Letter From the Editor
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EDITORIAL
Letter From the Editor AY Lewin Editor-in-chief Journal of International Business Studies (2003) 34, 413–415. doi:10.1057/ palgrave.jibs.8400052
At the recently concluded annual AIB meeting in Monterey, California I reported to the membership on the status and ambition of JIBS under the new editorial team. The purpose of this letter is to share my presentation with the entire AIB community and readership of JIBS. Peer reviewed academic management and social journals all share the goal of advancing their respective fields by seeking to publish path-breaking research on major questions. In reality, however, most journals (including top tier journals) publish midrange theories or minor theoretical extensions and incremental empirical findings. In the field of strategy management the variance explained by any one empirical study is inconsequential. This observation also holds true for empirical research in social psychology and organization behavior. Moreover, citations studies suggest that most published peer reviewed papers sink without a trace. It would seem that publishing radical new ideas is an unnatural act for established journals. New ideas that lead to new research paradigms or that redirect established orthodoxy in a major way are rare and difficult to recognize or easily denied in the course of the peer review process. JIBS is not different from other established journals in this regard, as judged by its declining impact scores in recent years. In the case of JIBS another cause may be that ‘ythe international business (IB) research agenda is running out of steam?’ as discussed by Peter Buckley (Buckley, 2002). The new JIBS editorial team has implemented an editorial strategy and editorial structure that is designed to increase the odds of attracting to JIBS new emergent IB research ideas, new paradigms, and new research directions. In essence, the strategy is intended to open JIBS to much greater variety in IB research themes. The new decentralized editorial structure represents the first step towards increased variety. The nine editorial areas, each with two or more Departmental Editors (DEs) guiding the review and developmental process of papers, represents a formal structural solution for increasing the volume and variety of submissions to JIBS. Simply put, many gatekeepers and editorial areas that crossdisciplinary fields add up to greater variety. Greater variety arises from opening JIBS to scholars doing international research in adjacent fields and from opening up JIBS to a broader range of theories, disciplines, and empirical methods. The structure also provides greater flexibility for realigning or opening new editorial areas. For example, the Entrepreneurship area has been renamed Entrepreneurship and New Ventures; Political Economy, Public Policy and Political Science has been renamed International
Editorial
AY Lewin
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Political Economy and Comparative Capitalism; and a new editorial area has been c
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