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Editorial
Ken Parry
Graduate School of Management, Griffith University, Nathan QLD
Article Text
Welcome to the first edition of the Journal of Management & Organization (JMO).
Steve Kempster reports on research into how people in senior executive leadership positions have learnt leadership throughout their careers. He used the methodology of critical realism to uncover and explain the metaphor of 'apprenticeship' to assist with our sense-making of this important aspect of managerial life.
Fernando and Jackson researched religion-based workplace spirituality and its impact upon the decision-making of senior business leaders. They found that decision-making was facilitated by traditional management techniques plus, in difficult moments, by a higher-order construct associated with a transcendent reality. Religion plays a significant role.
Neil McAdam reports on a large world-wide research project. He found that stress moves us away from creative, collaborative and ambiguity-based brain styles toward performance-driven and control-oriented brain styles. In the Australasian tertiary academic sector, I can see precisely this phenomenon in action over the last 10 years. Our challenge is to maintain our creativity and not to fall into control-oriented styles. This is precisely the point made by Bill English in his article.
Bill English is Shadow Education Minister in New Zealand and a former Education Minister. In his article we can see that New Zealand has experienced tertiary educational reforms similar to those that Australia is in the process of implementing now. It remains to be seen whether Australian policy-makers have learned from the New Zealand experience. Personally, I doubt it. English advocates a simpler model of oversight of the sector, with less costly and potentially unmanageable control mechanisms. In Australia we continue to see policy models characterised by complexity, cost, and control mechanisms that are difficult to maintain. He makes the point that incentive is better for our sector than control. This maxim is reasonable obvious to most of us, but it seems to be discarded too readily by our policy-makers and many university managers. In small economies, like Australia and New Zealand, control is easier to implement than incentive, but it is less effective. The challenge for us all is to unleash the huge potential that we have in our tertiary academic sector with policies based on incentive; and with management practices based on efficiency and not expensive administration.
The future for JMO
In this editorial, I have directed my comments mainly to my colleagues in New Zealand and Australia. This situation will not remain for much longer. JMO will quickly have a global reach in the scholarship that is presented. This is not the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Management & Organization. Nor is it the Asia-Pacific Journal of Management & Organization. It is THE Journal of Management & Organization.
I see our journal no longer being reliant on ANZAM conference papers as the main source of quality submissions. With our new international editorial board we have the potential to make the refereeing process even more constructive and valuable. We also have the prospect of attracting more quality submissions from around the world.
We have managed to generate quick turnaround on submissions over the past two years, and we plan for this to be a strength of JMO. We also have the plan to offer two special editions and two general editions each year. Special editions are widely seen as a sound vehicle for producing cohesive publications that are of considerable scholarly value to a readership. The second edition of Volume 12 is the special edition on 'emotions and coping with conflict in the workplace', edited by Peter Jordan and Ashlea Troth. I look forward to receiving other offers to edit special editions for JMO.
My thanks go to the people who have helped with JANZAM over the past two years. These people include the members of the final editorial board of JANZAM. I also thank our colleagues who have reviewed submissions throughout 2005. Their names appear below in alphabetical order.
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