Dear IACMR members, colleagues and friends,

On behalf of the Executive Committee, I would like to wish everyone Happy Holidays, and hope that 2021 is filled with peace, love, fulfillment and – most of all – good health.   

This has been an extremely difficult year, with remote teaching, cancelled conferences, university budget crises, and minimal contact with friends and family. Through all of this, IACMR’s Beijing staff, leadership, and members have remained focused the mission of supporting Chinese management research and teaching.   

While we could not have our biannual conference in Xi‘an last summer, we were able to run our Teaching Workshop in Nanjing, and we created two new virtual seminars – one on research, and one on career development. In a way, the COVID-19 crisis forced us to innovate in ways that provide better service to our members.  

Thanks to all of you who have contributed to IACMR, including our staff in Beijing, our conference organizers, track chairs, student volunteers, and host schools, our board and committee members, our reviewers for MOR and the conferences, workshop faculty, and our journal editors and staff. It takes so many people contributing their time and energy to make IACMR be the scholarly community that it is, and wants to be. 

I would like to take a moment to report a few highlights of 2020.

Two New On-Line Seminars.  We have launched two on- line seminars: the IACMR Research Seminar, delivered monthly, and IACMR Young Scholar Development Seminar, delivered bimonthly. Through these platforms, we provide members with access to high quality management research and offer a forum to discuss career development.  We have had as many as 500 attendees, indicating that these seminars are meeting a need in our community.  Even after our biannual conference is back to normal, we plan to keep these seminars since they enable us to connect throughout the year.  

Teaching Workshop.   In October we had our second stand-alone teaching workshop, attended by 45 young faculty from 33 universities. It was held in Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, with talks about, for example, “Case Teaching: Substantive Analysis and Process Design” ,  “Integrating Research and Teaching” and  “The Art of Storytelling in Management Teaching”.

Management and Organization Review. Our flagship journal, Management and Organization Review, had some tremendous papers come out in 2018 and 2019, resulting a two-year impact factor of 2.34. Keep an eye out for new issues, and be sure to submit your best papers. We are also pleased to have Xiao-Ping Chen as the next editor of MOR, starting in 2022, building on the strong foundation built by Anne Tsui and Arie Lewin. 

Awards.  We recognized seven “Finalists”, eight “Winners” and three “Distinguished Winners” for the third IACMR-RRBM Award for Responsible Research in Management. We held three on-line seminars to honor the winners and hear presentations of the research done by the award winning authors. Also, five students won Kwok Leung Memorial Dissertation Fund grants for 2020. Congratulations to all of these award winners!

Xi’an Conference in June 2021.  The upcoming conference in Xi’an was delayed from last summer, but still looks to be a wonderful program. Given COVID-19 patterns around the world, the program will be hybrid, with physical attendance expected for those living in China, and on-line attendance expected for those living outside of China. We will adjust panels and schedules to ensure that virtual presenters can speak at reasonable times of the day in the locations where they live. For those attending in person, the subway line to the conference location will be complete, making access to and from the conference much easier. Get ready for a fun, engaging, and educational conference! 

Wish you all Happy Holidays

Sincerely,

Ray Friedman 
President of IACMR, Brownlee of Currey Professor of Management
Vanderbilt University  
On Behalf of the Executive Committee