The appearance of this issue (volume 30, no. 1) marks the beginning of the thirtieth year of publication of Business Ethics Quarterly. It is worth taking a moment here to acknowledge and celebrate this milestone in the history of the journal, its organizational parent the Society for Business Ethics, and indeed, the academic field of business ethics writ large.
Five years ago in this space, on the occasion of the start of the journal’s twenty-fifth year, my predecessor Denis Arnold described the provenance of the journal and sketched its evolution through the tenures of the three editors who preceded him.Footnote 1 My ability to shepherd this vital scholarly institution into the start of its fourth decade owes much to the contributions of those who came before me and who handed off to me a journal in a robust state of good health, in terms of the quality and volume of submissions we receive, the distinguished caliber of its editorial team, and the excellent relationship we enjoy with our publisher, Cambridge University Press. On this anniversary, it is fitting to recognize and thank publicly and prominently the series of editors in chief bridging inception to the present: Patricia Werhane (1991–2000), George Brenkert (2000–2005), Gary Weaver (2005–2011), and Denis Arnold (2011–2016).
Saying that the state of the journal, in its thirtieth year, is strong does not obviate the need to acknowledge that academic journal publishing is in a time of evolution. At the annual meeting of the Society for Business Ethics last August, we at BEQ convened a roundtable conversation with editors and publishers on the ethics of the scholarly journal publishing enterprise and industry. We discussed, among other things, how journal publication is changing with respect to payment schemes, subscription models, distribution channels, and metrics of reputation and performance. Developments related to open access, author rights, and censorship are the harbingers of an industry in transformation. It is not hyperbolic to predict that when BEQ’s next major anniversary arrives in a decade, key features of what we do and how we do it may look a good bit different than they do now. BEQ is fortunate to have, in Cambridge University Press, a publisher that is seriously and thoughtfully engaged in analysis of and dialogue about these trends.
With the start of this volume, we are introducing a few modest tweaks to the journal’s look and feel. Readers of the print edition may notice small changes to the cover, including modifications to typography and color, as well as a matte finish. Inside the journal, our thirtieth-year gift to readers is a long-overdue shift from endnotes to footnotes. With this issue, we also begin publishing author biographies at the bottom of each article rather than collected in a separate list of contributors to a given issue. This change is a necessary nod to the reality of contemporary online journal consumption: a reader may gain access to an individual article but never encounter the issue as a coherent whole, and therefore not see author information that is not packaged with the article itself.
In an editorial note in the very first issue (January 1991) of BEQ, inaugural editor Patricia Werhane charted the journal’s mission and future with this simple sentence: “We invite all our readers to submit papers on any aspect of the relationship between business and ethics from every disciplinary point of view.”Footnote 2 In the decades since, as in any field of inquiry, there have been shifts in areas of emphasis, in theoretical orientations, in dominant paradigms, in empirical methods, and in (for lack of a better word) fashionable topics. What hasn’t changed, though, is the journal’s unwavering commitment to publishing multidisciplinary scholarship of the highest quality and with the greatest potential for enduring impact on the field.
