The reestablishment of the Journal of Management History : A quantitative review of 2005 to 2009

This paper aims to provide a review of the reinstitution of the Journal of Management History (JMH) following its five-year merger with Management Decision. In this review, the final issue of the merger in 2005 is examined through the four volumes of JMH that were published after the separation. Across this time period, trends in topics and approaches, as well as identify particularly impactful work, were investigated.

With a taxonomy developed in a previous review of JMH (Hardy et al., 2015), articles were sorted by independent raters for the following dimensions: focus (i.e. person, topic or event), historical approach (i.e. an account or analysis) and readership (i.e. public policy or management). After full consensus was reached, these categories were examined to identify themes and shifts in trends over the target time period. Finally, the impact of articles published between 2005 and 2009 was evaluated by using citations provided by Google Scholar.

In the years following the separation of JMH from Management Decision, a few notable shifts were observed in the journal’s focus, approach and readership. This time period was first characterized by a heavy emphasis on topic-based articles. The emphasis subsequently shifted to strike a balance between focusing on people and topics. There was also fairly balanced use of historical analysis and historical account approaches. The final shift led to a majority of articles having a person-based focus. Interestingly, the largest impacts were made all by articles with a focus on particular management topic.

This quantitative review provides insight into the development of JMH following its reestablishment as independent publication outlet.