Adding Spice to Our Scholarly Journals: The JIBS Experience

Abstract

A scientific field of inquiry is a socially constructed entity consisting of a community of scholars who share a common identity and language (Kuhn 1962). The boundaries may be more or less fuzzy, but scholars working with that field have a consensual understanding of its essential meaning. Scholarly journals are designed to introduce new research and critique existing research within a field of inquiry. As such, scholarly journals are the ‘‘eyes’’ through which we understand the past and anticipate the future within that field. The editor of a scholarly journal can affect the direction and shape of a given field, and the careers of individuals working within it. Journal editors not only see the newest literature in that field, well before it reaches print form, but also have the opportunity along with reviewers to shape that literature. Editors are ‘‘guardians at the gate’’ (McGinty 1998) because they decide which papers are published (and, mostly, which are not) in their journals. Through their journals, editors disseminate research results and create networks of scholars working within a particular field of inquiry. I am sympathetic with Cohen’s worry that scholarly journals in the field of inquiry of international political economy (IPE) may become boring, and that the truly path-breaking research was done in the past and not today. This concern is not a new one, however, and I suspect it may be shared by many leading scholars. In the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), for example, there have been at least three articles on this topic. The field of international business (IB) studies is seen as ‘‘running out of steam after a period of vibrancy’’ (Buckley 2002:365). Several view the root cause of this malaise as the lack of a ‘‘new big idea’’ to excite research (Buckley 2002; Peng 2004) or the lack of mid-level theory to explain issue-driven phenomena (Buckley and Lessard 2005). This suggests to me that Cohen’s concerns about boring journals may be more widespread than IPE. In this Commentary, I address—and discard—two possible reasons for more boring journal articles: lack of research opportunities and economics envy. I then evaluate Cohen’s three ideas for spicing the IPE journals, using our experience at the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS). Lastly, I argue that the key issue for scholarly journals is encouraging authors to build better theories. Author’s note: I want to thank Benjamin Jerry Cohen for asking hard questions about our scholarly journals at an International Studies Association ‘‘Meet the IPE Journal Editors’’ panel in New Orleans, February 2010, and Bill Thompson, Editor of International Studies Quarterly, for taking Cohen up on his challenge and inviting the journal editors on the panel to join in a point-counterpoint debate. Helpful discussions, while I was writing this paper, with Charles Hermann, Ying Zhu, Bill Thompson, Alain Verbeke and Li Dai are also gratefully acknowledged. I continue to explore these ideas in the JIBS ‘‘Letter from the Editor-in-Chief, 41.7: JIBS Publication Criteria and their Consequences.’’