As many readers of MOR and IACMR members know, Kwok Leung, Deputy Editor in Chief of MOR, passed away on May 25th, 2015. He was hospitalized at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong for more than two and half months, battling a very rare case of autoimmune disease. He celebrated his 57th birthday in the hospital. Kwok was one of the few mainstream social psychology scholars who made important scholarly contributions to cross-cultural management research, including the AIB community, where I first worked with him, the IACMR, and MOR. I have lost a friend, a partner, and a mentor. On behalf of MOR I extend my condolences to his family.
In remembering Kwok and his tremendous contributions, it is fitting that this issue serves to reintroduce and reinforce MOR interest in research on indigenous management theories. It also showcases the first article in the Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion editorial area of MOR.
In my way of thinking ‘The Global Corporate Organization’ article, by Shawn Pope and John W. Meyer of Stanford University, opens a new dimension in research on indigenous management theories. Pope and Meyer seem to suggest that the global adoption of the dominant US model of business education has had the effect of homogenizing management education and consequently diminishes variation due, for example, to founding conditions, history, and cultural differences.
Gordon Redding and Michael Witt, in their Perspective paper ‘Advancing Indigenous Management Theory: Executive Rationale as an Institutional Logic’, argue that executive rationale represents an unexplored line of research that differentiates between country contextual management practices. According to Redding and Witt, a country institutional logic serves to guide managerial action that enables strategies, structures, and formal integration mechanisms. The paper is followed by two commentaries. The first by Jianjun Zhang – ‘From Market Despotism to Managerial Hegemony: The Rise of Indigenous Chinese Management’ and the second by Peter Ping Li – ‘The Economic-Social Duality for Executive Rationale: The Interplay between Resource Pool and Game Rule for Sense-Giving and Sense-Making’. In a departure from prior invitations for commentaries the authors were not invited to respond. This is a change of editorial policy. The intent is to inspire submissions to the Dialog, Debate and Discourse editorial area of MOR and invigorate research and new submissions on indigenous management theories in general but especially in the context of emergent economies.
The other five papers in this issue were overseen by MOR founding Editor in Chief Anne Tsui. We are working diligently in clearing the backlog as well as increasing the print capacity in order to minimize the lag time between final acceptance of a paper and its publication in the journal. I wish to acknowledge the very close collaboration with Cambridge University Press in planning an optimal page budget for each volume year.
Finally, I wish to note that Sheen S. Levine, Deputy Editor-in-Chief for Research Outreach, is developing a strategy to broadly disseminate research findings published in the journal. The goal is to reach readers of diverse backgrounds, who may not be aware of MOR. To support our reach for a wide audience, authors will be asked to submit a Significance Statement: Whereas an abstract conveys details about the study, the Significance Statement is intended to briefly convey the importance of the findings reported in a paper to a non-expert, an undergraduate-educated reader from outside the field.
In a world of increased fragmentation, where management scholarship is dispersed across many peer reviewed journals and where online journals proliferate, it is strategically important that MOR reaches a wider audience. We aim to increase awareness of research published in the journal, stimulate parallel, real-time discussions of it, and drive new submissions. This Research Outreach strategy was launched with first issue of this volume year and went live on May 5th.
This will not be an easy task to implement, but I have very high hopes that under the leadership of Dr. Levine it will contribute to increased awareness of MOR. You can view some examples on Dr. Levine's twitter stream (https://twitter.com/sslevine) and MOR's (https://twitter.com/MgmtOrgRev).
MOR is on the move.
