Management Learning: The journal for critical, reflexive scholarship on organization and learning

Abstract

The journal’s 2-year impact factor currently stands at 1.25 and the 5-year impact factor at 1.89 in the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports (2014). In terms of 5-year trends, the journal’s mean 2-year impact factor stands at a healthy 1.37. As far as journal quality lists go, we await with interest the outcome of the revision to the United Kingdom’s Association of Business School (ABS) journal quality list to see how things stand. Further afield, the Australian Business Dean’s Council (ABDC) Journal Quality List (2013) rated Management Learning as an ‘A’ journal. However, the ABDC is right to remind us that journal lists should be only a starting point for assessing quality, and that there is no substitute for assessing the scholarship of a piece of work on a case-by-case basis. In this latter regard, the outcome of the United Kingdom’s Research Excellence Framework (unknown at the time of writing this Editorial) may also shed light on the quality, impact, and relevance of Management Learning scholarship. Management Learning has a long and respected history, the first issue being published in 1970 under the name of Management Education and Development. In 1994, the journal title changed to Management Learning, and in 2009, we celebrated our 40 th anniversary. We entered our fifth decade with the conviction and optimism that the type of scholarship the journal publishes “continues to be different” from the scholarship to be found in the mainstream management journals or that of the journals we consider our closest “relatives.” Perhaps better known in the UK, Australasia and Europe, we continually seek to expand our reach to North America and Asia to provide a forum for scholars wishing to challenge mainstream work. But we still struggle against the perception that we are a pedagogic teaching and learning journal—which clearly we are not. Rather, we publish innovative critical and reflexive scholarly work around learning, managing, and organizing—a philosophy that can be traced back to Mark Easterby-Smith and Mike Pedler’s 1986 Editorial, when in