IACMR MONTHLY BRIEFING-August 2014

– Updates on IACMR Publications

– Book: Management Education for the World

– Conversation with Founding EIC of MOR

– Staff leaving: Irene Zhang

– IACMR Newsletter

IACMR Business Meeting 2014

The 2014 IACMR business meeting was held on Aug. 3 during the AOM annual meeting at Philadelphia. Prof. Jiing-Lih Larry Farh, President of 2014-2016, addressed the audience by reviewing the IACMR history and its main products and sharing the current status and development, the challenges and future actions of IACMR. IACMR enjoys strong growth and is becoming a more mature, visible, and impactful organization. There are over 7000 registered members and 1297 fee-paying members across China, America and Europe. In the meantime, IACMR is faced with such challenges as rising operating costs, membership development and retention, and culture building. The new leadership team headed by Prof. Farh will spearhead to tackle the issues and lead the association to a new phase of development.

Following Prof. Farh’s presentation, Prof. Jing Zhou briefed the audience the IACMR Constitution and Bylaws revision on behalf of the task force. She talked about the reasons to make the revisions and the efforts the task force made in the 18-month process. She highlighted the major areas of the changes made in the revised version of the Constitution and Bylaws and particularly emphasized the revised IACMR objectives and revised sequence of the IACMR core values. The revised Constitution and Bylaws was voted by the membership in the past months of 2014 and the result of 152 positive votes meant the pass of the revised Constitution and Bylaws. (link: http://www.iacmr.org/v2en/List.asp?navid=15 )

On behalf of Neng Liang, Vice President and 2014 Conference Program Chair, Prof. Hui Liao, micro Track Chair (English) talked about the conference theme, new features, the statistics and the preliminary analysis of the 2014 conference submissions/sessions.

Next Prof. Arie Lewin updated on MOR about its new editorial structure, the 2014 mid-year status and announced the new publisher of MOR from 2015 as shown in the next part of the Briefing. Also he promoted the inaugural research frontiers conference to be held in Hong Kong University of Science & Technology in December 2014.

Prof. Ray Friedman, Vice President and Program Chair of 2016 IACMR Conference, briefed about the preparation of the Hangzhou conference. Focusing on Culture and Chinese Management, the next conference will welcome all management related topics with expansion of strategy coverage. Since Zhejiang is strong in private economy, some Zhejiang-focused topics will also be considered, such as family business, entrepreneurship and e-commerce in China. Ray announced the members of the program committee:

Ray Friedman, Vanderbilt University (Program Chair)

Zhen Zhang, Arizona State University (Micro, English)

Lynda Song, Renmin University of China (Micro, Chinese)

Haibin Yang, City University of Hong Kong (Macro, English)

Runtian Jing, Shanghai Jiaotong University (Macro, Chinese)

Xu Huang, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Micro, Chinese & English)

Tony Fang, Stockholm University (PDW Workshops)

Dr. Ming-Jer Chen, Past President of AOM, Professor of Business Administration from the University of Virginia made a speech titled ‘Becoming Ambicultural: A Conversation with IACMR Members’. He shared his rich and fascinating life experience in how “becoming ambicultural”—bridging dichotomies such as East and West, global and local, research and teaching—enables him to integrate the best qualities of seemingly irreconcilable opposites. He also led a discussion on how IACMR can embrace ambicultural ideal to become a premier academic association of management to better serve its members in a global world. The business meeting was followed by a reception jointly hosted by IACMR/Wiley/Shanghai Jiaotong University. Prof. Yuan Li, Executive Dean of Antai College of Economics and Management of Shanghai Jiaotong University, gave a welcome remark at the reception and talked about the history and current developments of Antai College.

 About 100 people were present at the reception, an appealing platform for China-minded international scholars to meet and exchange ideas and have discussions.

IACMR Publications

 
MOR 10.2

The July 2014 issue of MOR (Volume 10, Issue 2) includes a collection of editorials on the peer-review process by Arie Y. Lewin, Leigh Anne Liu, Paul S. Hempel, and Eric W. K. Tsang. The issue is also a special issue dedicated to the topic of “Business Leadership in the Chinese Context,” with an introduction by the issue’s guest editors, Zhi-Xue Zhang, Zhen Xiong Chen, Ya-Ru Chen, and Soon Ang. Authors (listed in alphabetical order) includeYuntao Bai, ArranCaza, Jeanne Ho-ying Fu, Jane Y. Jiang, Kenneth S. Law,Fangjun Li, Peter Ping Li, Zhenjiang Qi, Lynda Jiwen Song, James J. M. Sun, Lu Wang, Joshua B. Wu, Jixia Yang, Kuo Frank Yu, Gang Zhang, and Xiujuan Zhang. We hope you enjoy reading this issue’s interesting articles!

Management and Organization Review/Peking University Press Best Paper Award of Chinese Theory of Management

 Please join us in congratulating Victor Nee (Cornell University) and Yang Cao (Cornell University) for winning the MOR/PUP best paper award for “Market Transition and the Firm: Institutional Change and Income Inequality in Urban China” (MOR1(1): 23-56). Victor Nee was present at the IACMR Awards lunch to receive the award. Please join us in congratulating Victor and Yang on this tremendous accomplishment!

Wiley-Blackwell—Management and Organization Review Young Scholar Award

We are pleased to announce that Professor Dali Ma (Drexel University) is the winner of the 2014 Wiley-Blackwell—Management and Organization Review Young Scholar award for his paper “A Relational View of Organizational Restructuring: The Case of Transitional China” (MOR 8(1): 51-75). He was presented the award at the IACMR Conference Awards lunch in Beijing. Please join us in congratulating Dali on this great achievement!

Management and Organization Review Best Reviewer Awards

We are excited to announce that Chi-Nien Chung (National University of Singapore),Yaping Gong (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Tae-Yeol Kim (CEIBS), Leigh Anne Liu (Georgia State University), and Jia Lin Xie(University of Toronto) received the 2014 Best Reviewer Awards at the MOR board meeting held at the IACMR Conference in Beijing. They were selected for upholding MOR’s developmental orientation by providing high quality and timely reviews. We wish to extend our sincerest thanks for the wonderful work our reviewers do to support MOR!

MOR 2013 Impact Factor

The 2013 Journal Citation Report has been released and we are delighted to report that Management and Organization Review’s 2013 Impact Factor is 3.227 – an increase on the 2012 IF of 2.829. In addition, this moves MOR’s ranking among management journals to 14/172 (from 31/174 in 2012). MOR has been sponsored by the Business School of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Guanghua School of Management of Peking University since its inaugural issue in 2005. Guanghua School of Management released this good news in its official Chinese website (http://www.gsm.pku.edu.cn/index/P807764881340104993228.html?clipperUrl=30/49334.ghtm).

New Publisher for MOR

Beginning in 2015 MOR will be published by Cambridge University Press. The MOR editorial team has been working closely with CUP on this transition and both parties are excited about the future growth of MOR. Some highlights from this transition:

 – MOR will increase the frequency of publication to four issues per year.

 – Beginning with Volume 11 (2015) IACMR members will receive MOR online as part of their annual membership. This is in line with the trend of environmental protection. We don’t encourage our members to subscribe to printed copies. However, members still have an option to receive a printed annual volume for a discounted member fee of $30/year if it is necessary to have printed copies.

 – New marketing avenues are being explored to increases MOR’s visibility and reach.

The book was first published in English in July 2013. Prof. Anne Tsui saw the great potential of the book in leading the business schools in China and in the world to change their mind to become more responsible management institutions and promoted translation and publication of the book in Chinese. The Chinese version of the book was published in June 2014 and, with support from the China National MBA Education Supervisory Committee, the book has been distributed to over 200 business schools across China.

About the Authors

Katrin Muff, Dean, Business School Lausanne, Switzerland,

Thomas Dyllick, Delegate for Responsibility and Sustainability, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland,

Mark Drewell, Chief Executive, The Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative, Belgium,

John North, Associate, Albert Luthuli Center for Responsible Leadership, University of Pretoria, South Africa,

Paul Shrivastava, Director, David O’Brien Center for Sustainable Enterprise, Concordia University, Canada and

Jonas Haertle, Head, PRME Secretariat, UN Global Compact Office, US

About the book

For many years commentators have described what is wrong with business schools – characterizing them as the breeding grounds of a culture of greed and self-enrichment in global business at the expense of the rest of society and of nature. Management Education for the World is a response to this critique and a handbook for those seeking to educate and create knowledge for a new breed of business leaders. It presents a vision for the transformation of management education in service of the common good and explains how such a vision can be implemented in practice.

This book explores the 21st century agenda of management education, identifying three fundamental goals: educating and developing globally responsible leaders, enabling business organizations to serve the common good, and engaging in the transformation of business and the economy. It is a clarion call of service to society for a sector lost between the interests of faculty, business and the schools themselves at the expense of people and planet. It sees business education stepping up to the plate with the ability of holding and creating a space to provide responsible leadership for a sustainable world embodied in the central and unifying element of the 50+20 vision, the collaboratory.

Management Education for the World is written for everyone concerned or passionate about the future of management education: consultants, facilitators, entrepreneurs and leaders in organizations of any kind, as well as policymakers and others with an interest in new and transformative thinking in the field. In particular, teachers, researchers, students and administrators will find it an invaluable resource on their journey.

Media coverage of the book

China Business News has noticed the importance of the views in the book and has published two sections of the book: ‘reconnecting business to society’ (Part I – 2) and ‘management educators as custodians of society’ (Part I – 4) on Aug. 1 and Aug. 15 respectively.

The 2013 Journal Citation Report has released that Management and Organization Review’s 2013 Impact Factor is 3.227, placing MOR’s ranking at No. 14 among 172 management journals. It’s very encouraging news. Zhijun Yao, Executive Director, has had a conversation with Anne Tsui, the founding editor-in-chief of MOR, to explore why and how MOR has achieved its current status in a decade.

Question: why was it important to introduce a journal on management and organization when there were many journals in the field already in 2005?

In 1996-1999, I was the Editor for AMJ. I asked my associate editors if they would consider having a special issue on China. Their answer was no because AMJ would not publish research on a specific region. If AMJ had a special issue on China, why not a special issue on India, Brazil, or France. I also heard other editors talked about submissions from other countries. For example, they asked why AMJ should publish a paper about job satisfaction in Africa. They must provide a reason why that context was important or interesting. I as well as a number of other scholars wondered why editors or reviewers wanted the author to justify a study in their countries, but a paper about employees in New York or in Texas did not have to make this justification. The importance of context came into light a few years later. These editors actually had foresight, but I was ignorant at the time about this, but fortunately realized that research in new contexts must be allowed a venue where such research findings should be shared with the management scholarship community. In the late 1990’s, management research in China began to pick up. My colleagues and I at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology discussed the idea of having a journal that was dedicated to Chinese management research. It would welcome studies in China and authors do not have to justify a Chinese sample. Hence, we created MOR, specifically for authors who study employees and firms in China.

In 2000 to 2001, I was a visiting professor at the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University. I discussed the journal idea with the then Executive Dean Prof. Weiyging Zhang. He strongly supported this idea. His foresight and vision was instrumental in the final decision to create MOR. His support was a strong endorsement that such a journal would be important and necessary in China. I am grateful to both Guanghua School of Management and the Business School of HKUST for providing their generous financial support to MOR since its founding and continuing to this date.

Question: what are the characteristics of MOR in comparison with other management journals?

MOR has a specific focus on China. Even though the domain has been expanded to cover other emerging economies, China is still the core focus. Also, MOR has a developmental philosophy. We try to give all authors feedback on their submissions, including those whose papers that are not ready to be formally reviewed. After a paper is accepted, we work with the author to improve it until it is the best it can be. We take this developmental philosophy seriously. In recent years, we have published many papers about unique phenomena in China such as the idea of Yin-Yang, guanxi, renqing, and traditional cultural values like Confucianism, Daoism, or Legalism. It is a great resource for scholars and managers who want to learn about Chinese management in theory and in practice.

Question: when deciding on accepting a paper or not, what criteria do you think are most important?

We look for papers that address important problems in Chinese organizations. They have to have an interesting idea that adds to our current stock of knowledge on the topic. The conceptual logic should be persuasive, and the empirical method should be rigorous so that we can have confidence in the validity of the conclusion. We are more understanding of the English writing because many authors are not native English speakers. We have an English editor who does excellent work and she helps our authors to polish their papers.

Question: what did you do to get the first good IF of 2.806 just in 5 years from its inaugural issue?

The main reason is that we have published some excellent papers that attracted many readers. MOR articles were cited by a variety of journals in management and other disciplines. We send the Table of Contents to various groups in the management research community potentially interested in China and in good scholarship. We have articles by many distinguished scholars and young authors. We have special issues on topics that deserve more research attention, and we have editors’ forum on issues that are current and controversial. For example, we published an issue on the “Future of Chinese Management Research”. The ideas discussed by the authors of the essays in this forum are applicable to scholarship in other emerging contexts such as India or South America. The article by Barney and Zhang on the debate between Chinese Theory of Management or Theory of Chinese Management was well received. Equally influential is the article on contextualization by Whetten and another one by Child. We also published an editors’ forum on Publication and Research Ethics. The articles in this forum are not citation candidates. We knew that but the topic is so important that we want to publish it.

Question: what have you done to bring the journal to such a height in the following 5 years?

We did not do anything in particular. We just continue to publish good articles on important topics.

Question: any other points that you would like to mention to demonstrate the high quality and status among the 172 ISI-listed journals…

“Citations” is one indicator of the influence of the articles in a journal. However, we must keep in mind that this is not a perfect indicator. Authors cannot do an exhaustive search of all relevant articles to their study. They search in their fields of familiarity. Therefore, well-established older journals have an advantage. Articles in the new journals that may be most relevant can be overlooked. To move up into a list with many well established journals and a highly competitive field is not an easy feat. We see an extremely well regarded journal ASQ in rank 34 in 2013. It has a rank of 8 in 2012. This is crazy. There is not much room to move up and plenty of room to move down. MOR is more likely to go down than to go up next year. We should not get too excited about one year’s citation figure. We should look at the quality of the papers in a journal and judge if they offer new insight that we do not know previously. As the new editor in chief Prof Arie Lewin said “we want to find the jewel in each paper”. We hope that each MOR paper has a jewel that is precious knowledge about management in China and in other emerging economies.

IACMR Newsletter

The last issue of the IACMR Newsletter has been posted at the website (Publications/Newsletter/2014 Special Issue, http://www.iacmr.org/v2en/Detail.asp?id=152). It is a special issue about the 2014 IACMR Conference, in both English and Chinese. Enjoy reading!

As announced in the July issue of the Monthly Briefing, the quarterly Newsletter will be replaced by the bilingual Monthly Briefing which brings you timely the news and reports about IACMR and members’ activities, the information about research and career development. We also welcome members’ thoughts, suggestions and news in the members’ universities/organizations relevant to management research and teaching. Please keep sending your submissions to us at iacmrmembership@pku.edu.cn.

Goodbye, Newsletter!

Information Bridge

IIE has announced the launch of the Confucius China Studies Program (CCSP) Joint Research Ph.D. Fellowship, a generous funding opportunity for doctoral students who wish to pursue research in China.

For more detailed information, please click here (http://www.iie.org/Programs/Confucius-China-Studies-Program).