Volume 17 concludes my last year as Editor-in-Chief of Management and Organization Review. It is the culmination of a long editorial career that began in October 1974 as the founding Management Science Departmental Editor for Organizational Analysis Performance and Design (1974–1987); founding Editor with Richard Daft of Organization Science (1989–1998); and Editor of Journal of International Business Studies (2002–2008). Collectively these editorial opportunities became unique interdisciplinary learning opportunities. However, leading Management and Organization Review has been the most inspiring and challenging. Anne Tsui, the visionary founding Editor of MOR, established the mantra of advancing management scholarship in the context of Chinese history, culture, and institutional configuration. This continues to be a challenge going forward, and it is equally daunting for Chinese management scholars and their more established counterparts in social science departments and business schools in advanced economies, especially those with no background in Chinese history, culture, and the dominant philosophies or who have no collaborators with requisite knowledge.
The second challenge that the MOR editorial team had to overcome related to the imperative of responding to the mounting criticism of untrustworthy social science and management research, which questioned the credibility of reported empirical findings. Since the publication of ‘The Critique of Empirical Social Science: New Policies at Management and Organization Review’ (Lewin et al., 2016), MOR implemented a new editorial statement and reviewing policies beginning with Volume 13. The MOR transparency requirements are very simple and are summarized below.
Summary of MOR Reviewing Policies:
• Hypothesis testing is not obligatory.
• Exploratory empirical tests in the pretext of hypothesis testing (HARKING) will be rejected.
• Statistical analysis must report and discuss positive, negative, or null findings and effect size.
• Post-hoc analysis is permitted if labeled as such for the purpose of exploring relationships that were not originally hypothesized.
• Avoid cutoff points for statistical significance. Report coefficient estimates and exact p-values or standard errors. Summary asterisks are acceptable as long as the actual p-values are reported.
• It is a requirement to report and confirm all data manipulations, all measures (variables), and all data exclusions (see https://osf.io/project/hadz3), including analyses of outliers.
• The MOR Special Issue on ‘Doing Qualitative Research in Emerging Markets’ establishes the new bar for evaluating qualitative studies.
• Before accepted papers are published in MOR, authors must deposit relevant materials and data, as specified by accepting editor, on the Open Science Framework (see https://osf.io/).
Over the past few years, MOR has also experienced an increasing growth in submissions. Between 2017 and 2020, submissions increased from 217 to 348, and the acceptance rate is trending to below 9 percent. Circulation has increased from nearly 2,000 institutional subscribers in 2015 to nearly 9,000 in 2020. Usage has increased from about 20,000 downloads in 2015 to over 71,000 in 2019 and over 100,000 in 2020. MOR consistently has an Impact Factor of over 2 and is quartile 1 on Scopus.
This issue also launches the first wave of commentaries for the Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion Forum on de-globalization and decoupling. The Forum invited commentaries that address two broad questions: (1) What are the most salient contextual forces driving the trend toward de-globalization and global decoupling (e.g., geo-political conflicts, global supply chains, reshoring and relocation of manufacturing hubs, software development, electronic payments, platformization, and ecosystem)? and (2) How can MNEs headquartered in liberal democracies or state capitalistic systems best adapt and respond to these emerging dynamics? This first collection of commentaries features selections from the first wave of over 27 submissions. The guest editors ventured to think out of the box and to propose a co-evolutionary framework for making sense of imaginable scenarios and potential consequences. The second installment of commentaries will be published in MOR 17.2.
Lastly, this issue publishes five regular papers, ‘CEO Transformational Leadership and Corporate Entrepreneurship in China’, by Yaotian Pan, Alain Verbeke, and Wenlong Yuan; ‘The Ties that (Un)Bind: Change and Organizational Commitment in Ukraine’, by Wayne H. Stewart, Jr., Ruth C. May, Kristin L. Scott, and Amy E. Ingram; ‘Can CEO's Facial Attractiveness Influence Philanthropic Behavior? Evidence from India’, by Arpita Agnihotri and Saurabh Bhattacharya; ‘Firm Growth Performance and Relative Innovation Orientation of Exploration vs Exploitation: Moderating Effects of Cluster Relationships’, by Zhendong Li, Marina Yue Zhang, and Huiying Zhang; and ‘Performance Effects of Internationalization: Contingency Theory Analysis of Russian Internationalized Firms’, by Desislava Dikova and Anna Veselova. I wish to express my thanks and deep appreciation to Senior Editors Can Huang (Zhejiang University), Wu Liu (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Maral Muratbekova-Touron (ESCP Europe), and Deputy Editor Sai Yayavaram (Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore) for their diligence and outstanding editorial developmental guidance to see these papers through to publication in Management and Organization Review.
Happy New Year of the Ox,
