Making a difference: Thoughts on management scholarship from the editorial team

Abstract

I am delighted to usher in my second year as Editor-in-Chief having witnessed a substantial increase in both the quality and quantity of articles submitted for review. While the European Management Journal (EMJ) is well established as the leading voice of management scholarship in Europe, and growing globally according to current metrics, we continue to strive for excellence and our goal of joining the handful of top multidisciplinary management journals.In this pursuit, I am lucky to have on my side a team of Associate Editors who are all recognized and rising scholars in their respective fields. And it is for them that, in this Editorial, I make way so that they can express their views and engage directly in a dialogue with prospective authors and readers. In the following sections, EMJ's Associate Editors reflect on their respective areas and outline their visions for the journal's development; consider problems, pitfalls and opportunities; seek to inspire; provide guidance; highlight trending and innovative topics; and offer good advice on the quality standards required from authors wishing to publish with EMJ.Needless to say, as I am close to my colleagues, I know and share their ideas and concerns. As for my own specific views, I point to my Editorial (Kastanakis, 2018).Readers will, without doubt, enjoy reading Sarah Robinson's big but important questions aimed at creating better future workplaces; Yannis Tsalavoutas's practical guidelines on pushing the boundaries in accounting and finance research; Mario Fernando's call for understanding what it means to be human; Claudia Jonczyk's encouragement to build bridges among disciplines and find ways of imagining the world; Uriel Stettner's invitation to explore risky, less travelled territories; Ioannis Thanos's reflections on strategy, emerging global themes, research design issues and reasons for rejections; Barak Aharonson's insightful exploration of unknown territories in entrepreneurship research; Kristina Potočnik's views on emerging areas in HRM, methods and the types of papers to submit; Haina Zhang's outlook on an interdisciplinary theoretical lens for current international management themes; Antonia Erz and Sylvia von Wallpach's analysis of the trends currently reshaping the landscape of marketing; Andreas Diedrich's overview of management and organization studies and commentary on safely analysing qualitative data to generate accurate and useful theories; Chris Leupold's views on profound issues facing organizations around the world today and encouragement for better studies that generate practically significant insights; and, finally, Liz Breen's ideas on thought provoking and impactful supply chain and operations's research.Reading through these fascinating contributions, I can't but think that we, scholars, often stand at the start of diverging roads leading to the unknown -in terms of choosing topics, going through ideas, evaluating new concepts, utilizing methods and interpretation approaches. Following the comments of my AEs, I encourage our p...

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