After two years of meeting virtually, May 2022 marked the return of an in-person Organization Theory in Health Care (OTHC) conference. OTHC has been a mainstay among health care management researchers for many years. As those of you who have attended OTHC know, it is different from many other health care conferences. It is smaller. Fewer papers are presented to allow more in-depth exploration of the material. It provides an opportunity for late-stage doctoral students and early careerists to engage more intensely with more senior scholars. This year was no different in that regard. And it is perhaps no surprise that a consistent theme across these sessions was COVID and how it has affected health care work, including the type of work health care workers do, how it is organized, and what that work means to people. And we were excited to see work that takes us more deeply inside health care organizations, to get a closer look at how this work is done, a need we have highlighted in a number of previous editorials. This is especially remarkable given the impact COVID has had not just on how health care workers do their work, but how we, as health care management researchers, do ours.
What was different this year was the sense of[horizontal ellipsis] excitement. And relief. Indeed, a consistent comment among attendees was how good it felt to see, talk, and just generally interact with colleagues, new and old, in a more personalized way. Conversations without the "Can you hear me?" or "Can you see my screen?" that have become all too familiar over the past two years. And no one to our knowledge froze in the middle of their conversation with an awkward expression on their face! There was simply a genuine appreciation to be[horizontal ellipsis]present. To finally be meeting again in old, familiar ways.
Seeing and hearing these interactions reinforced for us the importance of community. We are a community of health care management scholars. OTHC exemplifies this with the way it welcomes new health care management scholars into the fold. This sense of community was not necessarily lost during the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, some might argue that Zoom and other technologies helped us maintain that community and moving forward will help us do so in between these more personalized conference opportunities. Even so, observing these interactions at OTHC brought into sharp relief that our sense of community was stretched and strained in ways that perhaps no one can fully appreciate until we have a chance to step back into our once familiar ways of interacting.
By the time this editorial appears in print, many of us will have also participated in the in-person Academy of Management conference in Seattle, which we suspect will be just as lively with conversations with colleagues and friends. Conversations that can restore our sense of being a community of scholars that cares passionately about improving health care through the study of health care organizations and management. We look forward to seeing you all soon!
Larry R. Hearld, Ph.D.
Cheryl Rathert, Ph.D.
Co-Editors-in-Chief