Ebook: Organisations Transformability And The Dynamics Of Strategy

In 2005 Management Decision enters its 43rd volume. It is one of the longest-runningcontinuously published journals of record in business and management in the world.Management Decision was founded in the early 1960s, when business was starting tobloom as a discipline worthy of study and research. When someone is writing an editorial for, say, the journal’s 60th year in publication,I am sure they will be commenting not only on the role of China’s influence as theworld’s major economy, but also on its emergence as a key centre of managementscholarship, with many of the world’s top business schools located there. Maybe theywill point to the publication in 2005 of a special issue of this journal, devoted tobusiness research from China, edited by Professor Wang ShouQing at TsinghuaUniversity in Beijing, as an important landmark in this growth. Certainly, I see part ofour role within this journal, but also more widely within Emerald Group Publishing, asencouraging research and knowledge creation and export from the world’s emergentregions, not merely its import. We are looking to explore, in real terms, how to be truepartners in the process, not just suppliers of journals to universities. In 2005 Management Decision will be available online in Emerald ManagementXtra, an online collection, not only of Emerald journals, but also of linked resources toassist the work of librarians, students, teachers, researchers, and even graduates ofbusiness schools and universities. In increasing measure, it is how this journal, andothers, is being consumed by our customers. Many students entering universities thisyear will find it hard to remember life prior to the online world, and probably wouldthink going into a library and looking through shelves in search of a journal paper wasbordering on insanity, when you can look up a keyword on the web. A fascinating by-product of all this for us editors and authors is that we can actuallytell how many readers we have nowadays! I can look at our last 12 months’ onlineaccess figures and see that nearly half a million people looked at an abstract fromManagement Decision, and more than 280,000 of them downloaded an article. Whichequates to just over 23,000 a month. In the days when a journal meant a paper copystacked on a library shelf, such figures were beyond the reach of most scholarlyresearch journals. Today it is easy for the student, researcher or practitioner to browsean index or search for a paper on a particular topic, review the abstract, and download(and usually print) the full paper. These are comforting statistics for our authors, forthere is nothing an author likes more than to know his or her paper is being read,thought about, talked about, learned from, cited. 280,000 downloads a year from thejournal is a powerful statistic. This journal is only ever as strong as its authors and its reviewers. We thank themall for continuing a thread which began 43 years ago, and which continues to thriveand grow. Previously published in: The International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow, Volume: 43, Number 1, 2005