This book is a collection of the best seventeen papers from the first Management Theory Conference held at the University of the Pacific in San Francisco, California, on September 27 and 28, 2013. The authors of these papers are some of the best management researchers in the world, including: Anette Mikes, Robert S. Kaplan, and Amy C. Edmondson (Harvard Business School); Sarah Harvey (University College London); Randall S. Peterson (London Business School); Jack A. Goncalo and Verena Krause (Cornell University); Karen A. Jehn (University of Melbourne); Yally Avrahampour (London School of Economics and Political Science); Tammy L. Madsen (Santa Clara University); and Sim B. Sitkin (Duke University).

All of the papers in this book present the latest theoretical developments that were discussed at the first Management Theory Conference. The purpose of the conference was to help address the shortage of new management and organization theories. The mission of the conference was to facilitate, recognize, and reward the creation of new theories that advance our understanding of management and organizations. The conference was held to motivate management researchers to create new theories and to provide researchers with a supportive forum where those new theories could be presented, discussed, and published.

Chapter Seventeen is the winner of the Wiley Outstanding New Management Theory Award. Authors Chris P. Long, Sim B. Sitkin, and Laura B. Cardinal present a theory to explain the drivers of managerial efforts to promote trust, fairness, and control. They theorize how superior-subordinate conflicts stimulate managers’ concerns about managerial legitimacy and subordinate dependability in performing tasks, and hypothesize how managers attempt to address these concerns using trustworthiness-promotion, fairness-promotion, and control activities.

This book also contains written summaries of the two keynote addresses that were given at the conference by Roy Suddaby (editor of Academy of Management Review) and Jeffrey Pfeffer (Stanford University), which comprise Chapters Eighteen and Nineteen. Professors Suddaby and Pfeffer present a fascinating debate of the future and new directions of management and organization theories.