Editorial

Citation

He, L. and Janney, J.J. (2017), "Editorial", Management Research Review, Vol. 40 No. 1, pp. 2-4. https://doi.org/10.1108/MRR-11-2016-0271

Incoming editorial

It is an honor and a privilege for us to take over the editorship of the Management Research Review. The journal was known as Management Research News for more than 30 years since its founding in 1978. It has taken the name of Management Research Review starting from 2010 to better reflect its increasing publication scopes. The journal is in good shape under the strong leadership of the previous editor, Dr Joseph Sarkis. During his tenure, the journal has improved considerably in terms of both rigor and relevance of its publication and has attracted a broader audience and significantly more contributors. In particular, the journal has recently been accepted in the Thomson Reuters Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), which was launched in late 2015 as a new database within Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science™ Core Collection. The inclusion in the ESCI not only signifies Management Research Review’s high-quality peer reviewed contents but also allows all papers published in this journal to be searchable and citable through the Web of Science, thus allowing more visibility and higher impact of its contributors. The journal has also been continuously included in several key regional lists including the Association of Business School’s (ABS) Academic Journal Quality Guide and the Australian Business Deans Council’s (ABDC) Journal Quality List. Dr Sarkis has also successfully compiled a solid and diverse advisory board consisting of 33 members from 11 countries. Under the sound leadership of Dr Sarkis and the joint effort of advisory board members, ad hoc peer reviewers, authors as well as the book review editor, the content editor, and the publisher, the journal currently publishes 12 issues per year ranging from 6 to 8 papers per issue, receives around 400 submissions annually and attracts more than 255,000 annual downloads. The journal is also proud of its fast turnaround cycle of less than 3 months.

As incoming editors, our objective is to follow the footstep of our predecessors and to take the journal forward to its next phase. Changes made will be gradual and consistent with the progress made by Dr Sarkis. The most visible change over the next year will be to expand the size of the editorial board, as well as deepen our pool of potential reviewers. As the number of submissions continues to grow, having more scholars engaged will help MRR maintain its fast turnaround time. Beyond that, we want to continue developing the reputation of Management Research Review and to increase its impact as an essential outlet for publishing the latest management research with rigorous research design and important tactical implications in the broad management area. In particular, we encourage the submission of high-quality empirical and theoretical studies and literature review articles that examine a wide range of management issues including Business Ethics and Sustainability, Corporate Finance, Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management, Industrial Relations, Information and Knowledge Management, International Business, Human Resource Management, Organizational Theory and Behavior, Production and Operations Management and Strategic Management and Leadership from multiple academic disciplines (e.g. economics, finance, law, management, psychology and sociology).

We also welcome studies adopting an interdisciplinary research design and those conducted in different national contexts. In addition, we would like to continue the tradition of Management Research Review to adopt a structured abstract that highlights key features of each manuscript from the aspects of purpose, design/methodology/approach, findings, research limitations/implications, practical implications and originality/value. We believe such a structured design facilitates the review and reading process of published articles and would ultimately improve circulation, citations and impact of manuscripts published in the journal. For authors wanting to improve the visibility of their work, we encourage them to identify keywords that match their work to future research streams.

Finally, we would especially like to emphasize research and practical implications of each study, i.e. its relevance to the management field. We believe what makes management research interesting is its role in providing actionable guidelines for managerial decision-making. We also believe the importance of context when drawing conclusions from research findings. In our view, an in-depth understanding of managerial issues can only emerge if appropriate attention is paid to the boundary conditions of studies that are constrained by institutional, social psychological and other contingency factors.

As a general management journal, Management Research Review is welcoming a broad array of topics and methods, and articles published in the first issue of 2017 exemplify the quality and scope of this journal. The first paper by Georges Romme and Darush Yazdanfar conceptually explores how the quest for management as a science-based profession can be rejuvenated by challenging the fundamental assumption on the distribution of power and authority within an organization. The second paper by Peter Öhman examines the usage of trade credit as a financing source in small- and medium-sized enterprises. He finds that short-term debt positively influences the usage of trade credits, while long-term debt and firm profitability both have negative impacts on trade credits. In the third paper, Arun Tarofder, Ferdous Azam and Abdullah Jalal identify factors affecting effective adoption of internet technologies in an organizational supply chain as well as outline key benefits generated from internet adoption in supply chain management. In the fourth article, Amulya Gurtu, Cory Searcy and M.Y. Jaber propose a new method to include carbon emissions from international transportation in the calculation of National Emissions Inventories, and subsequently suggest that carbon pricing on international transportation emissions should be explicitly considered in sourcing and supply chain decisions of multinational firms. The fifth paper by Niccolo Gordini and Elisa Rancati studies the influence of board gender diversity on firm performance. They identify a significantly positive board gender diversity effect in Italian firms. In the sixth article, Hanudin Amin, Abdul Rahim Abdul Rahman, Dzuljastri Abdul Razak and Hamid Rizal use a sample of Malaysian bank customers to examine consumer attitude and preference in the Islamic mortgage sector. They find that service quality, product choice and Islamic debt policy all affect attitudes of bank customers, which in turn influence their home financing preference and mortgage choice. Finally, this issue also includes a book review written by Nnamdi Madichie on Sonny Oti’s “Highlife music in West Africa: Down Memory Lane”.

In conclusion, we welcome any suggestions you would like to share with us on how to improve the journal. We will work closely with the advisory board and the journal publisher to help the journal achieve even higher recognition and impact in the broad management field. We enthusiastically look forward to our responsibilities as new editors of Management Research Review, and we encourage you to engage with us in this journey.