Times Change and We With Them

An Emerging Reality

Until very recently, the combination of JME’s acknowledged position as a “Top Three” management education journal and its vibrant readership would have been sufficient for the journal to look to the future with optimism. But times are changing and we must change with them to ensure that we survive and thrive. Although I say, Dylanesque, that “times, they are a-changin’,” I am really only referring to one change, but it is a change that has huge implications for journals, the people who publish in them, and the way they are managed. This change is the emergence and increasingly important role that journal rankings are playing in people’s perceptions of research quality.

A little more than a decade ago, before the arrival of journal rankings, the comparative strength of journals was largely unknown. People knew that if someone had a paper accepted in the Academy of Management Review or the Administrative Science Quarterly, it was seriously impressive (as it still is today), but publishing in less well-known journals was more ambiguous as the comparative strength of the journals was shrouded in mystery. Since that time, a plethora of ranking systems have emerged, primarily as a response to the need to rate the quality of research conducted in universities (Alexander, Lecoutre, & Scherer, 2007). Although many have been critical of the way that they influence and distort research work (e.g., Adler & Harzing, 2009; Özbilgin, 2009), these ranking systems have opened up the mysterious dark world of journals. Everyone doing research these days is able to determine which are the better journals to target. It also means that there is now a currency, for all its faults, to assess the quality of academics’ research work.

Naturally, deans and university selection and promotion committees are placing much greater emphasis on these metrics to assess the quality of research outputs. They have a seductive charm (Nkomo, 2009). For all their faults, these rankings are viewed as “rigorous” metrics that capture the quality of successful outputs in an independently assessed process. These metrics do not capture hearsay, self-promotion, simplistic student satisfaction scores, or the biased opinions of referees. They are “reliable” numbers that can be used to rate the strength of research output. Moreover, university departments, schools, and faculties are graded themselves on the quality of their research using these same journal ranking scales. Inevitably, therefore, they are being used more and more and have greater weight in recruitment and promotion decisions.

This trend is hugely important for JME. We may have a great history, a tremendous readership, and a strong position in the “Top Three” management education journals, but these factors are no longer enough. Nowadays, the (sad) reality is that a journal also needs an impact factor, strong citation rates, and elevated positions in ranking lists to justify its reputation (Rynes & Brown, 2011). Without these metrics, the risk to the long-term health of the journal is clear. The dynamics are such that there is a clear danger that scholars will turn their backs on JME and the quality and quantity of submissions will reduce. So while tremendous work has been done to achieve JME’s eminent position, this is a precarious moment for the journal.

The imperative to achieve higher citation rates and an impact factor listing for JME are vitally important considerations at this time. These outcomes could be achieved relatively easily by mirroring the approach of the Academy of Management Learning & Education or Management Learning. But that would neither serve our readership well nor respect our history and traditions. Instead, I believe that more subtle changes are required that can move us toward our citation and listing goals without fundamentally changing the nature of the journal. We still want to be the leader in publishing work on how management (and closely related topics) should be taught. We still want to be at the forefront of experiential learning. We still want to keep our critical edge. And we still want to be an exciting forum for the exchange of radical and experimental ideas. We are a vibrant journal with our own special identity. We must not lose this. In fact, I believe that making enhancements in all of these areas will help us attain our citation and listing goals.

Changing Nature of Management Education

Before discussing the subtle changes that I think will help us maintain our identity and move toward our citation and listing goals, there is an important development in the management education environment that will influence the way we move forward. That development, quite simply, is the maturing of our field. On most topics that a management education journal would publish, us included, there is now a mature and growing literature (Rynes & Brown, 2011). It does not matter what the topic is—something critical, such as the role of the business school or whether management is an art, a science, or a practice, or something about pedagogy, such as the incivility of students, or the nature of online learning in management education, or something about teaching particular subjects, such as managing change, leadership, or emotion, there is almost certain to be a history of writing on these subjects. Just a few years ago, this was not the case. Nowadays, scholars wishing to write about new developments in management education fields such as these must first demonstrate their understanding of past work before advocating new and innovative ideas.

This maturing of the management education literature makes it an exciting time to be doing scholarly work in this field. Whereas previously authors had trouble establishing a need for their new arguments and approaches, now authors can demonstrate how their work builds on past initiatives and makes a substantial contribution. This opportunity is not just limited to the empirical, theoretical, and essay domains, it is also relevant to papers that advocate new and innovative ways of teaching.

One consequence of this development in the management education field is that manuscripts are likely to contain increasing numbers of references to previous work, which must help us as we strive toward higher citation rates and listings. Management education authors will naturally include more references in their papers as the form and style of management education writing changes and becomes more scholarly. This is an inevitable process as the field matures.

In many mature fields of scholarly endeavor, authors are able to track down review articles that quickly inform them of the state of the art in the discipline. Systematic reviews, selective reviews, and meta-analyses all serve the purpose of establishing the current “state of play” in a domain. To date, there have been very few scholarly reviews in the management education literature. But given that this is a rapidly maturing field in which many subjects have written about extensively, now is the time to codify these bodies of knowledge. Accordingly, one of our new initiatives is to publish articles that review management education domains. I hope that these will be a feature of the journal and I have appointed an Associate Editor, Michael Cohen, to work exclusively on these types of papers. Some of these we will be commissioning, and they will still be subject to our rigorous double-blind review process, but we would welcome ideas for reviews as well. We are open to various forms of review, but I would recommend discussing any ideas for reviews with Michael first so that you do not duplicate work that we already have in the pipeline and to check that the subject of your review falls under our ambit.

Looking to the Future

The previous discussion suggests that there are already dynamics in the field of management education that are going to help JME improve its citation rates and the likelihood of being included in the journal ranking lists. In addition, the publication of review articles, which are ones that are likely to be highly cited, will help further. These are incremental changes in response to environmental changes. There is one further change that I believe will help us as we look ahead. That change is to introduce sections to the journal.

Currently, JME is informally sectioned: Volume 35 Issue 2, for example, had an Editor’s Corner, Articles, Exercises, and Announcements sections. I would like to formalize the sectioning with the addition of Essay and Resource Review sections to Research Articles (i.e., empirical, theoretical, conceptual, and review articles) and Teaching Innovations. Essays are particularly useful in management education as many of the issues we discuss are difficult to justify with empirical data. Exchanges of view provoke new thinking and are an engaging form. Interestingly, JME has always welcomed essays, but we are not as well known for them as we are for articles outlining teaching innovations. I hope that by making them a separate section of the journal, with dedicated Associate Editors, we shall attract more essays and the section will become a forum for lively discussion of management education matters.

The second section I should like to introduce, or, more correctly, reinstate, is a Resource Review section. To my eyes, there is a dire need for a place where teachers can find reviews of materials that can be used in management education. Book and film reviews would naturally fall into this category, but I want us to be adventurous and include poems, plays, pictures, photographs, games, and so on and so forth. Anything that has been previously produced and is in the public domain is fair game for a review.

Although we may not be able to run every section every issue, over a year I hope that we publish a substantial number of research articles, essays, teaching innovations, and resource reviews. In our research section, we will continue to be open on philosophy, for example, positivist, constructionist, realist, and the type of data generated, for instance, quantitative and qualitative. I want us to continue to be an inclusive, welcoming, and developmental journal that publishes the best work in management education.

In This Issue

This issue contains four articles: one research article and three teaching innovations. The first article, the research article, by April Wright and Anne Gilmore, explores the emerging notion of threshold concepts and applies them to management education. A threshold concept is similar to a learning objective; it is a learning target that teachers hope learners achieve. However, it is a lot more than a learning objective because a threshold concept involves a student transformation. A threshold concept is something that, once learned, changes the student’s view on a topic forever. A typical example is the idea of transaction costs in economics. Once learned, a student’s understanding of economics is changed for good. The notion is a powerful one that challenges readers to discard learning objectives in favor of threshold concepts. Whether applied at session, course, or program levels, the idea has the power to change the design of teaching. Teaching would no longer be about the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and abilities, but about changing the individual in irrevocable ways. The idea is a fascinating one, but it begs the question of what management’s threshold concepts might be.

In the second article, William Van Buskirk and Michael London introduce poetry into the organizational behavior classroom. Their interest is in metaphor and how metaphors develop an enriched understanding of issues. Poetic metaphor, they argue, provides a particularly deep sense of meaning given the associations and emotions contained in poetic language. Their workshop exposes students to approximately 75 poems on, or related to, work. The students choose one they find particularly insightful and share it with a companion. After this acculturation process, they are given the opportunity to write their own poems about work.

Amy Lewis and Mark Grosser have developed a new way of teaching managing change with emphasis on communication, intergroup dynamics, and power. But rather than focus on teaching particular theories or ideas, these authors are interested in demonstrating to their students that managing change is an issue. Accordingly, their exercise is a cooperative one where the students playing the role of managers have to persuade students in the roles of workers to change seats. But the game is set up in such a manner that there are vested interests that will almost always prevent the task from being successfully completed, which leads to an enhanced discussion of communication, intergroup dynamics, and power issues.

The final article in this issue is by Matthew Eriksen, who views learning as a voyage of self-discovery, “a continuous and ongoing embodied and relational process” (p. 698). He is interested in the idea of “authentic becoming,” which he conceives as a

proactive process in which one continuously develops one’s self-awareness of and movement toward one’s ideal self. This ideal self is not fixed. It continuously develops based on one’s experience. Authentic becoming requires a continuous conscious development of one’s ideal self by creating and adhering to self-disciplines. (p. 699)

As such, there is no destination to arrive at; instead, learning is a continuously evolving process of becoming. To illustrate the learning process that this approach advocates, Eriksen describes a practical reflective assignment in which students learn from their past experiences.

At the end of the issue, you will find a new Special Issue Call for Papers (CFP). This special issue will be guest edited by Matt Statler, NYU Stern School of Business, and Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Copenhagen Business School, and it focuses on the implications of the recent Carnegie Report into undergraduate management education. The CFP printed at the end of this issue is an abbreviated version of the full CFP that can be viewed on the journal’s website. I hope you will give serious consideration to submitting a paper—a research paper, an essay, a teaching innovation, or a resource review.