Editorial
One of the aims of any journal that regards itself as international is to show through the membership of its Editorial Advisory Board and through the papers that it publishes that it represents an international authorship and readership. The internationalness of the review panel for the Journal of Workplace Learning is evident in the list on the inside front cover of this issue, and the evidence available suggests that the journal has a wide audience,with usage particularly strong in Asian countries. Any scan of the journal’s papers in recent years will show that the papers consistently represent a wide spread of countries and continents.
One of the reviewers recently returned a paper to me with the comment that“Scandanavian readers will like the way this paper is presented”. His comment reminded me that we all bring our own cultural biases to the way we present and interpret research findings, and that a journal needs to be careful not to limit itself to a particular cultural view of how research should be regarded.
This current issue of the Journal of Workplace Learning typifies the range of countries of origin of the authors who write for the journal. First,Annika Lantz and Agneta Brav from Sweden present their research on “Job design for learning in work groups”, and then Srabani Maitra and Hongxia Shan, from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Canada, detail a fascinating study entitled “Transgressive vs conformative: immigrant women learning at contingent work”. This is followed by a paper on “Bureaucratic boundaries for collective learning in industrial work” by Mari Kira and Ekkehart Frieling, Germany, with the final paper, “Factors associated with transfer of training in workplace e-learning”, by Ji-Hye Park, Southern Illinois University, USA and Tim Wentling, University of Illinois, USA,continuing the international trend. Of course, we don’t know where those authors may have originally come from, and that might only add to the international dimension of the issue!
And wherever you are as you read this, it will, as usual be: good reading!
Darryl Dymock
