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"I've met students whose parents pressured them to major in business or biology or to enroll in pre-law courses, but I can't remember ever meeting students whose parents insisted that they become philosophy majors. Certainly, nobody ever went into this field motivated by greed, unless he or she was laboring under a serious misapprehension. Plato may have gone into philosophy impelled by a frustrated lust for power, but few make that mistake anymore"--

This essay initiates a stock taking conversation with the Administrative Science Quarterly's broad community of scholars—its editors, editorial board members, reviewers, authors, submitters, and readers—about the criteria that organization studies scholars use in evaluating one another's work. I review ASQ's founding editors' vision for the field of organization studies, as articulated in essays by Edward Litchfield and James Thompson that appeared in the first issue of the journal in 1956. Then I outline seven concerns that have been voiced about the state of the field or ASQ in the subsequent 50 years, indicating how ASQ's content in recent years stacks up vis à vis these concerns. Then I offer my own thoughts on these concerns. I argue that we should remain open to diverse modes of inquiry, but I also acknowledge significant challenges to doing so. I close with a list of questions to which readers might respond, in the hope of generating a dialog that can make ASQ's role in the social construction of the field of organizational studies more self-conscious and fruitful.