Editor’s Note

We are pleased to share the articles published in this issue, full of diverse ideas and perspectives as follows:

• Editorial on indigenous research in HRD

Upon request of interested editorial board members in this year’s annual editorial board meeting, we formed a subcommittee on indigenous research whose nine committee members ¹ met twice in the summer and decided to write a collective editorial on the topic. Following Peter Kuchinke’s lead, six members took part in writing the editorial from diverse perspectives. This is our sincere endeavor to make HRD research relevant to and inclusive of marginalized groups and communities, at a time when Pope Francis apologized for the Catholic Church’s critical mistake (Horowitz & Austen, 2022) of assimilating indigenous children to Canada’s western ideology through residential schools (Cooper, 2022), ignoring their own identities and culture. Additionally, there was a report on why there are so few native students at the University of Hawaii that was built on their own land (Adedoyin, 2022). This is certainly a long-awaited effort not only for Indigenous people who had to endure the wrongdoings of Western colonialism (e.g., Kormann, 2022) but also for my parents’ generation who had to change their native Korean to Japanese names and to speak in Japanese under the Japanese colonial periods (1910–1945) in the Korean peninsula.

We invited Läwurrpa Elaine Mahypilama as an Australian Indigenous researcher and Petra Buergelt and Douglas Paton as Western researchers to reflect on their collaborative research experiences and the understandings they gained through working together with very remote Indigenous communities in Northern Australia. In their guest editorial, they offered their perspectives regarding the potential value of Indigenous knowledges for HRD research and practice, how to best design and conduct research together with Indigenous peoples and communities, and possible implications for HRD research and practice. The first author Buergelt witnessed that their collaboration only occurred because of Läwurrpa Elaine Mahypilama, an Indigenous senior elder with over 40 years of experience working together with Western researchers. This guest editorial will contribute to expanding the scope of HRD research to further inspire and enable research with Indigenous people and communities across the world. HRD researchers and practitioners working together two-way with Indigenous peoples will also help achieve the UN’s sustainable development goals of leaving no one behind.

Wang and Doty’s article on theorizing HRD practices in extended contexts adds value to HRD research as theory building in HRD has not been actively conducted in recent years. They theorize HRD as multi-level and multi-context practices to decode the causality and regularities from open to closed sociopolitical contexts such as China and North Korea from a positivist perspective. To hear their first-hand critiques, we invited Darlene Russ-Eft and Hyung Joon Yoon who have reviewed the article over the past two years and also invited Rob Poell who has volunteered to write a meta-reaction article with impartiality. In the process, we aim at promoting the importance of theory building in HRD from different angles, which is the essence of the journal that should be continued for the future.

Shirmohammadi et al.‘s systematic review on work-life balance during Covid-19 is a timely article that is grounded in resource-based theory and provides insights for HRD research and practice. Last but not least, Hitchcock’s article for the Instructor’s Corner is an update of his articles on mixed-methods (Hitchcock & Newman, 2012; Newman & Hitchcock, 2011) that addressed a call to explore aspects of theory-building in the context of research methods. Ten years on, he confirms most of his arguments about the necessity of using both qualitative and quantitative methodological choices instead of overemphasizing division between the two paradigms and provides three ways of doing so, so that HRD scholars can build on those in their mixed-methods research. This issue will surely inspire you to move forward with such diverse perspectives of theory building in HRD!