Mays Business Online

Management adds three new journal editors, for a record four in one department

Mays’ Department of Management is experiencing a rare occurrence of four professors serving as editors for top-rated management journals concurrently, three added just recently. They join Richard Woodman, Fouraker Professor of Management, who is editing the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.

Eden
Management professor Lorraine Eden leans into her 20-inch monitor in College Station lost in conversation with an area editor of the Journal of International Business Studies more than 2,100 miles away in Calgary. Chaired professor and Belgian native Alain Verbeke’s face looms large in the screen via the video-conferencing tool Skype as he discusses challenges the burgeoning journal will face.

It’s a global world, shrunk for a moment to the face-to-face video call between two academics embarking on a three-year mission to edit and guide the Journal of International Business Studies.

There are some hiccups, of course—for a moment, Verbeke’s image freezes and new journal editor-in-chief Eden talks to thin air as the call is dropped. But she soon gets him back online again, and the meeting commences in the imperfect global network of business and exchange that the duo and their team of nine additional editors are trying to capture and catalog in the scholarly pages of their publication.

“In the field of international business, we live out on the frontier,” Eden says. “We are out in the world, dealing with new things all the time, and the reality of how things come together or fall apart.”

She sketches a chart showing traditional intersections of business disciplines, then she adds economics, political science and sociology—and circles them all to show where the 40-year-old journal she inherited this July should be focused. “My goal is nothing less than to gather insightful and influential articles on international business that are widely read and cited by business and management scholars.”

It’s an impressive goal for the Journal of International Business Studies, which just jumped to 8th-ranked among all business journals on the Social Sciences Citation Index’s journal impact factor for 2006. And it’s yet another example of the leading edge of scholarly thought and research represented in Mays’ Department of Management: In 2007 alone, three professors became the top editors of academic journals.

That brings the total count to four scholarly, peer-reviewed publications all housed in the Department of Management—a feat in the academic world that’s comparable to winning the Super Bowl of research. It means Mays has fielded a team of talented academics who are not only thought leaders within their fields publishing in some of the best journals, but running those very same publications. They are sage professors steering the research agenda for scholarship within their disciplines and guiding the development of entire fields.

Ready for takeoff

Hitt
Distinguished Professor Michael A. Hitt embodies what you’d imagine of a professor who has written more than 200 scholarly articles and edited or authored 25 books. He leans back comfortably in the chair in his office, surrounded by tall stacks of papers and piled books that he shifts around, apologetically, to better view visitors.

This fall, Hitt and co-editor Dan Schendel of Purdue University are launching the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, a publication they founded to set the framework for a new realm of research. The intersection of strategy and entrepreneurship, he says, teases out the empty spaces between creating something new in the world and ensuring it’s a strategic success.

Employing their own bit of strategy to the startup of their new scholarly venture, Hitt and Schendel hosted a launch conference this July to establish the territorial boundaries of strategic entrepreneurship study. They invited the top scholars within the field, and heard from authors of 21 papers in 10 distinct areas of focus (think topics such as innovation, risk, and economic growth opportunities). Those papers, once revised, will form the first two issues of Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal.

“Here’s what is missing in the field of entrepreneurship: There are no class-A scholarly journals,” Hitt says. As president of the Strategic Management Society, the new journal’s parent organization, Hitt and colleagues had been batting around ideas for leading scholarship in three emerging areas. His Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, a concept envisioned more than three years ago, is the first of those to come to fruition.

“This could be a very big development for the field,” he says. “Entrepreneurship receives a lot of attention outside academia, but has enjoyed little support within. This is precisely why we need a journal of this caliber with scholars and ideas of this importance.”

What it takes

Ireland
For most academics, getting a paper accepted into a journal such as the Academy of Management Journal—ranked third among all management publications—is career-furthering, if not career-determining. Roughly 8 percent of the 1,000 papers now submitted annually to the journal are accepted.

It can take years from the time a hopeful young professor first submits a paper to a journal until it is finally published, if it is still deemed acceptable through two and three rounds of reviews by scholarly peers. Reviews are a challenging process of benchmarking, worse than an audit some would say—akin to inviting independent auditors in to evaluate your best projects not once, not twice, but perhaps three times. Out of every 100 manuscripts only five to 10 percent make it through. Scholars who make it past the hurdles of such stringent review have highly verified and fully endorsed work on their hands.

Editors who shepherd ideas through the review process are tasked with providing timely, thorough and constructive feedback. That happens even if a young professor is getting a rejection letter along with his or her review, says Bennett Chair in Business R. Duane Ireland, as of this summer the newest editor of the Academy of Management Journal. The highest-rated journal housed at Mays, AMJ is known for its extensive reviews as a service to the profession itself.

The chief role of an editor inheriting an already well-established journal, Ireland says, is to find topics and solicit manuscripts that continue to make a contribution to the field. But for Ireland, who has been the journal’s associate editor and served twice on its editorial board, the impact of the role goes beyond its full-time demands. Ireland stepped down from his post as head of the Department of Management to edit Academy of Management Journal for the next three years.

“You realize the magnitude and significance of your decision as editor—it affects careers, it affects the scholarly literature itself,” he says. “A journal like this can have such influence.”

That influence is evident across all top-tier journals, from the ability of a journal to marshal scholarship around a particular emerging idea to the editors who prize themselves on finding the diamonds in the rough—plucking new approaches from the papers submitted and championing a new way of looking at a research problem.

There’s a moment in endless drills on the field that Ireland remembers now, gazing into the bright sky of a July afternoon outside his office window. He reflects on the meaning of service, on how vital it becomes that faculty who benefit from publishing their work in top journals now give back editorial and reviewer time to the literature they value.

“There’s a term from sports teams, it’s the end of practice and you’re all tired,” he says. “It’s this concept of ‘man up,’ and at Texas A&M that means we will give back. The leadership of our university and our business school are standing up behind us to say ‘Yes, we’ll give back.’

“And in this department, we certainly are.”

For more information:
Academy of Management Journal: www.aom.pace.edu/amjnew/
Journal of Applied Behavioral Science: jab.sagepub.com
Journal of International Business Studies: www.jibs.net
Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal: smsweb.org/publications/SEJ/