From the Editor

Citation

Pate, L.E. (2007), "From the Editor", International Journal of Organizational Analysis, Vol. 15 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijoa.2007.34515cab.001

From the Editor

Article Type: News and notes From: International Journal of Organizational Analysis, Volume 15, Issue 3.

One of the many challenges we faced in January 2007, when I was invited to serve as the new Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Organizational Analysis, was that the journal was a full year behind schedule. At the time, none of the 2006 issues had been published! While I wanted to see us get caught up quickly, I was unwilling to get there by lowering our standards. In fact, my goal was just the opposite to raise the journal’s acceptance standards and establish IJOA as one of the premier journals in the field. My strategy for achieving these ends was a simple one to surround myself with good people and give them the freedom they needed to do what they do best. I am pleased to report that already the strategy is paying off. We are now doing both getting caught up and raising the bar thanks to the hard work of everyone on our editorial team, particularly our Associate Editors, Ken Mackenzie and Mariann Jelinek, and the many highly respected members of our Editorial Board and our outside reviewers.

We now have assembled a strong Editorial Board, on par with other top journals and containing some of the most respected people in the field from Harvard, Yale, MIT, Wharton, Berkeley, McGill, INSEAD, Lancaster, Bath, Amsterdam, Queensland, Northwestern, Duke, Michigan, and other top universities people like Nancy Adler, Professor of Organizational Behavior and Cross-Cultural Management, McGill University, Canada; Allan Cohen, Edward A. Madden Distinguished Professor of Global Leadership and Director of Corporate Entrepreneurship at Babson College, USA; Cary Cooper, CBE, Pro-Vice Chancellor and Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health, Lancaster University, UK; John Kimberly, Henry Bower Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies, Professor of Management and Health Care Systems, The Wharton School, and Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, USA; Greg Oldham, C. Clinton Spivey Professor of Business Administration and Associate Dean of Faculty, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA; Andrew Pettigrew, Dean and Professor of Management, University of Bath, UK; Barry Staw, Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Professor in Leadership and Communication, University of California, Berkeley, USA; and John VanMaanen, Erwin H. Schell Professor of Organization Studies, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; to name just a few.

Now that we are receiving a greater number of top-quality manuscripts than ever before, we have gone to a new online submission process, Scholar One, which will help us shorten the time for making acceptance/rejection decisions. All manuscripts should be submitted online at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijoa The good people at Emerald, especially our publisher, Kim Foster, are doing their part to see that the online submission process runs smoothly and efficiently, but of course the only way to know that first-hand is for our readers and subscribers to submit manuscripts for our review.

Getting good manuscripts is critical to the survival and growth of any high quality journal. As I said in my previous editorials (Pate, 2006a, b, 2007), we are looking for articles that break new ground, offer a new theory or methodological advance, provide a new synthesis of competing theories, or open up a new area of research. We, therefore, give preference to articles that establish new lines of inquiry, redirect exhausted or unproductive lines to more promising lines, and shut down those heavy on method but light on consequences. Mostly, we prefer vigor over rigor.

Currently, we have five special issues planned, starting with the one on Service Learning outlined in the Call for papers. I am open to any good ideas for additional Special Issues. We want them to be fun, innovative, creative, and scholarly, and they should ask more questions than they offer definitive answers. To that end, we plan to publish a series of innovative issues containing a single article, written by one of the Associate Editors or members of our Editorial Board, with “comments” written by members of the Editorial Board and imbedded into the article itself, such that everyone who writes a comment is an author and the order of authorship is determined by the extent of the contribution to the article. Ken Mackenzie has agreed to take the lead for the first of these, under the working title of “The process of processes.” I see this as something we will probably begin in late 2008 or early 2009.

Finally, we will soon be launching a Letters to the Editor section, so please write with your thoughts and comments on articles we have published, on research and theory we should publish, or on anything else that you believe will advance the field. Letters to the Editor cannot exceed ten-typed pages in length. The bottom line is that this is your journal. Write and tell us how we are doing.