The first issue of Volume 16 marks my fifth year as Editor-in-Chief of MOR. It is amazing how time can fly when I consider how much has been accomplished over such a few years.
• The scope of the journal was expanded to attract management research across the intersection Organization Behavior, Organization Theory, Cross-Cultural Research, Strategic Management, and International Business;
• In recognition of China's global aspirations and reach, the editorial scope of the journal was expanded to include management research in the context of all transforming economies;
• Publication frequency has increased from 3 issues in 2014 to 5 issues in 2020;
• Circulation has increased from nearly 2,000 institutional subscribers in 2015 to nearly 9,000 in 2019;
• Downloads of abstracts and full papers has increased from about 20,000 downloads in 2015 to over 71,000 in 2019;
• Submissions have increased from 166 in 2015 to 293 in 2019;
• Cambridge University Press, the new publisher of MOR, has undertaken extensive experiments with innovative promotional strategies such as themed collections, blogs, ‘Article of the Month’ promotions, and mass marketing of each new ‘table of contents’;
• MOR was one of the of the first management journals to engage with Open Data and publish badges to recognize exemplary scientific practices satisfying criteria of falsifiability, transparency and replication;
• MOR is one of the few international journals publishing abstracts in three additional languages to make the content as accessible as possible and bring in new audiences;
• MOR introduced new article types including Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion, Perspective Papers, Editorial Essays, and Letters to the Editor
MOR has also continued the strategy of Professor Anne Tsui to publish forward-looking, focused special issues and open new research agendas. The special issue on qualitative studies, ‘Doing Qualitative Research in Emerging Markets’, has set the bar for future qualitative studies to be published in MOR. The special issue on ‘The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem in India’ introduced the other country of 1.5 Billion population destined to escape the middle income trap. Forthcoming special issues include ‘Informal Networks: Exploring the Dark and the Bright Sides of Networking’, and ‘SMEs and Family Business in China'. In addition, MOR has announced two ambitious Research Frontiers Conferences. The first recognizes that China has emerged as the leading Outward Foreign Direct Investor in the world. OFDI from China increased from less than USD 3 billion in 1999 to USD 130 billion in 2018, a 40-fold increase in less than two decades. China has now leapt forward to the position of the second-largest foreign direct investing country in the world (UNCTAD, 2019). The MOR Research Frontiers Conference will be held at University of Pretoria, June 21–23, with a focus on China investments in Africa. The second Research Frontiers Conference announced in this issue seeks to attract research that advances Responsible Leadership in China and beyond. Please review the ambitious agenda of these two research conferences in the Calls for Papers that appear in this issue.
I wish to highlight another MOR first. This issue leads off with the first replication study published in MOR or any other major journal in the fields of management and strategy. The lead paper ‘Institutional Systems for Equitable Wealth Creation: Replication and an Update of Judge, Fainshmidt, and Brown (2014)’ that was published in the Journal of International Business Studies. The paper concluded that capitalism ‘works best’ when the economy of a country is able to generate wealth and distribute that wealth in a relatively equitable manner among its citizens. I invited this replication because, in my view, there is an urgent need to direct attention to exploring the antecedents underlying the perceived failure of liberal democracies to address the rising chorus of concern about disruptive justice issues as manifested in countries such as France, the US, and the UK and Brexit, the decline of the middle class across developed economies, the rise of populist movements, and regional trade compacts which feed de-globalization partly in response to perceived and actual paralysis of the WTO.
Whereas the definition of economic inequality in the literature covers diverse definitions (Davis, 2017), there are strong indications that it has been increasing steadily across the world (Amis, Munir, Lawrence, Hirsch, & McGahan, Reference Amis, Munir, Lawrence, Hirsch and McGahan2018). Although some levels of economic inequality may be inevitable or acceptable (Haack & Sieweke, 2018), the extent of such distortions in income distribution seem to vary, and to be more or less tolerated, depending on the institutional environment (cf. Jiang, Lin, Liu, & Reference Jiang, Lin, Liu and Xu2019). However in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty (Reference Piketty2014) observes that capitalist economic systems have been superior in wealth creation. However, he argues that the rate of return on capital has consistently been higher than the rate of economic growth, which according to Piketty, is the main driver of the income gap and the perception of unfairness in the distribution of income. Lazonick (Reference Lazonick2019) noted a significant rise in the productivity pay gap (see also Lazonick, Reference Lazonick2017). Between 1950 and 1973 productivity increased by 95.7% and hourly compensation by 90.9% (Lazonick, Reference Lazonick2019) whereas between 1970 and 2020 productivity has increased by 243.6% while hourly compensation has increased by only 114.7%. In other words, if the distribution of income is increasingly perceived as unfair it feeds the perception of unequal distributive justice and threatens the founding principles of capitalism. Similarly Tsui, Enderle, and Jiang (Reference Tsui, Enderle and Jiang2018: 156) admonished that ‘Extreme income inequality challenges all economies, both developed and developing, by causing social inequality, bringing misery to those at the bottom and power and influence to those at the top, dividing the minority “haves” from the majority “have-nots”, allowing the powerful to create conditions that further increase their wealth, and causing the deprived to become poorer’.
In view of the perception of rising inequality around the world, I wondered whether a replication of Judge et al. (Reference Judge, Fainshmidt and Brown2014) might capture the effect of rising inequality and identify emerging effective institutional configurations. The replication does report identifying potentially new forms of capitalism associated with equitable wealth creation and that collective bargaining institutions are less important than the original study suggested. It is my hope that publication of this replication will demonstrate the role that replication studies can occupy in advancing social science research in general but especially in the context China and other transforming economies.
Lastly, the MOR editorial team wishes to thank Deputy Editor for Artwork Tony Fang, who was born in Wuhan, for leading the selection of artwork for this issue, which seeks to highlight the beauty of Wuhan, the location of the 2018 IACMR Biennial Conference. The people of Wuhan are in our thoughts at this time.
