who may have expressed anti-Trump views on social media, “just don’t come” is not a neutral option. It is exclusion by design.

That the AoM conference has remained largely unchanged in the face of such disruptions raises questions not only about values, but about organizational dynamism. As Seidel's (2018) account of the OMT division demonstrates, even modest efforts to make the conference more inclusive and developmental—such as creating informal, low-cost spaces for interaction—have required “positive deviance,” operating at the margins of official conference structures rather than through them. In other words, innovation has depended on workarounds rather than AoM support. This suggests a deeper institutional constraint: while many members clearly wish to improve the conference experience, the organization's governance structures and temporary leadership roles may make sustained redesign difficult. When adaptation requires rule-bending rather than support, inertia becomes an organizational accomplishment. The result is a profound gap between AoM's language of inclusion, sustainability, and leadership, and the annual staging of a flagship event that actively undermines all three.

If AoM Actually Cared, What Would Change—Now?

Caring does not require reinvention overnight. It requires immediate, visible signals that the organization is willing to act in accordance with its values of inclusion, sustainability, leadership, and scholarly responsibility.

Expand virtual participation—seriously

Not as an afterthought, not as a diminished “stream,” but as a legitimate mode of engagement. Yes, high-quality hybrid conferences are expensive. But so are the parties. Elite business schools could easily divert a portion of their reception budgets toward underwriting robust virtual infrastructure. Let them be publicly recognized—not for champagne receptions, but for expanding access.

Make the conference smaller

Rather than persisting with the status quo, or trying to make the meeting even bigger, the AoM needs to start laying the groundwork for a smaller conference. A necessary first step is renegotiating hotel room blocks. AoM's current contracting practices implicitly reward growth for its own sake, privileging scale over substance. Committing to smaller blocks would reduce financial risk and create space to experiment with alternative formats and modes of participation.

It isn’t just size; it's design

However, tinkering around the edges will not be enough. AoM does not merely need a smaller conference. Rather, it needs a different one. Before the pandemic, AoM experimented with specialized conferences. That experiment should not be abandoned; it should be brought back and expanded. Smaller, theme-based or division-based conferences—organized around broad problems rather than narrow subfields—would be far more conducive to intellectual exchange. They could be held in multiple locations, at different times of the year, and aligned more sensitively with diverse academic calendars across countries.

Smaller and regional conferences already demonstrate that more developmental alternatives are not only possible but well established. For example, the Western Academy of Management has long emphasized developmental paper sessions designed to support early-stage work through sustained discussion and constructive feedback, while organizations such as the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada explicitly create “work-in-progress” formats that prioritize learning over performance. These models underscore that the limitations of the AoM meeting are not matters of feasibility or imagination, but of institutional choice.

But scale is only part of the issue. Format matters just as much.

Ask an AoM regular what they value most, and many will point to pre-conference workshops. Why? Because they foster mentorship, sustained dialogue, and real engagement with work in progress. We already know how to do this better—we just refuse to redesign the main event accordingly.

There is also no need to reinvent the wheel. Conferences such as the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) have long relied on subtheme-based structures in which scholars spend several days in the same intellectual community. The result is deeper feedback, stronger ties, and a sense of collective purpose that AoM's rotating session model systematically erodes.

Hybrid and virtual participation must be central to this redesign—not as a concession, but as a principle (such as at EGOS, where subthemes are encouraged to make hybrid participation available). Accessibility, inclusiveness, and sustainability should not be optional add-ons. They are defining criteria of institutional legitimacy in the twenty-first century.

What Would Institutional Care Look Like?

This is not a call to abandon the annual meeting, nor a denial of its social or symbolic value. Conferences play an important role in sustaining professional relationships, mentoring scholars, and cultivating shared identity. But if AoM cannot rethink its flagship event considering changing social, political, and environmental realities, it risks undermining its claim to leadership in the very field it represents. We routinely urge organizations to adapt and redesign practices that no longer work; we should practice what we preach.

Viable alternatives already exist within AoM and beyond. Developmental formats thrive in PDWs and consortia; hybrid and federated models have been articulated and sometimes implemented (Etzion et al., 2022). The real question is whether AoM will treat its conference as an untouchable tradition or as a site of institutional learning and experimentation.

Doctoral students and early-career scholars should feel entitled to ask why participation in the field's flagship conference entails personal risk, financial strain, and ethical compromise—burdens that fall most heavily on those with limited resources or precarious positions. As Tsui (2013) reminds us, professional associations have an obligation to care for the people who constitute them, not merely the knowledge they produce. When unfair burdens are normalized rather than addressed, the conference fails to meet this obligation. Management academics should therefore decide what, exactly, we want from our conferences: prestige theater or a scholarly community grounded in mutual care and development.

Caring, in this sense, is institutional. It is expressed through how conferences are structured, whose participation is enabled, and what kinds of scholarly work are nurtured. Reimagining the AoM meeting as smaller, more developmental, and more flexible would not diminish the Academy. Instead, it would strengthen it. The future of the field will not be decided by hotel ballrooms or receptions, but by whether its leading association is willing to align its most visible event with the values it so confidently promotes.