As I think I mentioned before, different parts of the social sciences have very different norms about what kinds of things 'count' as viable work and what kinds of publications are the most prestigious. In management, my area, journal articles are the most prestigious in general. High quality management journals are the most prestigious, followed by psychology journals, and then lower quality management journals. Though it may seem like there is some big differences between management and psychology journals, they truth is, the kinds of articles in them is mostly overlapping Venn diagrams. The content is mostly the same though the focus may be a bit different. You may see two very similar articles about employee turnover, for example, one in a management journal and one in a psychology journal. Though all of the methods, scales, and structure of the writing is similar, their outcome variable is likely different. Turnover in management is typically studied from either the desire to reduce it or determining what effects it has on performance. Psychologists may not care as much about reducing turnover and focus their effort on just determining why it occurred. Their outcome variable is more likely to be not based on performance and is instead about the emotional state of the group that lost a member or the member who left.
Because the work itself is so similar, their is a lot of cross publishing by authors who target the journals to which their work is the most similar. It varies based on the school, but faculty in many business schools are sometimes given a list of approved journals. They are not forbidden from publishing in other journals but they are informed that publications in journals not on the list won't be considered when that faculty member is up for review. This process of generating a list seems very perverse in some respects but it has a reason for existing. Because an institution wants to make sure their faculty are doing good work, they make a list of places where, the assumption is, only good work can be published. The school also wants to assure that their name is seen prominently in good articles. The criticisms that I have heard of this system are two-fold: the lists don't change to reflect the current prestige of the journals and there are penalties for doing interdisciplinary work. Because I feel that my work is interdisciplinary, I may run into situations where I send work to a journal where the fit is not as good as some other journal if that second journal isn't on the list.
There is a secondary disparity that is interesting though I will not discuss it deeply. Though there is some extent of crossover between psychologists and management in our publications, there is less in actual placement. A professor mentioned to me once that psychology is somewhat protective of their positions and that jobs in psychology departments typically require you to have graduated from a core psychology program as opposed to a applied field such as management. The majority of the faculty in my own department, however, are also from core disciplines, psychology and sociology. It does seem a bit strange then that those of us working toward applied degrees might be unable to get a job at the institution we are studying at because we are earning applied as opposed to core degrees. It will not matter for most of us, but it does seem a bit strange to feel that opting for organizational behavior as opposed to social psychology could have reduced future employment options.
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