Editorial
STILL
FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT
“SO! has
quickly risen to offering some of the most interesting research in the strategy
and organizations areas. This stems from the journal’s “taste” for
innovative work rather than safer, incremental, normal science exercises.
In addition, the journal is run with a remarkable efficiency and quality in its
publication and review process both in terms of quality and speed … SO! has established a clear place for itself in the management
domain.”
Daniel
A. Levinthal
Reginald H. Jones Professor of Corporate
Management
Our fourth
year at Strategic Organization might
best be characterized as more “fighting the good fight.” As we have handled an increasing volume of
submissions, we have maintained the focus, quality and timeliness of our review
process. We continue to rely solely on
our editorial board for all reviews, and refresh it annually to maintain the
quality and speed of editorial feedback.
We continue to push for institutional and individual subscriptions, and
are also seeing a rapid uptake in the number of online downloads through SAGE Journals Online at so.sagepub.com, which has proven a great venue for article
distribution. We have also been covered
in ABI/inform, Business Source and CrossRef, and several other indexing services. We became
eligible for inclusion in the Web of
Knowledge after completing publication of our third volume, and applied to ISI for coverage in February 2006 as SO! 4(1) went to press. ISI
has indicated that they will communicate their decision to us shortly after
publication of SO! 4(4). We look forward to their decision!
Our
mission throughout the past four years has been the same: to provide
researchers interested in doing work at the intersection of strategy and organization
with a leading, multidisciplinary, multimethod
journal as an outlet for their work. More specifically, we have been pursuing
four objectives:
Signals provided by submissions, the editorial review process, readership,
and citations point to great progress toward each of these objectives. More details of our progress are highlighted
below, but what is more exciting to us is where we are headed.
5th Anniversary Special Issue and “Strategic Organization SO!APBOX” Roundtable Symposium
In 2006, we will celebrate our fifth anniversary with a special SO!APBOX issue on the state of the field. We anticipate that this forum, which will be
published in our August issue [SO!
5(3)], will be accompanied by a preconference roundtable symposium at the 2007
|
Margaret
Peteraf |
A critical
look at dynamic capabilties in relation to the RBV |
|
Jackson Nickerson, Brian Silverman & Todd Zenger |
The “problem” of creating and capturing value |
|
Moshe Farjoun |
The end of strategy |
|
Timothy Pollock & Ted Baker |
Strategic organization and entrepreneurship |
|
Nelson Philips & Paul Tracey |
Why reinvent the wheel? Connecting institutional theory to the
field of entrepreneurship |
|
Leif Melin & Mattias
Nordqvist |
Institutionalizing the family firm: Strategic practices
implications |
|
Sydney Finkelstein & Margaret Peteraf |
The future of managerial discretion theory |
|
Nicolai Foss |
Beliefs in strategic organization |
|
Arjen van Witteloostuijn & Christophe Boone |
The psychology of competition |
|
Anne Miner |
Creativity and emotion in Strategic Organization |
|
Danny Miller |
Paradigm prison: The importance of doing non-paradigmatic and
sometimes brutely empirical research |
|
Stephen Mezias |
The science of organization: Walking the walk as well as talking
the talk |
|
Ann Langley |
Process thinking in strategic organization |
The editorial essay topics cover a broad spectrum of ideas – and the
authors include some well-known for challenging the status quo. The anniversary issue and symposium should
make for stimulating reading and dynamic discussions. We hope that you will join us for the
pre-conference symposium and contribute to discussions that will help us shape
the future of the journal and the field!
See you there!
Of course, if you have your own idea for your own SO!APBOX editorial essay,
please contact any (or all) of the editors directly after reviewing the essay
submission guidelines on the coeditors’ website
maintained at www.rotman.utoronto.ca/~baum/so.html,
or SAGE Journals Online at so.sagepub.com.
A First Look At SO!’s Impact
SO! has quickly established itself as a journal with a strong reputation
for high quality, with contributions from numerous high-profile international
academics in the field, as well as up-and-coming junior scholars from leading
institutions around the world.
Reflecting
their quality, the articles published to date have already begun to attract
citations in the ISI Web of Knowledge
(most under the cited work STRATEGIC ORG).
More importantly, the rate of citation is increasing. For example, by
the end of September 2006, the 23 articles and 15 essays published in the first
two volumes (2003-04) had received 97 citations – 4 in 2003, 21 in 2004, 34 in
2005, and 39 in the first ten months of 2006.
Moreover,
these citations appear in articles by notable scholars in other leading
journals in the field including (in alphabetical order): Academy of Management Journal, Administrative
Science Quarterly, American Journal
of Sociology, Annual Review of
Sociology, Entrepreneurship Theory
and Practice, Journal of Business Venturing,
Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Organization,
Organization Science, Organization
Studies, and Strategic Management
Journal.
The
34 citations in 2005 imply an ‘impact factor’ of 0.895, which would rank
SO!’s impact on the field extends beyond citations, however, as is
clearly illustrated in the views of researchers familiar with the journal’s
achievements. For example:
“In a very short time, SO! has become a highly regarded journal in the fields of strategic management
and organization theory … the journal has attracted creative, fresh,
well-executed papers for its first several volumes. I increasingly see SO! articles
cited, and I am sure that the superb launch of the journal will lead to sustained
visibility and impact.”
Donald C. Hambrick
Smeal Chaired Professor of Management
“SO! is the premier journal that
integrates the fields of strategy and organization theory … it is also one of
the top two international journals in the field of strategy, and one of the top
three in organization theory. More
important, it is one of a handful of journals in our discipline that
combines relevance with both intellectual and methodological rigor.”
Danny
Miller
Rogers – J.-A. Bombardier Chair in Entrepreneurship
Director of the Center for Research on
Family Business
HEC, Montréal
“SO! fills a critical gap among the leading
journals – it is the only major research-oriented journal that combines
strategy and organization theory scholarship, producing rich theoretical
insights that are highly relevant.
Moreover, SO! has a remarkable track record of
top-notch scholarly publication, rigorous review process, and number of
submissions, especially given how new the journal is. It is an important, increasingly referenced
journal.”
Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
Stanford Warren Ascherman
M.D. Professor
Management Science & Engineering,
Editorial
review process
The enthusiasm of SO!’s
Editorial Board lies at the heart of the journal’s
success to date. To ensure a
high-quality and timely review process for our authors, we brought together an
active working Editorial Board comprising 100 leading scholars and researchers
from around the world with sufficiently broad in expertise to carry out all the
journal’s reviewing; the journal uses no ad hoc reviewers.
Last year we began an
ongoing process of regular renewal of the Board’s membership. Each year 10 to 15 of our longstanding members
step down to create opportunities for new top-notch scholars in our research
community to contribute to SO!’s further advance.
You can meet the 2007 Editorial Board here.
SO!’s Editorial Board members are committed to ensuring the high
scholarly standards the journal has set itself are maintained. Three members of the Board evaluate each
manuscript, focusing on the substance and rigor of
submissions, providing discipline and method neutral feedback that challenges
authors to strengthen their work while maintaining their voice. The result
has far exceeded our expectations. The quality of their reviews has been
outstanding, helping the journal quickly establish itself as providing one of
the most constructive, developmental and timely review processes in the
field. It
is these qualities of SO!’s review process that are attracting an increasing number of
submissions to the journal, and assuring
SO!’s place
among the top journals in the field.
It is most gratifying to receive so many positive reactions to the
quality and timeliness of SO!’s review process. Our
authors deserve timely feedback and expect that editorial decisions will be
constructive, informed, and challenge them to improve their work. The author feedback we have received
indicates that we are meeting these standards.
A sampling from our first four years includes:
“Thank
you. I received the review, which is exemplary by all means. Clear,
constructive, approachable, encouraging and timely – even if demanding. SO! is definitely a positive experience.”
“We
found the SO! review process to be developmental,
timely and constructive – attributes that we value highly – and we will share
this experience with our colleagues.
Other management journals should be ashamed of their frequent failure to
deliver on any one of those characteristics, much less all three.”
“We
got the reviews and then set about radically reworking the paper immediately
and I have forgotten to thank you for the work that went into these excellent
reviews … SO! will rapidly rise in status on the basis
of reviews like this. We really need journals like yours to help us do better work.”
“[We] are now revising our paper for submission elsewhere
and I just read through your comments and the reviewer comments again. The reason I am contacting you is to let you
know that I really appreciated your comments and I think they are the most useful
and helpful comments I've ever received from an editor. I wish other journal editors followed your
model when dealing with rejected submissions.
In my experience, editors at other journals simply state that the
submission is rejected, the reviewer comments are attached, and wish me luck
for submitting it elsewhere … your letter is just such a dramatic contrast to
another decision letter I recently received and I thought I'd let you know.”
Although we are disappointed by the outcome of our submission, we
really appreciate the useful reviews we received, as well as the speed of the
review process. The reviews and your
letter are being very helpful as we improve the paper for submission to another
journal. I will definitely consider SO! very highly
for future submissions of my work.
“Many
thanks for your very useful notes. Your editorial feedback will be very useful
to us and we appreciate your effort very much. Irrespective of the
disappointing decision, your remarks expose the weaknesses of our paper and
will very conducive indeed.”
“I want to say thanks for the great experience I've had seeing this
paper through the process. When I asked ____________ about submitting to SO!, he said ‘Think of all your experiences with
__________ Journal. It will be the exact opposite.’ He was right.”
Editorial
review statistics
Timely and constructive feedback from informed reviewers is the norm at SO!
We continue to meet and regularly exceed the standards we set for
ourselves. These targets are:
·
Authors
whose work is not sent out for editorial review, either because it does not fit
the journal’s aims and scope or because it is not sufficiently well developed
for our one-revision editorial policy, will receive a letter from the coeditors within 7-10 days explaining our editorial
decision and, where appropriate, will be encouraged to resubmit their paper
after further work identified by the coeditors has
been undertaken.
·
Manuscripts
accepted for editorial review will be sent (double-blind) to three editorial
board members and authors will receive reviewer feedback and a letter from the coeditors detailing our editorial decision within 60-90
days.
Between October 2005 and October 2006, all article submissions were
handled within our stated targets.
Indeed, our average turnaround time for articles accepted for editorial
review fell below 60 days. We are
indebted to our editorial board for enabling us to provide our authors the
highest possible quality feedback on their work in such a prompt manner. The outcomes of the review processes
completed during this period (October 2004 to October 2005 figures in
brackets), were as follows:
·
43 (45)
percent of papers were returned to their authors by the Editors without being
sent out for blind review;
·
31 (20)
percent were rejected after blind editorial review;
·
14 (22)
percent were invited to revise and resubmit their work for further
consideration after review;
·
12 (13)
percent were accepted for publication.
Notable among
these figures is the continued high rate at which submissions are returned to
authors by the coeditors without being sent out for
blind review. All submissions are carefully screened by the coeditors before being sent out for review. We do this because we remain strongly
committed to a one-revision policy in order to ensure a prompt review
process. Because
our publication decisions are made after no more than one major revision, the
quality and development of initial submissions greatly affects their likelihood
of being accepted for full review.
Also notable
are the increase in the rejection rate, and decline in the rate at which
revisions were invited. Clearly SO!’s
Board members are willing to accept only the very best work – so send us yours!
Call for article and essay submissions
SO! welcomes article
submissions that have a strong interdisciplinary base and reflect a clear
understanding of the related strategic and organizational literatures. Empirical and theoretical articles published
in SO! are conducted soundly and rigorously within
their genre and discipline. Preferred
submissions identify a compelling strategic organization topic and a strong
conceptual framework for tackling it.
In addition to regular refereed articles, we
also welcome proposals for SO!APBOX editorial essays. A soapbox is a platform used by a
self-appointed, spontaneous, or informal orator, or, more broadly an outlet for
delivering opinions. These editorial
essays provide a forum for thought-provoking informed opinion and reflection
upon which interdisciplinary bridges can be forged, research directions and
methodological traditions discussed, and the field of strategic organization
staked out.
Submission and review processes for articles
and editorial essays are described on the inside-back cover of journal, and in
more detail on the coeditors’ journal website at www.rotman.utoronto.ca/~baum/so.html,
or at SAGE Journals Online at so.sagepub.com.
SO!’s
identity
Danny Miller has commented to us that SO! is one of
organization theory’s the last hopes in the field of strategy, because it
represents a serious attempt to reconnect the two fields. That integration is
core to what we are trying to achieve and central to our aspired identity. In truth, however, SO!’s identity is only now
beginning to emerge. We hope we are
moving in the ‘right’ direction … but we are impatient! We feel a need to press on. Please join us at the planned preconference
symposium next August and help us as we attempt to do exactly that!
Until then, we look forward to your
submissions!
Joel A. C. Baum, Royston Greenwood, and P. Devereaux Jennings
[1] Note that because SO! was not
covered in ISI during this period, citation counts do not include references to
SO! articles
published in SO! Consequently, the impact factor is
underestimated.