Editorial

Citation

Jones, G. (2015), "Editorial", Journal of Global Responsibility, Vol. 6 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGR-03-2015-0002

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Global Responsibility, Volume 6, Issue 1

Normally, I use the editorial as a means to raise issues that might excite a scholarly response and give potential writers food for thought as they consider whether their interests can be well expressed though this journal’s pages. However, this edition comes at a special time. The sixth issue of the Journal of Global Responsibility marks just over five years that the Journal has been operating. It is an appropriate time to put aside the broader issues that I usually address in the editorial to pay tribute to those that have supported the Journal though its infancy and have helped to build its reputation in the academic world.

The journal was founded by the Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative (GRLI). The GRLI is a forum of partnered business and educational institutions that are concerned to encourage thought about global responsibility and build supportive institutions. The GRLI Web site puts the philosophy rather well:

The Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative is about creating individual and collective leadership and practice that is globally responsible – that strives to be the best FOR the world rather than the best IN the world.

As this suggests, people do not become involved in the GRLI for what they can get out of it, but for what they can give to it. If you can understand that orientation, you are well on your way to global responsibility.

One of the institutions the GRLI has nurtured is The Principles of Responsible Management Education initiative (PRME). While the PRME is the creation of the United Nations Global Compact, it should be acknowledged that members of the GRLI were prominent among the thought leaders that developed the rationale and conceptual framework. The GRLI is also active in its ongoing management. There are now over 500 business schools across 80 countries that have signed up and, in so doing, agreed to provide and share reports of progress. These figures provide some indication of the impact of the GRLI in the world. While the progress reports provided by members are not binding, they are useful exercises in corporate meditation of a kind that produces a more global sense of responsibility. The GRLI is an organisation which keeps itself purposely small, but works through partnerships with others. At any one time, the GRLI has a number of strategic initiatives in operation or under development. The beauty of an online journal is that I can include a link that will take you straight there if you want to see these additional examples of initiatives: http://www.grli.org/projects/

Many of the members of the GRLI are also on the Editorial Board and I want to thank the Editorial Board for its support in developing the strategic direction of the journal and, on many occasions, the sweat equity that the journal has acquired.

There are also many fellow travellers on the editorial board, not necessarily members of the GRLI, who provide other perspectives and also the same degree of sweat equity. In particular, I want to thank Professor Gayle Avery, who is a cofounder and Director of the Institute for Sustainable Leadership (ISL). She has been supporting me as Deputy Editor over the past five years. ISL has become a thought leader in the development of key elements of the fabric of organisations. Sustainable leadership has been conceived as a form of leadership that creates value by building qualities such as durability, resilience and sustainability into the operation of organisations. It has an operational appeal to managers who want something that they can implement and that works. It also has an appeal to academics, who want to understand ideas and phenomena that have many layers of meaning. If you want to know more about their work, check their Web site at http://instituteforsustainableleadership.com/ or, better still, come to one of their annual symposia which is generally held somewhere in Europe around the first week of June each year. This year it is at Dubrovnik from 2 to 5 June. Details can be found at the above link.

Last but not least, I want to thank Emerald, the publisher of the journal. Emerald specialises in scholarly publishing and is particularly committed to academic journals. They operate from a strong sense of global responsibility, have a genuinely global mindset and are an ideal partner for this particular journal.

Grant Jones, Editor-in-Chief