What our community thinks about us

I had my first academic journal article published in 1965, and between then and my retirement in 2010 was active in submitting articles and reviewing submissions by others. I published in both discipline-oriented (e.g., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of the American Medical Association) and more general (e.g., Behavioral Science, Management Science) outlets.

During my career, I became acutely aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the peer-reviewed, discipline-oriented academic journal system as a way of disseminating advances in science. On the one hand, reviewers and editors can help a scientist better describe the substance of a small step advancing knowledge. On the other hand, reviewers and editors invested in the current orthodoxy of a scientific discipline may not recognise a larger step that may be leading towards a Thomas Kuhnian scientific revolution.

While most journals hold to reasonably consistent quality standards, there will always be some journal that will publish an article, no matter how poorly the research was conducted or the report was written – if the author is willing to pay to be published. For most dwellers in the groves of Academe, publishing is better than perishing. So as an author, I sometimes had to deal with people who had a vested interest in not understanding my findings, while as a reviewer, I all too often lamented the absence of a decent Gibberish-to-English dictionary.

I left Academe to conduct research in a think tank when my professional orientation for knowledge creation shifted from curiosity-driven to practical; over time, it appears that my shift is increasingly becoming the norm. I still did reviewing for discipline-oriented journals, but my own outlets were more typically general ones that catered to that new orientation.

Retirement meant that I no longer conducted any research (that takes funding and institutional support for my kind of research) but it did not mean that I stopped thinking. My journal submissions dropped to zero and requests to review gradually dwindled over time. But I still was thinking, although my thoughts became more about trying to understand just what had happened to the sciences I had worked in and what could be said about the approaches I had developed.

In 2020, I was pleasantly surprised when I got a message from Professor Jonathan Calof, newly installed as the North American regional editor of Emerald Publications’ journal Foresight, asking me whether I was interested in being an author or reviewer for a special issue on foresight in North America. I wrote back, saying that I was interested in both reviewing and submitting, but I had no recent research. Instead had been thinking about writing something about how foresight relates to the increasing transdisciplinarity of science, and he told me that Emerald journals had a “viewpoint” category for submissions such as what I wanted to write. So, to cut to the chase, I wrote my article, got two reasonable reviews, negotiated a way to satisfy the editor and the reviewers, and the article was published.

There was a nice Zoom call for announcing the special issue with a bunch of interesting people. One of those interesting people was Ozcan Saritas, Editor-in-Chief of Foresight. When I got an idea of writing something showing the evolution of a scenario gaming method I had worked on 20 years earlier, I wrote him asking whether he was interested. He was, so I wrote it up and it appeared as another viewpoint article. I should mention that in getting from acceptance to appearance for both articles, I had wonderful support from Emerald’s Ashleigh Weller.

Earlier this year, I received a message from Douglas Medland, marketing editor for Emerald, asking whether I had anything in the pipeline about trust and management. As it happened, I’d been thinking a lot about trust, but of course had no recent research, so I offered a way of thinking about trust that I had used in my work but never published. He asked me to put it into a short piece that he could post on Emerald’s website in its Trust and Management section. I did, and it came out just a few days ago. With luck, this will not be the last of my interactions with Emerald.    

I recognise each writer entrusts me with something that is precious to them, something which they have felt strongly enough to write about and something they wish to share. I always aim to take care, responding in a respectful, helpful and timely manner. Emerald is also a special organisation. Firstly, the company values around building trust, creating fairness and maximising inclusivity mirror my personal values in the leadership development and coaching work that I do. The Emerald team I work with provide excellent support and speedy responses to any queries, ideas or issues. They provide high quality systems and processes whilst allowing me full editorial freedom to shape the journal in the way I feel will add most value to our readers around the globe.

Emerald is also an organisation that is constantly looking to the future, establishing innovative processes to improve the quality of experience for authors, reviewers, editors and most importantly, the reader. Technology is constantly shifting the ground within publishing (sometimes overnight as with Large Language Models such as ChatGPT) and, as an editor, I am confident I can rely on Emerald to be fully engaged in shaping and speedily responding to these changing landscapes.