Personnel Review: new paths, future directions

Personnel Review: new paths, future directions

Article Type: Editorial From: Personnel Review, Volume 45, Issue 1.

Personnel Review has been in circulation for 45 years and during this period it has earned and maintained a robust reputation: Downloads have doubled and user rates have trebled since 2005.

Since we became co-editors of Personnel Review in 2012, the journal has gone from strength to strength, with a reputation that continues to grow, boosted by impressive contributions from around the world. Submissions to the journal have grown rapidly and remain strong, increasing by 38 per cent. Our five-year impact factor is a healthy 1.438 and we are delighted to have been recognised by the Australian ABDC list for our contributions to the field.

Our associate editor board has undergone some changes, and the hard work continues with our new international team of associate editors and book editors, from Canada, New Zealand, Spain, South Africa, the UK and the USA. Our readership has become more international too, with the USA topping the list, alongside readers from China, India, Germany, Brazil and the UK, as well as Canada, and countries across Europe, Asia and Africa. We would also like to congratulate Niki Glaveli, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Dr Elise Marescaux KU Leuven, joint-winners of the Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Awards, 2015. The quality of their work is indicative of the quality of work among early career researchers from around the world, as well as being a tribute to their institutions and their supervisors.

We would like to thank the army of reviewers who work tirelessly on behalf of the journal. From now on, all those reviewing for our journal will be acknowledged formally and will be listed in our first issue of each volume. Without their sterling effort, the journal could not have made the major strides that it has. We would like to say a special thank you to Tamija Argarwal and Akram Al Akriss, who have each reviewed five articles for us in 2015.

A sharp rise in submissions from around the world, including, encouragingly, many from developing and emerging economies, has led us to reflect on how to revisit and refresh the academic direction of the journal. The implications of this can be seen on the website: we have revised our remit through sharpening our focus on “mainstream” HRM, as opposed to HRM-related OB. Although submissions related to the latter are welcome, the HRM component must be strong and clearly articulated. Authors must make clear the aspect of the HRM literature that their OB investigations help to explore and develop. HRM was, and will remain, the primary focus of our work.

We are especially interested in research that explores the positive and negative medium- to long-term impact of HRM policy and practice. For example this could be through under-researched areas such as line management provision of HRM, interim and sub-contracted delivery of HRM service provision. We therefore especially encourage articles that propose new theories of HRM, including fresh applications of social science and management science thinking, empirical investigations and new theorizing.

In the pipeline, there are a series of Special Issues that will further indicate how Personnel Review will be reorienting its work: from an original focus on operational practices largely in the UK, to a truly international journal focused on contemporary issues and emerging challenges. These forthcoming Special Issues have provided us with an opportunity to further underline this change in direction as well as topics that, in our view, merit greater scrutiny. The topics include innovations in HRM policy and practice, HRM in India, HRM and gender in the Middle East and HRM in SMEs. This is in addition to a recently published SI on HRM in Africa, and for 2016; HRM in the public sector in China and migration and HRM policy and practice. Originality has always been important to Personnel Review, but there will be a redoubling of effort to ensure that only those articles which offer something truly original make the final cut.

In order to give potential authors a feel for the kind of articles that embody these characteristics, we will temporarily provide free access to what we regard as good examples of this kind of work. Priority will be given to submissions that embody these characteristics, rather than incremental additions to well-established thinking: papers that genuinely break new ground. We are especially interested in how HRM is applied and/or created in new contexts; new categorisations in different contexts (including those associated with traditional disadvantage); HRM managers and how their jobs are changing and establishing different inter; HRM theory; national contexts and sectors; including context conscious typologies.

Nelarine Cornelius and Eric Pezet

About the Editors

Nelarine Cornelius is a Professor of Human Resource Management and Organization Studies in the School of Management, University of Bradford. She is the Director of the Bradford Centre for Business in Society and was previously a Associate Dean, Research and Knowledge Transfer in the School. She has published widely in the areas of international HRM, equality, diversity and inclusion and business ethics. She is a Fellow of the British Academy of Management. Professor Nelarine Cornelius is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: mailto:n.cornelius@bradford.ac.uk

Dr Eric Pezet is a Professor of Human Resource Management and Organization Studies at the Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (France). He is the Co-Director of Paris Research in Norms management and Law (Primal). He has published in the areas of HRM, and in critical management studies, mainly in the area of control.