Something Old,Something New: Continuity and Change at Business & Society

Declaration of Interdependence to a “New Era”

In Business & Society’s first issue, published in 1960, the founders of the new journal laid out a broad agenda that continues to provide the backbone of the journal’s mission today:

We will try to provide perspective of [businesspeople] not merely in [a] desk chair but in a world, or perhaps it’s wise these days to say a universe . . . We will strive to emphasize the interdependence of business and all the other disciplines that contribute to society. (Editorial, 1960, p. 3)

As the new editorial team at Business & Society, we find ourselves in an exciting position as next in line following a score of editors, reviewers, and authors who have carefully nurtured this powerful founding vision for six decades. Also, we find ourselves in a fortunate position that the 60th volume of the journal will start later this year; we will devote a special issue of the journal to reflect on and celebrate the growth of the journal and the business and society field.

While the mission of the journal has remained constant over the last 60 years, the initial founders of Business & Society needed to expend considerable effort in differentiating the journal from a broader academic landscape that at times seemed indifferent to societal concerns. The primary purpose of the journal at that time was to support and publish research that often remained overlooked in mainstream publication outlets. More recently, the journal faces a different challenge, as issues that were once part of specialized discussions have become fully embraced as urgent and legitimate topics of academic research. The previous editorial team referred to these changes as a “new era,” which is “marked by the growing importance of the field, an expanding community, the growing importance of metrics, and increasing competition for good papers” (Crane et al., 2015, p. 4).

Our inheritance rests in the challenge of leading the journal in this “new era.” Conversations about societal issues continue to grow exponentially both in practice and in academe, and these conversations offer tremendous opportunities for publishing relevant scholarly articles in Business & Society. Global society is increasingly grappling with grand challenges, such as climate change, human rights violation, global poverty, socioeconomic inequalities, mass migration, and institutional corruption, in which business is just one of the stakeholders that needs to work in tandem with public and civil society actors in efforts to seek better outcomes (Reinecke & Ansari, 2016). New conversations setting the stage for advancing research on issues that are critical to our society include such topics as sustainable development goals (e.g., Howard-Grenville et al., 2019), modern slavery (e.g., Caruana et al., 2019), human rights (e.g., Van Buren et al., 2019), stakeholder management (e.g., Barney & Harrison, 2018), social entrepreneurship (e.g., Rawhouser et al., 2019), social irresponsibility (e.g., Chiu & Sharfman, 2018), economic inequality (e.g., Bapuji et al., 2018), cross-sector partnerships (e.g., Bode et al., 2019), social impact measurement (e.g., Barnett et al., 2020), corporate governance (e.g., Brown et al., 2019), corporate political and corporate social responsibility (CSR) alignment (e.g., den Hond et al., 2014), and reporting-led organizational transformation (e.g., Higgins et al., 2019). As noted by the former editors, “We have a domain that is attracting more and more attention and a journal that is well-positioned to play a leading role in these important debates” (de Bakker et al., 2018, p. 1292).

As the salience of societal issues increases, so does the expansion of the number of authors who choose to write on these topics, the range of journals that seek to publish them, and the external audiences interested in learning about their conclusions. In 2010, Business & Society processed 134 new submissions, which increased to 210 in 2014. In comparison, and thanks to the careful stewardship of the previous editorial team, the journal processed well over 500 new manuscripts in 2019, almost a 400% increase from 2010 numbers. The journal’s impact factor shows that citation patterns, as well as submission rates, have increased exponentially over this time period. In 2015, the journal’s 2-year impact factor was 2.135. As of 2019, the impact factor rose to 5.013. While many factors may explain such an increase and impact factors may fluctuate, we think the overall trend of growing interest in the topics that we have traditionally studied in this field and published in this journal explains the surge of citations to the journal’s publications in this new era.

The Interdisciplinary Mission of Business & Society in a New Era

Where do these external trends leave Business & Society today? In many ways, the “new era” amplifies the importance of the journal’s mission as the number of communities interested in its scholarship expands. At the same time, growth also creates a range of issues that need to be carefully managed. An emerging challenge relates to the possibility of competition between journals and the fragmentation of conversations within them. As our predecessors discussed, a challenge in the “new era” rests in “increasing competition for good papers” (Crane et al., 2015, p. 4). The wide range of journals available to high-quality management and business research on related topics gives researchers a broad range of choices in where to publish their research, thus possibly leading journals to view themselves in competition for the best research.

Moreover, as more journals enter into the discussion of business and society themes, the landscape for authors also changes. On one hand, there is greater room for fragmentation, competition for attention, and arguably more time spent reinventing the wheel from subfield to subfield. We also know that some career interests may lead to defining highly idiosyncratic terminology, developing novel constructs, and formulating unique measures rather than dealing with issues of commensurability to other related communities; interdisciplinary literature reviews regularly show how similar phenomena are treated and termed very differently across adjacent fields (e.g., de Bakker et al., 2019).

This fragmentation does not advance the search for long-lasting and impactful solutions to complex problems and issues, and we therefore believe that journals need to proactively promote integration across different subfields and communities. Given the scale of the problems that we face as a society, and the role of business as a key part of any analysis of the causes and solutions to these issues, we believe Business & Society is uniquely positioned to address barriers to integration. The domain of business and society, inherently broad and well suited to interdisciplinary studies, should help to mitigate the significant challenges of integration, including differences in interpretations, assumptions, constructs, and methodologies. As noted by the previous editorial team in their insights on publishing interdisciplinary research, “Multidisciplinary approaches can bring a much needed breadth of vision and the power of rich intersections of thinking and theorizing” (de Bakker et al., 2019, p. 446).

We, as an editorial team, plan to double-down on our own “interdisciplinary” roots in efforts to publish research that connects fields of thought and academic traditions. As we review submitted papers, we will emphasize the importance of moving beyond narrowly focused literature reviews and methodological choices, and encourage authors to develop and broaden their thought processes by trying to connect across related fields and advance cumulative knowledge. We also plan to encourage, and specifically seek out and design, special issue calls that connect fields of thought and research that have traditionally operated independently from one another but have the potential for mutual growth through further integration and joint research. We believe that a cooperative, rather than competitive, mind-set is critical to amplifying the mission of Business & Society in a new era. We therefore hope to work in tandem with other journals and groups to sponsor developmental workshops that share a common mission in improving the general quality of business and society research.

Integrating New Voices, Contexts, and Communities

The expansion of communities and concerns in a new era of business and society research raises other questions about how to reach out to and incorporate new voices and perspectives within the journal while maintaining its strong values and traditions. In the past, many of the authors who chose to publish in Business & Society had a previous tie to the journal, likely personally knowing other authors and editors through conferences sponsored by affiliated communities like IABS, SIM, SBE, or ONE. Today, particularly as the journal’s impact factor increases and the range of interested parties expands, we find that a growing number of authors who have traditionally worked outside these communities are increasingly choosing to submit to Business & Society.

The growing global reputation of the journal therefore raises opportunities to extend its reach in new directions, which in turn requires active effort to welcome new voices and perspectives. For instance, an important challenge for the journal is to diversify the geographical location of our author base. When looking at the topics of publications, the preponderance of research is located within the most developed countries of the world, illustrating a clear need to extend the journal’s publications to include a greater number of contexts and authors from outside the developed North. As the previous editorial team similarly noted, striving to make the journal representative of its readers continues to represent an important objective (Crane, de Bakker, et al., 2019).

We, therefore, wish to build on earlier efforts at Business & Society to extend a research agenda beyond solely the CSR strategies of the largest, richest, and most established firms. This broader agenda includes the often-forgotten voices of the workers working within the largest and most powerful enterprises, the suppliers that service them within extended global value chains, the grassroots movements that raise attention to new societal issues and topics, the lower-income customers that may have limited access to needed goods and services, and global buyers that have increasingly come to incorporate social criteria into their buying decisions around the world. The inclusion of new country contexts also requires active consideration of the possibility that familiar theories and constructs may not travel well to new locations. This requires work that moves beyond assertions of universal theories that apply equally to all contexts to a more nuanced perspective about the scope conditions that may limit generalization of research finding across all community, national, and regional locations.

Conclusion

We understand that the extension of the interdisciplinary mission of Business and Society requires a careful balance of continuity and change. On one hand, we call for a careful consideration of prior published research as a means to advance cumulative knowledge on the topics that we engage with in our journal. On the other hand, we are interested in cultivating new research that addresses emerging topics, incorporates multidisciplinary theories, and employs various research designs. This balance represents a challenging task for the authors who submit to Business & Society, as well as for the many editors and reviewers who participate in the evaluation of submitted work. However, we believe strongly that this step forward is needed to ensure that the journal and the business and society field continue to remain highly relevant in this new era. We wish to publish papers that significantly move the field forward in new directions and shape broader public discourse to influence education, practice, and policy. We look forward to working with the large, dedicated group of Business & Society stakeholders to achieve these important and collective goals!