Management Decision 50th Anniversary.

Editor's Message

Welcome to the 25th Anniversary site of Journal of Organizational Change management. Fasten your methodological seatbelts and put your creative seats in an upright position. This site celebrates the JOCM’s contribution to the qualitative organizational studies as a research field over the last 25 years and includes some of the most important papers published in the journal and an interview with the current editor-in-chief, Slawek Magala of Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University.

Journal editors are in the business of brokering knowledge, and JOCM is a case in point. Upper case, strong point. Brokering, nevertheless. We are trying to prevent irrelevance by keeping empirical touch (this is the way organizations really deal with us) and pragmatic angle (this is actionable knowledge you can do something with). Simultaneously, we also attempt to balance the overkill of quantitative methods with a heart and a mind open for qualitative approaches.

It comes as no surprise that our anniversary issue (25/1,2012) opens with a paper on dialogue and deliberation as expressions of democratic leadership in participatory organizational change by Joseph Raelin and includes a study entitled "On the role of emotional arousal in sensegiving" by Timo Vuori and Jouni Virtaharju. We would like to contribute to the baby-sitting and even to educating individuals for sustainable democracy, especially in view of the transformation of the entire knowledge production – with privatization of knowledge and Big Brother (ACTA, SOPA, etc.) digital surveillance – which calls for the mobilization of concerned, knoiwledgeable and digitally diligent citizens. Digital Democrats Debate instead of proletarians and precariatarians of the world unite? Perhaps.

Perhaps we should draw conclusions from the fact that we are walking in the clouds of migrating knowledge diligently serviced by underpaid migrant labour, trying to make sense of our progress from Athenian agora to New Yorkese Wall Street and back? Perhaps we should watch the storytelling adventures of those who are trying to tell us about our new ideal of sustainable and desirable growth? Maybe we shall then be able to understand why we have ever been a bit democratic and why we should want to be more? Brokering knowledge in academic industries of education we are, after all, baby-sitting sustainable democracy of our increasingly numerous students, readers, audiences, constituencies, the Others.

Professor Slawomir Magala
Chair of Cross Cultural Management
Rotterdam School of Management
smagala@rsm.nl

• Read the editorial from the first issue of 2012, in which Professor Magala reflects on the past 25 years.
• Read an interview with the Editor.