Citation
Selmer, J. (2017), "Finding nothing – bad or good?", Journal of Global Mobility, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 222-224. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-07-2017-0027
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited
It has happened to me many times, there were no results of my study. A recent blogpost (http://deevybee.blogspot.se/?m=1) entitled: “Prospecting for kryptonite: the value of null results”, discusses such events through an analogy in a more positive manner than my feelings reflected at the time. You may think of science like prospecting for kryptonite in a vast desert, with an enormous territory but scarcely little kryptonite. You may also assume that the fate of the human race will be decided on finding kryptonite. Not finding any kryptonite and leaving empty-handed is disappointing but nevertheless useful since other prospectors do not need to look for kryptonite where it does not exist. Needless to say, this is effective only if the failed search is publicly reported and the prospecting was done properly. And, there is the analogy with contemporary science; false information is created by reporting bias and poor methods. The prospector/scholar who finds nothing does not tell anybody and others come back to the same place to also find nothing. Or, finding nothing from a poorly designed investigation is of little use to anyone. Although it would make more sense to do good work and report whatever was found, scholars are frequently given the impression that something amazing must be found to be good science. As someone said “There’s an awful lot of talk about ground-breaking research […]. Ground-breaking is what you do when you start a building. You go into a field and you dig a hole in the ground. If you’re only rewarded for ground-breaking research, there's going to be a lot of fields with a small hole and no buildings”.
Some academic research journals have now taken up that challenge, even within the social sciences. The editorial team of JGM is now considering how to devise processes whereby regions with kryptonite-rich and kryptonite-empty areas can be mapped-out. Publishing null results in any academic journal must be based on rigour and supreme methods. But that is clearly the way of the future. JGM, as a specialist journal for expatriate research and other global mobility issues, would be very interested in publishing studies with null results based on rigorous research.
As a fast rising academic research journal, JGM is indexed in Scopus (CiteScore 2016: 1.65) and ESCI. The journal is also ranked by the Australian ABDC List as a B journal and ranked by the Nordic countries and Brazil. The editorial advisory board reads as a who’s who in our area and the editorial team, reviewers and authors are all specialists. Truly, JGM is managed by experts, for experts. Solid evidence of the standing of the editorial team of JGM was produced recently when the winners of the JGM Best Paper Award at the Expatriate Management track at the EURAM 2017 Conference in Glasgow was also awarded the Best Conference Paper Award of the whole EURAM conference. This paper, “The influence of cultural intelligence on expatriate knowledge sharing: a multilevel country analysis”, authored by Sebastian Stoermer, Samuel Edward Davies and Fabian Jintae Froese, was initially double-blind selected by the editorial team of JGM as the JGM Best Paper Award winner.
One special issue of JGM has just been published, “Beyond corporate expatriation: examining neglected non-corporate communities”, edited by Yvonne McNulty, Charles Vance and Kelly Fisher. Keep an eye out for another special issue in 2017: “Dangerous moves and risky international assignments”, edited by Luisa Helena Pinto, Benjamin Bader and Tassilo Schuster. Two more special issues are scheduled for 2018: “On stakeholders and their stakes in the expatriation process”, edited by Thomas Hippler and Michael Morley and “Reimagining expatriation cycles” edited by Anthony Fee, Peter Dowling and Allen Engle. All JGM special issues aim to fill important research gaps in the extant literature.
JGM now has a distinct presence on social media with a JGM LinkedIn Group, a JGM Facebook Group (please contact Yvonne ymcnulty@expatresearch.com if you want to join) and a Twitter account, @JanSelmer_JGM.
JGM welcomes all kinds of rigorous research methods, but we are also very interested in thorough theoretical developments and focussed literature reviews. Besides that, we would like to publish research at various levels of analysis – individual, team, organizational or even regional or national. We are interested in research from a variety of academic domains, as well as cross-disciplinary studies.
In this issue
The first article, authored by Andre Anugerah Pekerti, Quan Hoang Vuong and Nancy K. Napier, deals with the double edges faced by individuals who have international and multicultural experiences; while encountering acculturation challenges, they also gain from their multiculturality. Based on empirical materials from three expatriates who have worked across multiple cultural contexts, the authors adopt Berry’s integration and multiculturalism framework to analyse the experiences and challenges that multiculturals face. Highlighting the challenges of acculturation and suggesting ways that individuals can overcome them, the article also suggests how organizations can take advantage of such individuals. Cátia Sousa, Gabriela Gonçalves, Joana Santos and José Leitão, undertake a systematic literature review, from the late 1980s to the present day, in the second article to identify practices that are developed by organizations and their impact on the adjustment of expatriates. The results show that few studies assess the impact of the types of adjustment support available among organizational practices, with the cross-cultural training and language training being the most common. These practices have shown a positive effect on performance and adjustment of expatriates. The authors of the third article, Jan Knocke and Tassilo Schuster, provide a systematic and comprehensive literature review of repatriation from an ecological systems perspective based on 96 peer-reviewed articles from 1973 to 2016. The results indicate that repatriation research covers a broad set of ecological systems, where quantitative approaches are fairly prominent. Qualitative approaches have increased lately but mixed-method approaches are still scarce. Since most scholars collected data on the individual level, future research on repatriation should differentiate more thoroughly between types of repatriates to provide target-group-oriented recommendations and to deepen the understanding of the repatriation phenomenon. Next, Liisa Mäkelä, Anna-Maija Lämsä, Suvi Heikkinen and Jussi Tanskanen explore, for the first time, if an expatriate’s career situation at the level of the couple is related to the expatriate’s work-to-personal-life conflict and if the expatriate’s gender is related to the latter. Based on a sample of 393 Finnish expatriates, they find that gender and single- or dual-career status were not separately related to work-to-personal life conflict but that there was an interaction effect between gender and a couple’s career status on work-to-personal life conflict. They also found that among dual career couples, women experienced more work-to-personal life conflict than men but that it was the other way around for single career couples. Practical implications both for employing organizations and the couples themselves are straightforward. The fifth and last article in this issue is authored by Kowoon Kim and Mary Ann von Glinow who investigate the international work experiences of lesbian and gay self-initiated expatriates (SIEs). Based on an in-depth analysis of four interviews of lesbian and gay SIEs, findings support three contextual determinants: personal, organizational and country-level contexts. They significantly influence lesbian and gay SIEs’ disclosure decisions and their overall international work experience. This article provides a contribution to the deeper understanding of lesbian and gay SIEs in the multidimensional contexts of an international assignment.
Finding nothing in a study may not be such a bad thing and the editorial team of JGM is determined to find a way to publish null results. This may provide mapping out areas with kryptonite-rich and kryptonite-empty areas to speed up discovery and avoid waste of scarce resources. So, in this context, null results are very useful.
As a specialist academic research journal, JGM attracts both reputable authors and readers by creating expert content for experts. The JGM Editorial Advisory Board, the editorial team and the best specialist reviewers all contribute to make JGM the leading outlet for academic research on global mobility and expatriate management.