As we embarked on a journey of re-inventing an academic journal, we inevitably had to ask the question “Don’t we have enough choices to publish academic research?” The answer, like many things is yes and no. Yes, there is a long list of academic journals from various business disciplines – some with long histories, others with shorter ones – that reflect the interests of scholars and occasionally practitioners. But, at the same time, there is an exponentially growing number of research articles in English as the academia is becoming increasingly globalized. In a way, the demand drives the offer, which leads us to the second part of the answer. No, because academic journals serve institutions and as such are subject to strong institutional forces. It is difficult not to conform to norms and paradigms. It appears, then, that there is little room for innovation as the mainstream is the dominant force. Many non-conformists end in failure. But others become admired rebels and sometimes even market leaders (Rindova, Pollock, & Hayward, 2006). Similarly, there are instances when scholars feel constrained and confined within norms that may limit the aspirational set of possible publication outlets. Therefore, they need outlets that do not necessarily follow all the norms. And we believe that within this reality, there is a place for a “new” journal that will provide a locus for those who do not find in other mainstream journals the place for their research.
What do we mean by not exactly following the norms? Creating dialogs between disciplines is extremely challenging and often norm breaking. While Devinney and Siegel (2012) claim that, by nature, management is an interdisciplinary field, it is fragmented into strong silos. It is not a secret that within management sub-disciplines, there are sometimes deep-seated norms and area-specific language that do not cross easily to other sub-disciplines. What does this mean? We are not going to tackle the question in search of plausible explanations, but we will try to offer a space for such cross-fertilization to happen. While more narrow specialization and technical rigor are becoming the standard for hiring and promotion decision in business schools (Lehmann, McAlister, & Staelin, 2011), there are scholars who eventually become bored with specialization and technicality. How many times have we heard comments of the sort “I am waiting to get my tenure and then I will start doing research about the things that really interest me”? Unfortunately, what authors discover is that when they start doing “interesting” research, it is hard to publish it. Our goal is the re-invented GEMRev to become a destination for open-minded scholars who find conversations across disciplines interesting. Thus, this is one type of norms we would like to break. Our desire is to bring together dialogs of global importance within and across the economics and management disciplines at industry, organization, or people level. Moreover, we are specifically looking for multi-level studies and systemic research.
Another norm we would like to break is the shunning away from unorthodox research. New ideas and paradigms are risky. They are risky because they challenge prevailing assumptions and throw people out of their comfort zone. But we believe science and scholarship should be pluralistic and democratic. Therefore, we welcome research that questions existing assumptions and wide-spread beliefs. Along these lines we also invite empirical studies that fail to support existing theories. Many researchers dread the insignificant results failing to support their hypotheses. We think our communities deserve to know when theories are not confirmed or data do not behave as expected based on our current state of knowledge.
And this brings us to the third norm we would like to break – replication. While a few journals have raised the issue of the importance of replications in management research (e.g. kudos for Journal of Business Research's special issue in 2013 and International Journal of Research in Marketing's Replication Corner introduced in 2013), most management journals discourage replication studies. This state of affairs is prompting a cry for help by practitioners. At a recent academic conference, a CEO of a marketing research agency started his pre-dinner address by quoting the editorial policies of Journal of Marketing and the British Medical Journal. The first one, as a typical management journal, deems it inappropriate to publish articles with substantial overlap with prior studies. The second one, as a typical medical journal, encourages replications and generalizability. The speech finished with these words: “Industry needs replication and generalizability – please help.” At GEMRev, we would like to be part of the answer to this cry for help.
Here is a summary of the kind of articles we welcome at the journal to break the above norms:
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Multidisciplinary and inter-disciplinary research
We appreciate managerially oriented articles using the foundations of the three basic social science disciplines management research is mostly built on – economics, psychology, and sociology. We are not theoretical purists and we do encourage crossing over and mixing different theories. We do not just pay lip-service to interdisciplinary research. We are committed to publish such articles and we will work with authors and reviewers from different backgrounds until a desirable result is achieved. What we mean is that we will not stop the process of a promising paper because reviewers from different backgrounds disagree. On the contrary, we want to encourage a broader dialog. This means that we will invite more reviewers or eventually invite response by other scholars on the journal's pages if an article touches on disciplinary sensitivities. The key is that the research has broad relevance at the individual or organization or industry level.
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Applied and evidence-based research
We agree with Hambrick's (2007) assertion that the management field is dedicated to theory, but not so much to testing it. Subsequently, we will prioritize applied studies and evidence-based research. The journal is particularly interested in publishing empirical tests of untested management theories. As Hambrick says, authors would not be short of such material for inspiration of research designs. To further our norm-breaking attempts, we are also interested in empirical studies that let the data “speak”. We will not penalize authors for not having an “adequate” theory to explain an interesting phenomenon. Other scholars have already written about the advantages of evidence-based research (Armstrong, 2011; Locke, 2007). Our search for evidence means that we also welcome review articles summarizing empirical evidence from various disciplines and replications.
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Replication research
We would like to emphasize the fact that we want to see more replication studies, hence we repeat it again. While social scientists are starting to mellow their attitude toward replication studies, they still “think of replication as an uncreative process that unfairly displaces ‘original’ and important studies” (Easley, Madden, & Gray, 2013, p. 1459). Our opinion is that replications are necessary for the advancement of the field of management. We are particularly interested in replications with extensions, different contexts, and time frames.
In addition, while GEMRev is a broad journal, it is our desire to see more research in the following substantive themes and approaches (we emphasize that this is not an exclusive list):
Themes
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Co-opetition, co-creation, co-production
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Entrepreneurial and transformational management
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Ethics, CSR, sustainability, organizational governance
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Non-profit management
Approaches
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Behavioral research
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Controversial issues in management
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Dialogs with practice
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Systemic research
As a final note, we emphasize that we encourage innovative and norm breaking research, but we also expect scientific rigor, intellectual honesty and integrity from authors. GEMRev is dedicated to quality and is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
