Abstract
Every issue of Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences (JABS) is special, and all special issues are, of course, very special. That makes this 50th year anniversary special issue very, very special indeed. For the past half century, JABS has been the voice of scholars with a concern for the practical significance of their work and for practitioners who have the courage to put their ideas through the test of rigorous research. Born of the need to have an outlet for groundbreaking work in the areas of organizational and societal transformation, the National Training Laboratories (NTL) commissioned the Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences to be the voice of its members and others who participated in this quest. Since then, JABS has retained its fundamental purpose and focus, although its tenor has evolved and continues to do so.
As Phil Mirvis and Jean Bartunek point out in the opening articles in this issue, JABS has become decidedly more scholarly in its orientation in recent years, pushed in that direction in part by forces in the journal publishing industry. While not exactly thumbing its nose at practitioners, JABS has published many pieces that practitioners would find of little interest, even if they could interpret the statistics behind the research. In this shift, JABS has lost some of its passion and a few of its connections with its original constituencies, which is bewildering given how the journal began and the many ways in which the gap between scholars and practitioners can be bridged in today’s world of social media. More work to be done here, it seems.
Warner Burke helps us understand that the organizations that were the focus of much of our attention in the early days of organization development were more bureaucratic and tightly connected than the networks and associations that we wish to influence today. Many of our hopes for the future lie in the hands of collaborative networks and associations among organizations in the public and private sectors. Understanding how to reshape OD to assist loosely coupled rather than tightly coupled systems has to be on our list of things to do.
On the positive side, as Kim Cameron notes, JABS has been a frequent outlet for the work of those interested in exploring the benefits of leveraging positive psychology to bring about transformations of all kinds. While it is still early, the work is promising and has taken a direction that JABS is proud to have nurtured.
Richard Woodman, my predecessor as editor of JABS, argues that insight, imagination, courage, skill, leadership, and even wisdom are required to enable research to be of practical benefit to those who have nothing less than organizational and societal transformation as their goal. Science alone is devoid of the rich insights that the art of practice produces. As the progenitor of JABS, Kurt Lewin is often quoted as saying, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory,” and “If one wishes to understand a system, one should attempt to change it.” Amen, Dick.
Finally, Gavin Schwarz and Inger Stensaker and remind us that we won’t get to find our way to the future by remaining entrapped in the theoretical straightjackets we have created for ourselves. Instead, research should be driven by an interest in the phenomena being studied, much as was the case when Lewin gave birth to our field.
The next 50 years will reshape JABS in ways that we can’t entirely foresee. What we do know is that the world needs what JABS offers more than ever. Its exciting work, and I for one am eager to see where it takes us.