The craft of journal practice

Abstract

This article reflects on journal practices in a study of The British Journal of Social Work conducted as a multiple method historical case study, focussing on the first 40 years of the journal. What constitutes a journal’s identity is slippery. Broadly speaking, there are those practices that are located primarily within the immediate creation of volume upon volume, and there are practices through which the journal interacts with those worlds that touch on its boundaries. Editorial appointments, editors’ visions, the work of reviewers, and the infrastructure of technology are all located fairly close to the journal’s day-to-day practice. In this article, the focus is on these comparatively internal practices. This includes becoming a British Journal of Social Work editor; doing the job; reviewers and reviewing; editorial judgement; and technology. We gained a strong sense of continuity in terms, for example, of how those to whom we spoke understood the journal’s identity, and managing editorial succession. There were tensions – perhaps essential – manifested in the deployment of rhetorical arguments and pleas. But while calculated to persuade, the ebb and flow of rhetorical issues are no less about substance and realities.

Keywords

Authorship disciplinary knowledge documents judgment

In the last decade, there has been a modest revival of interest in placing understanding of social work in a historical framework. Institutionally, there is a Social Work History Network in the UK¹ and a History of Social Work project led by Jan Steyaert in Belgium.² The NASW website in the USA carries a standing site section on social work history,³ and also holds a relatively extensive archive of oral history links to interviews undertaken some 40 years ago. A spoken and written archive of interviews conducted in 1980–1981 by Alan Cohen is lodged in the Modern Records Centre in the UK⁴ which also hosts an intermittent archive for the British Association of Social Workers (BASW). The European Social Work Research Association has an active Special Interest Group focussing on the field.⁵ A number of universities and agencies in the North America and UK hold their own archives, parts of which are likely to be of major interest to social work, although social work research therein remains limited.

There has been a recent interest in a more critical approach to social work history, partly through some interest in applying emerging research methods from the humanities and social sciences (e.g. archival research, visual methods), partly through developments in technology, and partly through the general influence of social theorists such as Foucault and Marx. It may be so that until very recently a professional sense of heritage has been stronger in the USA than the UK. Among those who are cited in honorific terms, Jane Addams’ name occurs probably the most frequently both sides of the Atlantic (and both sides of the channel dividing the UK and mainland Europe). A major history of sociology in America included careful analysis of the significance of social work (Lengermann and Niebrugge, 2007), and a parallel history of sociology in Britain carries a corresponding chapter (Shaw, 2014).

Journals have played a central role in shaping and being shaped by shifts in the identity of the field, yet little research interest has been manifested in the wider illumination studies of such processes would yield. There is a now rather old US study of the Social Service Review (Diner, 1977). A study of the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) that, for its approach, is of considerable interest for social work was undertaken by Abbott (1999, chapters 3–6).

In this article, I reflect on parts of a multi-method study of the history of The British Journal of Social Work (BJSW). The primary focus is on findings that address themes that seem likely to be shared by social work journals in general, other professionally owned journals and in some measure by social science journals. To this end, I have omitted some details that may be specific to this journal, or to any one country. There also is limited attention to trends in the journal over the years (c.f. Shaw et al., forthcoming). These distinctions are, of course, a matter of judgement. Whether one can generalize depends in part on the nature of the data, but also on the reader’s purpose.

Fieldwork methods

The methodological approach stemmed from undertaking the research as a multiple method historical case study, focussing only on the first 40 years of the journal.⁶ The team understood the term ‘journal’ widely to include all stakeholders, and adopted a strategy that was intended to avoid treating the journal’s history in an unduly homogenous way.

Oxford University Press (OUP) gave access to minutes of and reports to Editorial Board meetings, especially from more recent years. We visited the interesting if patchy records kept on behalf of the BASW (the owners of the BJSW) at the Modern Records Centre in Warwick University. We undertook a review of two important British predecessor journals, Case Conference and especially Social Work.

Oral histories were a central aspect of the study. Lengthy interviews, in some cases over two sessions, took place with 11 former and current editors, review editors and earlier and other key informants.

We undertook a complete analysis of journal content for the final full year of each of the 11 editorial regimes. The final year of each tenure was chosen to allow evidence of any editor-linked influences on the journal. In analysing the kinds of research published in the journal, we adopted an extended categorization of kinds of social work research (Shaw and Norton, 2007), which had been developed originally on a sample of BJSW articles. A classification of research methods, also developed by one of the team, was utilized in the analysis.

We framed the analysis in an initial broad set of themes (e.g. editorial practices, the identity of the journal as viewed by various communities linked to or more distant from the journal). Two team members then undertook a provisional fleshing out of these themes based on a subset of the interview and documentary data. We then negotiated agreement on a more detailed thematic framework. This was then applied to the main part of the data, making more nuanced elaborations of the themes as we did so.

Much of the data was in the public arena. However, there were two particular areas of ethical approval. First, the terms under which OUP agreed access to part of the electronic database for the journal, and for the minutes and papers for Editorial Board meetings; second, the probability that the identities of former editors, and other key informants from BASW and OUP, could be inferred or discovered from the interview transcripts. On the first question, the OUP undertook to agree sufficient terms of agreement. Certain data, such as the grouped, anonymous outcome of submission reviews, was not made available to the research team. On the second question, it was agreed that the project team would approach all persons to be interviewed, setting out the difficulty and asking their agreement based on informed consent as to the possible risk of disclosure. It was agreed by interviewed people and the advisory committee that it would be impossible to hide identities in a number of cases, and those interviewed were happy that this was so, but that we would do what we could to hide unnecessary explicit or implied disclosure. This article takes steps to further minimise this risk.

Following simultaneous but separate work on archival and interview data by different team members, the emerging themes were agreed. The eventual understanding of the substantive and temporally diverse data settled around four broad areas:

The identity of the journal

Journal practices

Journal form and content

The BJSW’s wider world.

In this article, the focus is especially on the second theme, although brief details on the origins and perspectives on the current identity of the journal serve as introduction.

Origins and identity of the journal

The two premier British social work journals in the 1960s were Case Conference (1954–1970) and Social Work, the latter being the last in an almost continuous line back to the first journal of the Charity Organisation Society. They both disappeared with the establishment of the BASW, the former being roughly replaced by the now no longer published Social Work Today and the latter more directly by BJSW, first published in 1971.

In the 1950s, social work’s disciplinary associations in the UK were oriented fairly tightly to social policy (or social administration as it was then called) and to psychotherapy of the psychodynamic variety. Clare Winnicott – a doyen of the social work and psychotherapy world, and also at the London School of Economics in the early 1950s – recalled a conversation with the founder and only editor of Case Conference, Kay McDougall, the year before it commenced, remembering that ‘the journal was not to be a learned journal for the few, but to be essentially for practitioners’. McDougall herself reaffirmed ‘I had never planned to produce a learned journal’ (McDougall, 1970: 514).

Olive Stevenson, the first editor of the BJSW, immediately set a contrast. ‘The Journal must speak for itself and justify – or fail to justify – its claim to be ‘a learned journal’, comparable to those in other professions and academic disciplines’.⁷ So Olive Stevenson opened the editorial of the first issue of the journal, both declining to, yet also expressing a position while doing so. The journal initiative and editorial appointment came, we are told, from a ‘temporary committee of BASW’ – ‘a new association struggling to achieve an identity for social work’. The Editor had been given ‘complete freedom’ apart from ‘certain financial matters’. The Editor had apparently appointed the Board. The seven members, including herself, comprised three academics, three from practice and the General Secretary of BASW. This number tallies exactly with Social Work, although only one had carried over from that journal. Five of the seven were women. Ten assessors were also listed, including just one from the Social Work editorial board, and of whom all were British academics with three women.

The contrast between Social Work and the newly minted BJSW in 1971 is striking. The general absence of a strong continuity of editorial board members suggests Olive Stevenson, the first editor, wished for a new start and to signal this all named people are given an affiliation, so suggesting the importance of institutional as well as personal identity. Stevenson expressed the ever-difficult balance of the academy and practice:

I make no apology for the fact that the assessors are all academics. For this is the expertise which is needed for this purpose and the representatives of the field on the Editorial Board will ensure that our intellectual aspirations do not run away with us—or run away from the field … It will not always be easy to find a proper balance between scholarship and readability. For we are conscious of the fact that unlike some 'learned journals' the readership is mainly composed of busy practitioners.

What constitutes a journal’s identity is slippery. Time and again, for example, we encountered claims about the ‘international’ character of the journal. The idea and the word came up in editorial minutes and reports, as part of former editors’ memories, and by inference from the analysis of the contents of the journal over 40 years. The diverse indicators through which being ‘international’ stand for a range of issues that, once inspected, manifest how the identity of a journal may have an inescapable ambiguity.

Journal practices

What practices have characterized the journal? Broadly speaking, there are those practices that are located primarily within the immediate creation of volume upon volume, and there are practices through which the journal interacts with those worlds that touch on its boundaries. Editorial appointments, editors’ visions, the work of reviewers and the infrastructure of technology are all located fairly close to the journal’s day-to-day practice. Moving outward, the Board, the publishers, the BASW, developments in university libraries, social work programmes and governmental research assessment programmes all form part of the worlds within which the journal is placed. In this article, the focus is on those comparatively internal practices.

Editorial regimes

‘It’s the way the world works’ – becoming a BJSW editor

The minutes of a meeting of the BASW Publications Committee in August 1973 record that the advert for the second editor had included the requirement that Olive Stevenson’s successor ‘should be a professionally qualified social worker of standing and experience’. A brief note records that just two expressions of interest had been received and that it had been agreed that Phyllida Parsloe should be appointed with the added note that she was ‘the senior of the two candidates’.

It may be of interest to hear the independent account of this decision from the second person.

On hearing Kenneth Brill⁸ [speaking about the planned BJSW] ‘I was very taken with that idea. I was a very young academic … and it really, I thought that was the goods, so I was in favour of the launch, and, being an ambitious young academic I thought “Yeah, I could have something to do with that.”’

Later,

‘when Olive was close to retirement from the editorship and she, and it was clear that a successor was needed, I wrote and offered my services, and she wrote back and said, “Well really Phyllida wants it at the moment, but why don’t you become book review editor?” So I became book review editor at the, when was that – ‘74 – and there was a kind of implicit notion that I would be the editor after Phyllida, so it was a kind of ordinary career related process really, nothing more, nothing more sort of esoteric or idealistic than that. It’s the way the world works’.

We heard numerous accounts of appointment. Lifting three from across the years of the journal, we find:

‘I knew somebody had a friend who was on the editorial board, and he kind of encouraged me to think about applying, and suggested that an application from X and myself for joint editorship would be favourably looked on by the board I suppose, that’s my memory. So I approached X and knew he was interested in applying for the editorship’

‘It’s one of those serendipitous things … I’m not exactly sure what they liked in my interview or what they saw in me, but I had done my homework, I mean I’d read some issues of the journal, I’d studied the website a good bit. Y from OUP was interested in whether I had any suggestions after that, and I was able to make a couple, so, and it was just a very congenial interview, I think all three of us hit it off’.

‘We were approached, as others were approached, by our predecessors, to think about, as … possible editors, invited to submit our CVs and go for interviews … There was a sense of well other people think we can do it, it seems interesting to us to do it, we know we can work together’.

The common ground across the decades is noticeable. A strong insider element, the role of networks, collegial processes, key colleague or friendship associations, serendipity (in the limited sense of luck), the guarding of continuity and identity and the fit with career intentions. The absences are as marked as what is present. There is limited sense of any open competition, or going for the best editor/s regardless of any previous direct or indirect association. This is not to demean the process, nor to suggest that the editors were anything other than the right choice. Nor is it to assume that editors and editorial regimes are monochrome. At least two of the former editors plausibly presented themselves in key respects as outliers, slightly maverick. But the overall consistency perhaps connects with the identity of the journal as a ‘Society journal’ where a strong representative identity is at stake.

Doing the job

Early editors often spoke of the week by week burden of work that editing involved.

‘… all done rather on a shoestring really, I mean my wife actually did … a lot of the administration. I couldn’t manage that, you know, I wasn’t given time within the university to do it, so that was actually quite difficult … and everything was so slow because we didn’t have e-mail or computers, so everything was done by mail. It took an awful long time to send things out, get them back, send them to the publishers, get proofs back, send the proofs back, so I think compared with now it was actually quite a hard slog to actually just keep it rolling and keep to deadlines’.

Without doubt the advent of online systems for submission, reviewing, proof correction and so on have alleviated this pressure. However, our general impression is that the classic operation of Parkinson’s Law is at work such that editorial work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Hence in one joint interview two post-Scholar One editors echoed each other’s remark:

(Joint editor 1) ‘that’s been another surprise for us, … just the treadmill aspect of production of the journal. Well certainly for me, I didn’t expect … that to preoccupy us quite so much, … ensuring the throughput of material, trying to ensure the quality of material, trying to control the amount of material …

(Joint editor 2) It would be nice to have more time to engage with some of those authors and shape up a bit of the material in a way that was authentic to their voice, but also took into account our sort of concerns as editors, and I agree X, we don’t get an awful lot of space to do that’.

Engaging with the authors raises an important characteristic of editorial work in the BJSW, and one that probably follows from the nature of the journal.

‘I did almost completely rewrite one or two papers because there was … a germ of something. It was so badly written, I ended up feeling we’re not a discipline that knows how to write very well, but we have a lot to say’.

‘We tried to encourage I suppose other voices from outside the academic community to write. But it’s definitely not easy … When the odd practitioner did come forward with a paper I know X and I invested a lot of time and energy in helping them to polish and make it as good as possible’.

Having said this, editors were not willing to give a chance to anything submitted. One person distinguished those submissions that failed to get beyond the editors’ initial appraisal (emphases added):

‘If) it’s essentially an opinion piece or a tirade of one kind or another, or it just didn’t have any scholarly merit, or was way shorter or way longer than the journal could consider. So there are quite a lot of situations where submissions don’t go out for review at all’.

Common ground yet desires to be distinctive go hand in hand within editorial regimes. As one former editor aptly expressed it, ‘I suppose there’s probably no way of getting around this, you know, when new editors come in, of being a bit critical of their predecessors, saying “We can improve on this”, “We can improve on that”.’ Asked if they had brought an agenda to editing the journal most, perhaps understandably, could recall one thing or another. This might have been about the content, tone or structure of the journal. On ‘tone’ one editor aimed ‘to bring it up to date … to make it a clearer reflection of where I felt the discipline was at that time and was going. We were passionate, it was a passionate era, about what the profession and the discipline should be engaged with’. Developments of this kind are not always viewed so warmly. Referring to a period quite close in time to the previous remark, someone said ‘people have got more keen to express opinions and to engage in discussion, even though they’ve got nothing to say’.⁹ On content, another reminded the interviewer ‘I was one of the … pioneers of behavioural social work, and though I wasn’t trying to make it into a behavioural social work journal, I was trying to push the journal, and social work, in the direction of an evidence base’. On format and structure someone recalled ‘we encouraged some shorter, particularly research notes, things like that which could be produced quite quickly and didn’t have to go through the rather ponderous, slow publishing process’.

How far any of these things actually happened is a different matter, but they were perhaps more likely to do so when there was a congruence of interest between at least two of the three key stakeholders, Editors and board, BASW and publishers. A key informant from the publishers said of one editorial regime ‘I had the sort of relationship with them where I could be pushing certain things which I felt were important to the journal. One of them was the profile in the States … When I say pushing, I knew this was something that they were interested in as well’.

How, then, did regimes vary? In two ways. First, there were variations that could best be explained in terms of the influence of particular persons; second, there were differences in the general character of regimes according to how interventionist they were.

Personal differences

Personal differences were highlighted by several people. An early editor said

‘I had a … very idiosyncratic vigorous style of editorship which you would never get now in journal editorship. It’s much more constrained, and perhaps rightly so. I think editing you see is actually a creative art … It’s a bit like being either the producer of a play or an orchestral conductor, and … I think the demeaning of editorship, as being simply an administrative process, totally fails to recognise that’.

An editor from a quarter of a century later said when asked on editorial aims ‘I think to some degree it will reflect (the) personality of the editors … I think that for example when X and I were editing it, we did probably look out for more sociological and politically orientated articles than say psychologically. I’m not sure if we did or we didn’t, but I suspect that we probably did. Those are things that attracted us’. A more direct relation of editorial regimes to the general identity of the editor can be seen in the following comment:

‘My impression when X came on was that it was quite a big deal … X was great, she was fun … so my sense is that she was … more of a free spirit kind of editor than perhaps the previous … I think X probably viewed herself as shaking things up a little bit, but to what extent that made any difference to the actual output of the journal, I don’t know … She had a slightly kind of irreverent … approach to things’.

Interventionist

Variations in terms of how interventionist an editorial regime may prove do seem fairly well grounded. There was one clear-cut example, taken from the editorial regime where the publishers detected a shared interest in moving the journal in a new direction. The editors listed eight action points which they brought to their tenure, and elaborated on the changes they had introduced. These entailed a general move in the direction of regularisation and a kind of corporatism. ‘Some of the other things that occasionally appeared in the journal were very ad hoc and we thought well either they need to appear on a regular basis or actually not at all’. Realizing a consequence of this they remarked ‘it wasn’t any sort of deliberate attempt to keep everything within house’.

More generally they remarked ‘we were a bit surprised I think by the archaic nature in which the journal was being run at that time … We were very keen to set very high standards in terms of how, making sure manuscripts were dealt with in a timely manner, not letting reviews drift and that kind of thing. And that certainly paid dividends in terms of, well I think in part in impact factor’. In summary ‘part of our ethos was we wanted to make that a bit more systematic, but also considerably more democratic’.

But shared interests, even when they happen, should not be seen as unreserved. Perhaps more surprising, diverging interests may not follow conventional expectations. For example, it may sound commonsensical that publishers will press for accessible, market-friendly outputs, while academic editors may be more likely to require and reward academic rigour. But in the case of the BJSW this was not obvious. We saw above that several editors stressed the importance of nurturing social work writers, and, where possible, giving time to nursing a less than perfect manuscript through to the finishing line. The response of the publishers to such worthy endeavours was less straightforward. I have included an extended extract from one interview that suggests this assumption about which interests promote academic rigour are quite different (Box 1).

Box 1.

Publishers’ brand.

‘One of the issues that … I think that it’s always a tricky subject to negotiate with editors is what’s the appropriate number of papers you should be accepting, the acceptance rate as a percentage … Now I think that [they]… saw part of the journal’s mission as being to help authors to improve their papers, particularly younger authors. So they would spend a lot of time and a lot of referees’ time working on papers that probably weren’t that great … And I think I would have gently suggested on a number of occasions that, noble as that mission is, … I didn’t think it was what they should have been trying to do, because, because (a) … it was taking up an awful lot of their time, (b) there’s a general problem with referee fatigue in the academic world, so people are being asked referee more and more papers, and they really don’t want to receive papers that are not particularly good to begin with, and (c) I felt that the journal should be aiming, broadly speaking, for high quality.

And of course … that’s part of OUP’s kind of brand and our mission, and I think … that largely was shared … by the editors. But I suppose there was … probably a tension there between myself on the one hand, probably encouraging the editors to be a bit more selective and to be a little bit more ruthless. If a paper really wasn’t going to make the grade … it’s generally kinder and better for everybody concerned to say so at the outset. But … I think they struggled with the idea of just rejecting the papers and not helping authors out with positive feedback from referees’.

We should note in passing the shift, during the 1990s, from solo to joint editing. For most this was a straightforward, often pragmatic decision. The exception to this general welcome for the inevitable was a former editor who ‘thought it was daft … I’m not a great believer in co-editing. I think it tends to reduce the style and personality of a book or a journal, you know, you get the sort of combination of two people and you tend to get the lowest common denominator if you’re not careful. So it avoids risk in one sense, but on the other hand I think good editing should involve risk, so I think it’s not a good idea’. On balance ‘I think it’s led to the greater routinisation of the process of editing and publishing’. Continuing, this editor suggested ‘I think the reasons probably were … that on the whole people think social work should aim to be safe and balanced, and they thought, possibly rightly, that they might achieve that better with two editors than one’.

Although this development was seen as an almost inevitable consequence of journal trends, it should be noted that this has not been the pattern in the USA where Social Service Review, Social Work, Research on Social Work Practice and Social Work Research were all solo edited at the time of the research, though in some cases with tiered levels of responsibilities. The remark above about greater routinization may have some plausibility, and it may certainly reduce the likelihood of the appointment of ‘outlier’ editorial appointments, and the degree of individuality.

Reviewers and reviewing

Distinguishing between the judgements of editors and those of reviewers should not be overdrawn. Editors may have varied in how much they engaged in pre-review filtering. An important underlying question here is the degree of power invested in editors and how far that has changed. An early editor was unequivocal on this point.

‘In my time the editorship was much more powerful I think is the fair, the right word. I felt that it was the editor’s role not necessary to accept the views of the reviewers, because often they were in conflict with each other, and so I did feel very strongly that the editor … had the last say, the last word, on whether journal articles should be published or not … I didn’t allow the reviews or reviewers to make demands on either me or the author … It gave me absolute freedom to publish an article if I thought it merited publishing even if one or other of the reviewers didn’t. So it was a very pragmatic system, which is very different from what applies now’.¹⁰

But this sense of exercising power persisted into the 1990s, albeit with greater equivocation:

‘there were some papers that I rejected without sending them to assessors. Looking back I’m not sure that was a good thing to do, but I mean I was certainly confident, and I would go on being confident, that the papers that I did that with would not have been accepted for publication; but arguably it was a bit unfair to the authors’.

It is possible that one consequence of the journal’s expansion is a reversion to editorial autonomy. ‘We are increasing the use of reject without review as part of this, our increased clarity around what we think should be there, what shouldn’t, as a way of managing the flow of articles’. We can say little about the figures for editorial decisions on submissions. What reports to the Board from the last decade or so do tell us is that rejection rates have slowly increased, from 27% in 2004 to 40% in 2011, possibly as a result of increased submissions and of tightening acceptance criteria, as well as ‘benchmarking’ against comparable journals where rejections rates are higher.

The profile of the reviewer database is important. It is the nearest we have to an operationalization of the range of knowledge and standpoints that are thought to make up the field. We were not given access to lists of reviewers for any period of the journal’s history nor, apart from the documentary records, to information about patterns in decisions regarding outcomes, and so can make only limited assessments of this central question.

First, it is possible with the advent of automated linkage of reviewers to submissions that the collective character of the reviewer list is less visible even to editors. Recent editors remarked

‘we will eventually get down to try and make sense of the types and the quality of the reviewers … The numbers that we’ve got and where they come from, I think it’s fair to say, still is a bit of a mystery to us. There’s this big list of reviewers, some of whom volunteer themselves, some of whom automatically come up because they’ve authored, means that … there’s a bit of a lottery in who pops up if you do the automatic allocations against subject area of interest’.

This ‘modern’ system is quite different from what obtained thirty years ago. Speaking of reviewers, an editor of the time recalled ‘I think on the whole they tended to be people that the editorial board knew and recommended … I don’t think it was a very open process, I don’t think people were invited to apply’. Midway through the history of the journal some detected a process of academization, such that ‘while we were editing it there was a move away from practitioner assessors towards pretty much exclusively academic ones’.¹¹ Indeed, quoting someone else, ‘that journal, like all journals, is now part of that … process by which academics and university departments come to be rated on the scale. So it’s a very crucial dimension in the way of life that academics now live’.

The actual arrangements for reviewing are by most people taken for granted. Articles are sent to two people anonymously, chosen for their knowledge and the field, who reply to the editors who then make a judgement based on the reviews. Neither author/s nor reviewers know the identity of the other – a process of ‘double blind’ as it sometimes it called.

The first observation to make is that the system of anonymising reviews is not as recent as we may assume. This exchange took place with an editor who was in place in the late 1970s.

‘Were the reviews always anonymous?

Yeah, … Those who had submitted papers didn’t get to know who the reviewers were

OK, were the authors also anonymous to the reviewers?

They, no, no, the papers at that time would have gone out with the name of the person there’.

This editor went on to say ‘I think that there were the beginnings of discussions about the anonymity and so on, and the new system, but during my time things didn’t actually change’. Referring to practice a few years later, another editor said

‘We certainly had two reviewers, but we only provided blind reviews on request. It was a much less transparent review process in those days … An author could request a blind review, in which case their name was blacked out, and there was nothing which identified them, which was sent to the reviewer, but I don’t think that, I can’t remember that ever happening actually. I don’t think anybody ever requested a blind review’.

By the late 1990s the academic review culture as it now is had come to be taken more or less as given. Take the following two comments from that general period:

‘So sometimes you can work it out, and occasionally we let things slip through, but 99.9% of the time yes it was double blind … but yes, they went out double blind … unless we made a mistake’.

The purpose of including this time series of accounts is not to raise knowing smiles at the superiority of later ways of doing things. While we have not been able to discover any sense of the change being troublesome, we should not treat it as given. The issue became the focus of a major controversy in Chicago sociology around 1960–1961. Everett Hughes had been Editor of the AJS. A transition period was marked by ‘intense conflict between Everett Hughes and Peter Rossi’ (Abbott, 1999: 140). The context and what was in effect a putsch while Hughes was away in Germany need not detain us. But the issue of double-blind reviewing was symptomatic. It was a lost battle for Hughes but there is an interesting note from him on the arguments against it that raises some significant points about kinds of bias. Abbott interestingly observes that Hughes’ position on this issue ‘rested on the classical Chicago conception of social facts as situated, a position diametrically opposed to the new decontextualized sociology of variables represented by Blau and Rossi’ (p. 147). Double-blind reviewing is depersonalization of social work scholarship, though Hughes probably underestimated the kinds of discrimination that were likely under the system he seemed to prefer. In principle there could be a fairly strong empirical test of the hypothesis through a careful ‘before and after’ study of the adoption of double-blind reviewing, but the data for such a natural experiment probably does not exist.

Editorial judgement

Among the observations that first prompted the proposal to undertake this research was a comment, again by Abbott, on how the editorial decision of ‘revise and resubmit’ had become almost universal when submitting articles. ‘I do know from personal experience that 99.9% of the time it’s going to be some form of revise and resubmit’ as one editor expressed it. Indeed, the rarity of any author having an article accepted as it stood was reflected in one editor’s remark that ‘I know there were only ever two in my whole editorship that I didn’t proof’.

Do such routine practices lead to undue standardization? The evidence is not easy to pin down. One person opined ‘I would be surprised if it led, in the case of social work anyway, to greater uniformity, because I think the assessors are diverse enough and covering a wide enough range in terms of opinions and expertise’. Someone else weighed the pros and cons:

‘it can be seen I think as just either part of quality control, which I think is how we would see it, or I suppose it can be seen as pushing everything away to the margins to a more standardised, sanitised centre. But I think for us at the moment, the quality control argument outweighs that one’.

When practised together with recent online processes, regular ‘revise’ requirements probably lead to a more direct and transparent feedback. Prior to then the kind of practice was more mediated through editorial extracts and digests:

‘I don’t think the reviewer’s comments were sent to the author, I think it was probably a summary. I think a summary was developed by the editor, of what the comments were, and the author was written to along those lines, trying to be as tactful as possible I think and as kind as possible’.

There were, however, substantial caveats raised in the interviews. These related to questions of the nature of academic disciplines and whether article review and management patterns jeopardize creativity and originality. On the nature of academic disciplines someone said,

‘I think it’s given power to reviewers that I think isn’t always justified, and reviewers can be as idiosyncratic as authors, so you can end up with some very silly ideas coming from reviewers so that if you adopt that revise and resubmit method, which I agree I think has become the norm, it rather undermines the principles of academic discipline I think. But it is true, yeah, and it’s true of the BJSW’.

The observations regarding risks to creativity are perhaps to similar effect:

‘I do think the revise and resubmit thing probably brings everything back to the norm, and probably means that things are somewhat safer and less dangerous, and I don’t think that’s particularly helpful. I would rather see people publish and be damned than publish and have all the edginess taken out of it. So frankly I think that the revise and resubmit may well lead to a sort flattening of innovation and creativity’.

This argument brings us back to questions regarding how the nature of social science scholarship in general and social work in particular ought to be reflected in the canons of peer assessment. Double-blind reviewing and associated methods of peer assessment are not neutral technical issues, but mirror particular conceptions of scholarship. They may be right but they are not self-evidently so.

Technology and the BJSW

We tend to talk about ‘new’ technology. While there are new forms of technology, the phrase ‘new technology’ may be misleading. What we think of as ‘new’ is not essentially so, but only so at this moment in our time. This is partly because ‘the way we collect, retrieve, store and manage data will always be shaped by context including the historic moment, and our relationship to it’ (Staller, 2010: 287). In the frequent use of the phrase ‘new technology’, we can see how ‘technology’, like the word ‘science’, functions as a positive rhetorical value. When speaking of technology in relation to the BJSW we are doing so in a limited way, to explore the general sense that something significant took place with the move in the middle of the last decade to online submission, review, feedback, transfer of documents to publishers, and the shift whereby all communication back and forth between various interested parties took place through electronic means.

Comparing with former ways, one past editor said ‘I think it’s really positive, because it speeds the whole process up, I think that’s the key thing. I would have loved to have had that, those processes available when I was editor … Still my main recollection is working with my wife, just the enormous labour that was involved in just sending things out and checking when they came back, and chasing up the odd reviewers who never seemed to be available … It was just very labour intensive’. One is forcibly struck by how recent some changes took place and how present practices are not givens. It should also caution us against assuming that journal changes are now in some final form or are in some obvious way ‘correct’. The role of memory is important here, in the sense that how certain ways of doing that were at the time seen as part and parcel of how things always were and would be done, now seem a forgotten world. One editor said ‘I can’t remember because it’s pre e-mail’, and later ‘I can’t remember because it’s pre e-mail, so how on earth did we do it? It just feels like impossible now but we did … And I was once talking to an author on the phone, we used the phone, that’s what we used to do, a lot of phoning’.

Publishers tend to welcome such trends. A publisher key informant observed:

‘publishers love it, they love the fact that there are more and more ambitious academics being told that they have to write for publication if they want to get anywhere in this world … is bound to mean that more and more pages would have to be printed in order to accommodate that flood of aspiring academics … So I think you’d have to say it’s a good thing, but it’s a reflection of the madness of modern academic life’.

In less sanguine terms those who speak for practitioners stress ‘our problem is that we are tending to use these changes by and large to overload people rather than find ways of making information more manageable for people.

The BJSW is one very small fish on a heavily stocked pond when it comes to developments in journal publishing. One of the deepest and most extensive consequences has been in relation to libraries, and the future prospects for hard copy publication of journals. The development was described by one editor as follows:

‘journals are sold in baskets to libraries and … it doesn’t make much sense now. I mean I access BJSW, I do have a physical copy … as an ex-editor, but to be honest if I want anything I go online and get the PDF. So I mean it’s hard to know now … how you count readership. Copies produced when it was a text-based entity you could count, but now I guess it’s hits and downloads of the PDFs, so I don’t know how you measure readership anymore’.

The meaning of this development is more profound than a question of scale and volume. One important aspect is around title loyalty. An early editor was one of the very few to notice this. ‘Because of what I’ve said about the enthusiasm in BASW for it, it did have quite a number of loyal individual subscribers, even outside of the academic sphere. I suspect that is no longer the case, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was principally a library based journal now’. It may now be the case that only a minority of readers will see any journal as something they follow, and that people read by choice of article and less than by choice of journal – a shift that may be regarded as quite profound. Seen negatively, this may be regarded as a fragmentation of collective scholarly enterprise, whereby people easily can locate the work of favourite authors.

Endings and inferences

The study’s aim was to illuminate the role and significance of the BJSW as a repository of social work scholarship. In doing so, we kept to the fore the wider question of social work as a field which has taken and found shape/s within the journal over approaching half a century. In this particular sense the journal is a journal of record. The study is not quite one of either a journal or a professional and scholarly field, but of one as the embodiment of the other.

Whether social work is a discipline, has discipline-like qualities, or is a field with boundaries enclosing diverse borrowings, applications and adaptations, is not a straightforward question, nor usually one helpfully pursued at least as a way of arguing some encompassing claim. The data, even though relatively comprehensive, are not complete. We were limited by not being able to have access to anonymized and group data regarding review decisions, or to information about the character and composition of the review community. But it is incomplete in a more enduring sense, for there is no reason to imagine that the BJSW now is in some finished state of arrival.

The study invites questions about how we should understand the development of social work knowledge and theory, and the role of editors, reviewers and shifting forms of technology in this process. We would eschew any assumption that journals embody a linear process of growth in knowledge, expertise and sophistication. To give just one example, there was apparently much greater immediacy in responsive exchange within early years of this and predecessor journals than is the case in the second decade of this century. Second, it seems probable that several important contributing explanatory elements in the development of social work are typically hidden. We have noted that we had no access to the decisions of reviewers, when we can assume with some safety that this is one of the most important processes through which certain ideas, practices and approaches are either approved or disapproved. A clearer knowledge of such processes could be gained without any threat to the confidentiality of individual author/reviewer/editor decisions. Third, we suspect that knowledge of the development of social work is likely to result in an under-estimate of personal, systemic and institutional factors, and accordingly a relative over-estimate of rational, intellectual influences.

We were struck, more unexpectedly that we anticipated, by the strong sense of continuity – in terms, for example, of how those to whom we spoke understood the journal’s identity, the ways in which editorial successions have been managed, and in our empirical analyses (Shaw et al., forthcoming) of what has found place between its covers.¹² We also have been impressed by the capacity of the journal to incorporate and embody changes – writing voice, technology, size of operation, and so on. These changes have typically been marked by conservative incrementalism.

We also have noticed the presence – indeed we might say essential presence – of tensions, manifested in the deployment of rhetorical arguments and pleas. The classic example of this lies in the question of if and how the journal is or ought to be ‘international’. Always sought – it was Olive Stevenson who first gave voice to this ambition – but rather marginally accomplished. But while calculated to persuade, the ebb and flow of rhetorical issues are no less about substance and realities. This journal will remain, in the apt terms of a key informant from the USA, the BJSW, rather than the Journal of British Social Work.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The research team is grateful to John Pinkerton and Jim Campbell who, as the then editors of the journal, embraced the idea of this study with enthusiasm. Former editors and key informants associated with the British Association of Social Workers and Oxford University Press (OUP) constantly impressed us by their willingness to ransack their memories.

We were given helpful access to the British Association of Social Workers archives at the University of Warwick Modern Records Centre. OUP provided us with minutes and reports to the BJSW Editorial Board for the ten year period covered by the study. Finally, we want to give special thanks to the British Association of Social Workers, for their funding of the study, and in particular to Bridget Robb, who always responded positively, practically and without reproach to the various scheduling difficulties that hit the team and were beyond anyone’s control.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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