Dear IACMR members, colleagues and friends,

On behalf of the Executive Committee, I would like to wish everyone Happy Holidays, and hope that the year of 2022 is filled with peace, love, fulfillment and- most of all—good health.   

This has been another difficult year, with remote teaching, travel difficulties, plan-changed conferences, 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 shifted our biennial conference in Xi’an online, we were able to run three virtual seminar series- on research and young scholar development, and a new created seminar forum on teaching and learning. To some extent, 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 2021.

The Ninth Biennial Conference. The ninth IACMR conference was postponed from 2020 to 2021, and due to the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic, the planned hybrid format of online and on-site conference had to be shifted to online via Cisco WebEx. Scholars were able to hear cutting edge research and connecting with new and old friends simply by clicking “Join Meeting”, without a problem of travel limit and the fear of epidemic. 

Participation in the conference again was at record high with 867 papers and symposium proposals submitted, 703scholars served as reviewers, and 381 papers presented during the conference. About 90 overseas universities and more than 300 universities from Chinese Mainland are represented at the conference online this year. We continue to be a truly global organization. 

More dimensions at the TLC@IACMR session. We extended this session from half a day to a day, digging deep from the aspects of theory, practice, case studies and so on. 9 experienced professors showcased their practices of synergizing teaching, research and practice. And we opened the TLC sessions to ALL participants this year!

Online Seminar Series.  Beside of our two online seminar series, the Research Seminars and Young Scholar Development Seminars, we initiated Teaching and Learning Forum this year, conducted bimonthly. Through these platforms, we provide members with access to high quality management research and offer a forum to discuss career development and gain experience to be good teachers.  With great effort of our seminar committees, we have organized 12 sessions of Research Seminars, 5 sessions of Young Scholar Development Seminars and 2 sessions of Teaching& Learning seminars this year.  

Management and Organization Review. Our flagship journal, Management and Organization Review, continues its effort to enhance the credibility of management research by offering pre-approved of publications. We are also pleased to have Xiao-Ping Chen who have built a very strong editorial team this year, as the new Editor- in- Chief of MOR, and the team is ready to start its term from January 2022, building on the strong foundation built by Anne Tsui and Arie Lewin. Keep an eye out for new issues, and be sure to submit your best papers!

Preparation for the 2022 Research Methods Workshop. The program and faculty are set for this workshop, which will take place at Lanzhou University in July 2022. If you have a paper that can benefit from personal feedback, and want to learn in detail about all stages of the research process, apply to the workshop. The deadline is March 5, 2022. 

Preparation for 2023 Conference in HK. With the ongoing support of Xu Huang, associate dean of School of Business, Hong Kong Baptist University, and under the direction of Wei Shen, our Program Chair, plans for 2023 are shaping up. The theme of the conference is “Globalization in Flux: China and the World”. Get ready for a fun, engaging, and educational conference! 

Wish you all a happy New Year!

Sincerely,

Zhi-Xue Zhang
President of IACMR, 
Professor of Organization and Strategic Management, Peking University  
On Behalf of the IACMR Executive Committee