With volume 13 MOR enters a new stage in its evolution to building its reputation as ‘The leading voice on management and organization research in China and other transforming economies’.
The editorial structure has been further decentralized to formally recognize and attract contextual management research on China (Chi-Yue Chiu, Johann Peter Murmann, and Eric Tsang), India (Rishikesha T. Krishnan), Latin America (Gerald A. McDermott), and Russia and Ex-Soviet Republics (Carl F. Fey). Later this year I expect to also announce the appointment of Deputy Editor for attracting management research on Africa. In addition, Eric Tsang will serve as Deputy Editor for Rigor and Methods, with a primary responsibility for counseling Senior Editors with realizing the new MOR Reviewing Policies (see introduction below); Sheen Levine, Tony Fang, and Liisa Välikangas continue in their present assignments. I also wish to take this opportunity to express my profound thanks to Klaus Meyer, Xiaohui Liu, Laura Poppo, Bilian Sullivan, Alain Verbeke, and Xueguang Zhou, who are moving to new assignments, for their support of MOR these past three-and-a-half years. At this time, MOR is also honored to welcome Yang Cao (University of North Carolina Charlotte), Can Huang (Zhejiang University), Dana Minbaeva (Copenhagen Business School), and Sai Yayavaram (IIM, Bangalore) as Senior Editors.
Following the publication of the lead article in MOR 12.4 (Lewin et al., 2016) this issue features MOR's revised editorial policies and new reviewing guidelines. The Deputy Editors and I have worked long and hard to revise the editorial policies as well as to develop the new reviewing policies, which are intended to ensure that all empirical research published in MOR satisfies falsifiability, data transparency, and replication criteria.
More specifically, the revised editorial policies emphasize that MOR seeks to advance and contribute to knowledge of management and organizations in China and all other transforming economies (see the challenge articulated by Deputy Editor Johann Peter Murmann in his guest editorial in this issue) and aspires to attract papers that empirically satisfy new falsifiability requirements, are methodologically sound, and explore research questions or phenomena that break new ground.
MOR's new reviewing policies are aligned with new policies adopted by leading journals such as Strategic Management Society Journals (SMJ, SEJ, and GSJ), Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (OBHDP), American Economic Review (AER), Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP), Psychological Science, and Marketing Science. Common to all these journals are expectations that
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(i) Hypothesis testing is not a prerequisite;
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(ii) Empirical studies must be framed within the extant literature;
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(iii) Statistical hypotheses testing results must present coefficient estimates alongside exact p-values or standard errors;
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(iv) All statistical analyses must present and discuss all findings: positive, negative, or null;Footnote [1] and
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(v) During the review process, authors may be asked to provide access to data, including survey instruments, field notes, variable definitions, etc.
In addition, MOR requires that
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(i) Context of all papers published in MOR must be transforming economies, such as in Africa, Asia (China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.), Latin America, Russia and Ex-Soviet Republics, Eastern Europe, or the Middle East;
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(ii) Authors are expected to provide readers with an interpretation of size effects as well as discuss alternative theoretical explanations, which may be analyzed post hoc using the same data or new data;
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(iii) Encourages publication of replication studies using same or new data;
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(iv) Submission of qualitative studies;
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(v) New reviewing policies will also offer authors a preapproval option and offer specific recognition to authors who share their work (e.g., deposit their research materials in an open-access depository); and
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(vi) Lastly, following the practice of other journals that have adopted similar reviewing policies, all empirical papers currently under review with MOR that receive an invitation to revise and resubmit will be required to satisfy the new requirements.
As noted above, MOR will also provide authors with a new preapproval option, which offers authors the opportunity to submit a comprehensive proposal for an empirical study without the inclusion of data collection, analyses, results, or a fully developed discussion section. Proposals will be reviewed by a preapproval sub-group of editors. If the proposal is preapproved, the subsequent paper is conditionally accepted for publication in MOR regardless of whether the findings are as hypothesized or not, whether positive or null (see complete details in statement of new reviewing policies this issue). Qualitative studies can also benefit from the preapproval process as a way to strengthen the study.
To explore the potential benefits of MOR's new editorial policies and reviewing guidelines, Deputy Editor Johann Peter Murmann's thought-provoking guest editorial appears in this issue. In this editorial he challenges the MOR review process to increase the probability of recognizing and publishing out-of-the-box ‘homerun’ papers. I welcome all comments and suggestions that realize the challenge discussed in this guest editorial.
As part of MOR's effort to attract management research from transforming economies beyond China, the Second MOR Frontiers Conference on the ecology of SMEs and Innovation was hosted by IIM Bangalore (January 19–21, 2017). This conference resulted in a call for papers for a special issue on the topic of ‘The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem in India’. The third conference in this sequence will be hosted by Rotterdam School of Management (May 17–19, 2017) to explore SMEs and family firms and Innovation in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Last but not least, I wish to direct attention to two provocative papers. First, the Perspective paper ‘History and the Debate Over Intellectual Property’ authored by Mike W. Peng, David Ahlstrom, Shawn M. Carraher, and Weilei (Stone) Shi. I found it interesting that following its founding the United States was a major violator of copyrights and that perhaps China is following a similar path in developing its IP protection regime, and as a consequence become party to enforcement of intellectual property rights globally. Second, the Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion article ‘Bringing Political Context Back into International Business Studies of Human Rights’, by Arno Kourula and Jukka Mäkinen, highlights how the political context is largely unexplored in management research in general but especially in the context of transforming economies.
