Editorial

As the vaccination of the inhabitants of the global village drifts into the center of the publicly satisfied attention, we try to return to business as usual. Return is tough and bitter because most of us suspect that some things will never be the same again. One does not have to believe in sinister schemes of the elitist conspirators to feel worried about everything solid melting into thin air. One does not have to believe in conspiracy theories with the United Nations Organization or Russia, with World Health Organization or China, with Bilderberg or the European Union, with Soros or Davos as the main suspects to grope blindly through the fake news and troll farm feeds.

But let us stick to details. What kind of business are we in, when editing academic journals and publishing them? Are not all academic communications in direct competition with the virtual commons colonized by runners of large data farms? In clouds and other virtual pastures we herd our journals in flocks and ranks and files. There are limits to metaphors we live by – we cannot always look at journals as if they were sheep. Instead of harvesting wool we tend to them as if they were animal species of knowledge carriers trying to make a difficult evolutionary step. We let them graze on fresh information, digest academic criticism and fight for attention. Competition must thrive because we learn more, know more and talk more than ever before. Virtual commons are overcrowded. Yet, they are still expanding and no tragedy of any commons follows. Knowledge grows, communicating knowledge becomes even more popular and everybody watches the virtual commons on which thousands of journals are fed like pigs, salmons or chicken or grown like soya, palms or rice. Genetic manipulation becomes a garage game.

True, business becomes remote as in remote control. Authors upload their papers and robots trim them for the preselection. Editors earmark them and send them to reviewers. Some like it honest, some like it hot, some do not like it at all. Anyway, with some loss of time, reviewers return their verdicts, editors assemble the batches of papers, baptize them as issues and send them out. Out where? Well, not onto the library shelves, because libraries became less material (though they cost more energy than ever before – just to cool down a little). Editors and their publishers blow these academic journals, these carriers of knowledge out into the open communication space. Let us call our global village, ourhyperconnected communication space – culture. Culture – for the sake of brevity. Culture is our nature, we cultivate ourselves as naturally as if we were born with letters and pixels already deposited in our inner minds. But culture has to be managed and we manage it for the hell of it. Remote control is currently performed by bots, our machines of the loving Grace, which whisper to us from screens and speakers. Bots used to be cheaper than employees of the publishing houses. However, bots first won and then got outwitted by previously unemployed or underemployed humans. This is what is now going to happen to the peer review system, which pretended to turn passionate humans into indifferent robots. We are going to drop the preemptive reviews and we are going to shift toward the open competition. Everybody can claim to explain everything. The only risk is that somebody more intelligent may see it and voice an open criticism. If this critic wins, the original author has to go to Canossa and change views. Otherwise the author may remain unchallenged by gatekeepers. But not for long. Only until we announce that we want something done. Then a competition follows and whoever makes a better nuclear weapon or a safer antiviral vaccine – wins. Fair enough?

Meanwhile our knowledge about the organizational change management increases with the study the cross-border mergers and acquisitions and with the tracing of emotional conflicts between consultants and their clients. It increases with the coping instructions for employees seeking support in company values and for leaders trying charismatic leadership out. Organizational culture change is studied for her role in influencing conflict management and in stimulating employee counter-narratives. Team learning in Southeastern Asia is investigated along with the change fatigue and change cynicism and the dynamic capabilities.

Let us hope for a change. Organizational change. For the better. More creative, less politically correct.

This paper forms part of a special section “Organizational change in open innovation”, guest edited by Dr Slawomir Magala.