The October issue of BEQ is an occasion for us to write an editorial, in which we summarize main events in the journal over the past year. First, we present changes in the editorial team. Second, we celebrate the winners of the BEQ awards.
Upon his request, we kindly thanked Andreas Rasche (Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark) for his long service as an associate editor of BEQ and we wish him success with his new responsibilities at his home institution. We are happy that Andreas agreed to join the editorial board and in that way maintains his commitment to the journal. We invited Ken Butterfield (University of Washington, Seattle, WA) to join the team as an associate editor, in order to increase the journal’s capacity for editorial decision making on quantitative manuscripts. As a consequence, Ken is no longer a member of the journal’s editorial board. We also welcomed Tae Wan Kim (Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburg, PA) as an associate editor. Tae Wan’s joining as an associate editor coincided with Mollie Painter deciding that she needed a temporary break from her editorial responsibilities, due to having been overtaxed in her overall workload. We are more than delighted that Tae Wan generously agreed to take over Mollie’s responsibilities for BEQ for the period of time that this would be needed. Tae Wan thus effectively operates as an editor-in-chief, until the moment that Mollie can return to her editorial role.
BEQ’s editorial board saw a number of changes in its composition, in addition to those already mentioned. We sincerely thank Tim Ford, Harvey James, Kirsten Martin, Patrick Murphy, Marc Orlitzky, John Roberts, Scott Sonenshein, and Edward Soule for their time, efforts, and commitment as members of the editorial board. We warmly welcome Brian Berkey, Claudia Eger, Alan Morrison, Rita Mota, Christina Neesham, and Steen Vallentin as new members of BEQ’s editorial board.
BEQ feels privileged with the amazing dedication that so many members of the business ethics community continue to show to maintaining it as a prime journal in our field.
Every year, BEQ hands out an award for an outstanding reviewer and an award for an outstanding article published in the journal during the previous year. The awards were announced in the program of the SBE conference and handed out during the conference in Chicago, IL.
This year, we selected Caleb Bernacchio (Loyola, New Orleans, LO) as the winner of the BEQ Outstanding Reviewer award. An outstanding reviewer is someone who rarely declines an invitation to review a manuscript for BEQ, lives up to their promise to send in their review report by the agreed date, and really engages with the argument that the author(s) seek to make: highlighting the qualities of the manuscript, critically appraising the argument and its relevance for business ethics, and offering ample actionable advice to the author on how to further develop the manuscript. In this way, outstanding reviewers both offer valuable feedback to the author(s) and facilitate editorial decision making. Caleb has consistently done an excellent job whenever he was invited to review for BEQ. We congratulate Caleb and wish him success in his new positions as the Legendre-Soulé Chair in Business Ethics and Director of the Center for Ethics and Economic Justice at Loyola.
Whereas the winner of the outstanding reviewer award is selected by the journal’s editors, a special committee selects the winner of the outstanding article award from a shortlist compiled from the nominations made by BEQ’s associate editors. During 2023, BEQ published twenty-one articles. Nine of these articles were nominated for the outstanding article award. This ratio attests not only to the diversity, but also and at least as importantly so, to the overall high level of business ethics scholarship published in BEQ. The selection committee for this year’s outstanding article award comprised Andreas Scherer, Tobey Scharding, and Scott Reynolds. They selected a finalist and winner. The finalist is the article by Denis Arnold and Roxane Ross, “Care in Management: A Review and Justification of an Organizational Value” (BEQ 33 [4]: 617–54). The winning article is “Deep Learning Meets Deep Democracy: Deliberative Governance and Responsible Innovation in Artificial Intelligence” (BEQ 33 [1]: 146–79) by Alexander Buhmann and Christian Fieseler. We reproduce below the committee’s praise for the winning article and join them in extending our congratulations to Alexander Buhmann and Christian Fieseler (both at BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway).
We are delighted to award the BEQ outstanding article of 2023 award to Alexander Buhmann and Christian Fieseler for their article, “Deep Learning Meets Deep Democracy: Deliberative Governance and Responsible Innovation in Artificial Intelligence.” The criteria we used to select the article were novelty (including the article’s timeliness, creativity, and surprise), rigor (including the insight the article provided), and flow (including accessibility to BEQ readers who are interested in AI but perhaps not informed about all the technical details). We also hoped to find an article we could celebrate, which we would be happy to hold up for wide notice and show off what business ethics is capable of. In all of these respects, we are proud to select Buhmann and Fieseler’s fine article. It is timely in addressing a pressing problem concerning public deliberation about AI innovation. It rigorously considers challenges to solving this problem, including many people’s limited knowledge concerning key technical issues in AI. It proposes a solution that is of great interest to BEQ readers, involving a new framework of responsibilities for AI innovation and a deliberative governance approach for evaluating and enacting them. In all of these regards, we are excited to celebrate this article as the outstanding BEQ article of 2023.
We believe that BEQ is on a steady trajectory: the number of new submissions has slightly increased to 389; the journal’s 2-year impact factor has increased from 3.0 to 3.4; BEQ keeps its position in the first quartile of the “ethics” category of journals; and the number of new manuscripts that make it to the second round is estimated at around 90 percent while the estimated acceptance rate is around 5 percent—both numbers are similar to those of previous years. We are also happy to announce the call for another special issue of the journal, published in this issue, on “Wisdom and Sustainability: Transforming Business Ethics in Practice.”
We close by extending a big thank you to all—readers, users, authors, reviewers, editors, and all those working behind the scenes—who help maintaining BEQ as an outstanding journal in the field!
