The Five Cs Framework for Scholarly Writing (2024)

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The Five Cs Framework for Scholarly Writing

Speaker: Prof. Don Lange, Arizona State University

In a 2017 AMR ‘Editor’s Comments’ piece, along with Mike Pfarrer, I articulated a framework designed to help you organize your scholarly thinking. For shorthand, we can call it the ‘Five-Cs’ approach, as it consists of these five ‘building blocks’: common ground, complication, concern, course of action, and contribution. You might find this approach easy to remember and valuable to employ for a range of purposes, including idea finding, writing for scholarly publication, designing academic presentations, reviewing for scholarly journals and conferences, and reading and remembering the literature. In this presentation, I’ll teach that framework, and focus in particular on how to write a compelling introduction to an academic paper. That will also give me a chance to talk about how our framework reflects and complements the excellent advice offered by top writers, including Jay Barney, Adam Grant, Anne Huff, Barbara Minto, and Tim Pollock.

Time: Thursday, 31 March at 7am (Pacific) / 10am (Eastern) / 3pm (London). This webinar is scheduled for 90 minutes (including Q&A).

Registration: Please register here to receive a personalized Zoom link.

Recommended follow-up readings:

Lange, D., & Pfarrer, M. D. 2017. Editor’s comments: Sense and structure—The core building blocks of an AMR article. Academy of Management Review, 42: 407–416.
Barney, J. B. 2018. Editors comments: Positioning a theory paper for publication. Academy of Management Review, 43: 345-348.
Grant, A. M., & Pollock, T. G. 2011. Publishing in AMJ–Part 3: Setting the hook. Academy of Management Journal, 54: 873-879.
Huff, A. S. 1999. Writing for scholarly publication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Minto, B. 2002. The pyramid principle (Third ed.). London: Prentice Hall Financial Times.

About the speaker

Donald Lange (PhD University of Texas at Austin) is the Lincoln Professor of Management Ethics at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. His research interests include individual- and situational-level drivers of good and bad behavior within and by organizations, antecedents and outcomes of reputation, the nature of corporate social (ir)responsibility, and stakeholder strategy. He is a past associate editor at Academy of Management Review.