Meet Emerald chief executive and editor of... Management Decision

An interview with: John Peters
Interview by: Margaret Adolphus

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John Peters is joint chief executive officer of Emerald, and editor of Management Decision. As an Emerald director, John has been associated with a number of policies that have helped ensure Emerald's market pre-eminence. He has edited Management Decision since 1985.

About the journal

Management Decision was founded in 1963, coinciding with the first major growth of business schools in the Western world. Academically rigorous yet firmly grounded in practice, with a broad appeal and international relevance, it publishes on a range of issues to do with strategy, policy and decision making. It is Emerald's second most highly downloaded journal, with 587,028 article downloads in 2008 and 348,738 to date (July) in 2009. It has been Thomson Reuters (ISI) listed since 2007.

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Management Decision

I get the impression that since we last spoke (in 2004) the journal's focus has shifted purely from decision making to looking at the practical applications of conceptual or empirical work on strategy, policy and decision making. Is this a fair assessment?

Over its long life, Management Decision (MD) has never simply focused on decision making or decision science. It's been more of a title than a restriction of scope. We've always been more interested in the application than purely in the academic discipline, and taken an eclectic view. Management is a very broad topic and by its nature multidisciplinary: problems don't exist within a single discipline.

Publishers, and the community, tend to structure journals into highly niched and specialized areas. But there's a fundamental mismatch in the idea of single discipline studies alone addressing the challenges of management. At least some journals need to take a broader view.

The management history section of MD is now a separate journal – the Journal of Management History. Why is that?

Originally, the Journal of Management History was a separate journal, but we were finding it hard to maintain a strong copy flow so I think back in 1999 we turned it into a section in MD, edited by David Lamond, with just one to three papers and the odd special issue. But David did such a good job that we decided to relaunch the journal in 2005.

With the current financial crisis, there is a renewed interest in the lessons of management history. When I was at the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) Conference in April [2009], there were two keynotes, one by Rakesh Khurana of Harvard, who wrote about the history of American business schools (Khurana, 2007), the other by Jeffrey Garton, a former dean of Yale, who has also worked for Lehman Brothers, and as a policy adviser to the US Government. Both men were talking about the role of business schools, business education, and business research in the current financial crisis, and as things settle down afterwards. And both emphasized the importance of studying the history of management. Garton even went so far as to say, when asked to name one thing we should be doing differently in business education, that management history should be introduced into the master of business administration (MBA) curricula.

How would you position yourself in the market?

The first thing is to define what we mean by market: we are talking about authors as well as consumers here. We are very much a supply-driven industry. I work with Kate Snowden, my executive editor, to humanize the review process, which authors often find difficult. We get many more papers than we send to review, and we review many more than we are able to publish. We aim to use the review process to help an author develop an idea, rather than use it to exclude.

And we try to see that they find the process engaging, rather than stressful, even if they don't ultimately get published. To that end, I need to say a formal very big thank you to our reviewers, most of whom are wonderful people who really care about what they do.

As far as the end user is concerned, because we aggregate our journals and put them together as an online package, articles are free at the point of consumption, so the student doesn't have to make a buying decision. The commercial arrangement will have been made by the librarian.

We stopped worrying about the profitability of individual journals several years ago. The question we ask ourselves is, what does the journal contribute to scholarship? Does the journal, and the papers within it, do something interesting and valuable within the online package? So, in the online era, brand differentiation needs to be from the supplier rather than the consumer point of view.

You list your key audiences as "consultants, corporate and academic libraries, general and specialist senior managers and their advisers, students and researchers". Would you say that MD was more a practitioner/professional journal, aimed at consultants, whose role it is to advise in real-life situations using the best of academic theory?

That was perhaps the original concept, but over the years the journal has definitely positioned itself in the academic market, as Emerald is a specialist scholarly publisher. Having said that, more than 20 per cent of our total revenue comes from outside the academic market, from the public or private sectors and from consultants.

I think of our readers mainly as student managers – people who are studying an MBA or specialist master's, or who are doing an executive development programme, studying while working.

MD is the second most successful Emerald journal in terms of downloads. What do you think accounts for this success?

I think it's the appeal to the student manager. MD and the European Journal of Marketing have jockeyed for first and second place in the charts ever since we started measuring downloads. Both journals are long established, and both take quite a bold approach to what we are willing to publish. Both look for the best ideas rather than the best reputations and schools. Both publish research in progress, and look for articles that are reliable and readable. I mean "readable" not in the sense of a short newspaper article or something you can just skim through, but rather as communicating outside a narrow circle of specialists. One of the issues I have with much scholarly publication in management is that it can be very obscure, like reading something on theoretical physics!

You said earlier that only a few of the articles you received made it through to review. What is it that makes you want to put an article through that particular filter?

MD has enjoyed a real boom in submissions over the last couple of years which is great, as we can spend longer working with authors to ensure the papers we publish are of the right quality. Because we get many more articles than we can eventually publish, we have a couple of initial criteria we use. First we ask, is this something for us? We take a fairly generalist approach, and if we get papers on a more specialist area, say, modelling, total quality, logistics, banking or accounting, we might direct that paper to somewhere else in the portfolio.

As to what gets a paper on a suitable topic into the review process, look at it this way. We publish over 100 papers a year, out of a total of around 1,000 submissions. So, a paper needs to stand out as interesting, challenging and different. And the place it needs to stand out is up front, in the title, the abstract and the front page. If the interest only occurs half way through the paper, it may get missed. It's the same principle as a job application, or a piece of marketing literature.

You can take it as read that papers submitted by the world's good scholars will be scholarly. But our job as publishers is to be the conduit between the people doing research and the consumer, in this case the consumer will go on to be a manager, so there must be good communication.

You became ISI listed in 2007. However, looking through the Journal Quality List, which collates journal rankings from various sources, you emerge fairly low in some – for example, that published by Cranfield University School of Management, which ranks you as a "national" rather than an "international" journal.

There's a nice bit at the end of the Wizard of Oz where they get to Oz, and the scarecrow says, what about my brain? And the wizard says, well, you've shown you've got a good mind, but what you don't have is a diploma. So, he gives him a diploma, and the scarecrow thinks, now I've made it. But having the diploma doesn't make him any smarter, and having an ISI listing, or indeed any kind of journal ranking, doesn't make a journal any better.

Maybe it's a bit short-sighted, but I'm not particularly interested in managing a journal to get onto league table lists. It's a bit like when I talk to business school deans and some of them say, we are doing these things to improve our place in the FT rankings, whereas others say, this is what we are doing and if that improves us in the FT rankings, so be it. And I think, good on you, stay true to your values and don't worry about league tables.

I don't like unidimensional quality measures. People equate quality with citation lists, but it's an increasingly smaller part of quality. A citation list describes how the work of one professor shows up in the work of other professors within a very tight list of controlled journals. That's not about dissemination, it's not about ideas leaking out into the marketplace, it's about ideas staying contained with an academic bubble and I think it's very short-sighted. So ISI is a nice stamp of approval, but it's not what we're about. Our journal has run very happily for 45 years and if you measure in terms of downloads, we have around 300,000 a year; 6,000 a week.

That having been said, we should probably try harder about where we come on journal quality lists such as that of Cranfield or the Association of Business Schools. We tend to spend our time trying to do a good job publishing rather than lobbying, and we should maybe try a bit harder lobbying.

You have had some really interesting issues recently: "Ethics in a global marketplace", "Taking sport seriously", "Common sense and other decision influences", to name just a few. How do you select topics for special issues and what do you have coming up?

Normally, we are approached by people with a potentially interesting topic, we don't usually commission. The one on the business of sport was very strong, we had a lovely one a couple of years ago about poetry and the creative arts (James and Weir, 2006); we've got a nice one coming out later this year on the positioning and future of business schools that Howard Thomas, dean of Warwick Business School is doing for us (Thomas, forthcoming).

Next year [2010] we will have one on the music business and technology, based on a conference running alongside In the City, a music festival in Manchester, England that runs annually. There are a lot of parallels between what's going on in the music industry and what's going on in publishing in terms of digital rights management.

The advantage of being a long-standing journal is that we can interact with pretty cutting-edge contemporary research issues like these.

How long does it take, roughly, between submission of an article, and its publication?

Once a submission is received, it is checked over by the editor and executive editor, then, if suitable, sent out for double blind review. It's usually less than three months from initial submission to hearing a decision. The decision could be acceptance, request for revision, or rejection/recommendation to another journal. It's very rare for a paper to be accepted after one round of reviews though; most papers are either rejected or returned to the author for revision. Obviously it then depends how long the author takes to make the revisions before it can be reviewed again. I'd say most papers take an average of seven or eight months from submission to acceptance, and then maybe another three to six months before publication. It really can vary though; I've seen papers go through almost two years of revision and review before being published.

Emerald

You said recently that Emerald had not been hit by the recession, but do you really believe that business education, and higher education generally, are recession proof?

They said the Titanic was unsinkable, didn't they! To describe any business to be "recession proof" would be dangerous hubris. I wouldn't say that.

I think that business education is increasingly being seen in both the developed and the developing world as contributing towards a successful and competitive economy. Much of the growth of the business education market comes from the fast developing economies, China, India and Russia. And I think we shall see investment in business education continuing in Africa, Russia and Latin America. Look at the demographics: Africa has a sixth of the world's population, but it doesn't have a sixth of the world's wealth. And the problems of Africa aren't going to be solved by mineral resources, the old colonial solution, it will come through investment in education. As developing economies move out of poverty and into development, there are some educational basics around literacy and hygiene. Then they move pretty quickly into making and building things and then into managing things.

So I think there's a continuing need, whatever the state of the global recession, to help people manage things better. But this doesn't make our industry recession proof. We are already seeing, particularly in the US, our customers suffering from across-the-board cuts in state funding. So in some cases it will be temporarily a flat or potentially contracting market.

But I don't worry about that – the company is strong and it has invested in great products and great relationships with customers. We don't get into things we don't understand: we sell things that our customers want to buy and we look after them. That's the basics of running a good business.

Emerald has a strong ethic of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. What is behind Emerald's strong ethical drive?

There's a phrase I very much like, which is "doing well by doing good". Doing good isn't about charity and it's not about being nice when times are good and not so nice when they are hard. It's about asking where does social responsibility and value overlap with market success, and pitching our tent on that piece of grass. If you don't think that through carefully, you can end up with what in the environmental world is called "greenwash" – empty slogans, and unsustainable good works.

What we've tried to achieve is a deep and detailed alignment with "the right thing to do" and that which we also believe will be successful, which means that you can continue doing it. That's actually good business.

It's a bit like when I used to work in quality years ago, and there was talk about the cost of quality: how much manufacturing and inspection cost you needed to overlay to make sure things were produced reliably. Then that got flipped on the head and people started to talk about the cost of non-quality and non-conformance. Cost not just in terms of scrap and returns, but also of brand and market position.

You can take a quality assurance approach to social responsibility and look at the cost of irresponsibility. Take for the example the recent [summer 2009] case where a publisher tried to pass off some paid advertorial journals as peer reviewed science: someone wasn't taking a cost of irresponsibility decision there. And someone commented that if the expenses of British Members of Parliament (MPs) had been put on a billboard in the centre of a town, would they have behaved differently? There was a high cost of irresponsibility to many of the MPs involved, and to the British Government collectively.

So I urge my staff to take the billboard test, and ask – are there things that we wouldn't want leaking out into the world, practices that we are embarrassed about? If there are, we shouldn't continue to do them, we should, over time, remove them from the organization. Over the years we've built ourselves a strong, values-driven organization that tries – doesn't always succeed, but tries – to do the right thing.

So, what is the responsibility of Emerald in the field of business and management in the current economic crisis?

I think we should continue to do what we've been doing, possibly a bit more assertively. Long before the economic crisis broke, we came to the conclusion that as part of doing the right thing as a sustainable organization, we should introduce a new (non-mandatory) field into our abstracts, and invite authors to address the social implications of their work as well as those for research and practice. Our reviewers would also be asked to comment from this perspective.

We are still a relatively small organization – I just about still know everyone by name, and what they do. Everyone has a direct line to me and other board members, so can influence company policy.

But at the same time, we have a genuine global reach –- from our download figures, we know that our papers will touch more than 20 million people this year. We are in the position of eliciting relevant and rigorous research from some of the world's best brains in business schools, and bringing that in a digestible form to students, practitioners and managers, who are making management decisions and making management policy. We have a really responsible job – touching millions of people in the world's most studied subject and the world's most practised profession. That's a great place to be, and we need to continue to find like-minded people who like what we do, and work with them.

Increasingly, we have friends in some of the most powerful influence groups in business schools around the world – EFMD (the European Foundation for Management Development), AACSB, CLADEA (the Latin American Council of Management Schools), ARQAANE (the Arab Quality Assurance and Accreditation Network) in the Middle East, BMDA, (the Baltic Management Development Association), and the Central and East European Management Development Association, among others. A lot of these bodies are very much aligned to what we do, which is great, and we can have a dialogue not only about the effectiveness of business and management publishing and scholarship, but also on the mission of business education and the business school.

Emerald recently acquired a list of books and book series in the areas of sociology, education, and politics. Is social science publishing going to be important to you in the future?

Yes, increasingly so. Having spent a year getting to grips with the differences of a books business, we are looking at launching into a number of areas in the social sciences where we can bring our books' and journals' content together. Some will be adjacent areas, such as education, politics and policy, economics and health care, others will be quite different, for example linguistics.

So, we'll be continuing to position ourselves as specialists in business and management, and library and information science, and as the world's leading publisher in those fields. We are not going to get, in short order, to being the leading publisher in education or economics research, but I think we can aim to be a preferred partner. We want both writers and buyers to say, I know Emerald and I like what it does.

And that's an achievable aim: it's not about "can we grow big very quickly?"; it's about sustainability – building something over time that actually has some solidity.

One of the things we are putting in our company value statements (which I was sharing with staff last week) – and I have to be careful of because often the values we live and work by can become rather generic – is that we seek, first and foremost, to be friendly, knowledgeable, expert and enthusiastic. That's part of our culture, and I'm not embarrassed about saying – be friendly with people because people like to deal with people they like.

Note

Read John Peters on the role of scholarly publishing in the current economic climate, and the new emerging model of capitalism, in: Peters, J. and Marsh, R. (2009), "Separating the wheat from the chaff", Global Focus, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 8-11.

References

James, J. and Weir, D. (2006), "Special issue on poetry, organisation, emotions, management and enterprise: POEME ", Management Decision, Vol. 44 No. 4.

Khurana, R. (2007), From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: the Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Thomas, H. (forthcoming), "Special issue on business schools: positioning, rankings, research and futures", Management Decision, Vol. 47 No. 9.

Editor's note

Margaret Adolphus re-interviewed John Peters in July 2009. This interview replaces an earlier version written in 2004.

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