Reframing “Conversation” as an Editorial Responsibility

Abstract

As many of our readers know, Journal of Management Education (JME) coeditors and associate editors spend significant amounts of time interacting with the management education and development (MED) community at conferences and via invited talks at universities. So far this year, someone in this group has done so in New Zealand, Spain, China, Ireland, France, England, and the United States. We also meet regularly as a group, often with members of our SAGE team, via videoconference or in person, to discuss current issues and evolving best practices. JME’s author, editorial, and reviewer base increasingly represents a global audience, so we regard these activities both as essential to JME’s future and consistent with our personal values as management educators. As co-editors, we have recently paused to consider how we are engaged in conversation with an increasingly diverse set of JME stakeholders (not just where). We have taken this opportunity to reflect on what JME’s role is and should be in fostering conversations about teaching and learning, and more specifically, what our role is as JME editors to foster such conversations. At root in this reflection are a series of questions we have asked ourselves: What is a “conversation?” Who starts a conversation? How do we engage diverse voices in conversation? What is our responsibility as editors to invite discussion about topics and controversies, and how do we decide what topics and controversies merit our attention? As we have considered how “conversation” happens and enriches our MED community, a framework by Groysberg and Slind (2012) has