Personnel Review after 50: the next chapter
As Personnel Review celebrates its 50th anniversary, we feel privileged to lead the journal into the next phase as new editors-in-chief. We acknowledge the immense contribution and hard work of the previous editors, Professor Nelarine Cornelius and Professor Eric Pezet, who have helmed the journal since 2012. Over this period, their achievements have been many. They have increased the impact factor of the journal from 0.825 (5 years IF 1.236) in 2012 to 3.434 (5 years IF 4.034) in 2020; they have internationalized the journal and published more papers from emerging scholars and the global south. Personnel Review is now one of the top four journals in the human resource management discipline (h-5 index) attracting close to a thousand submissions last year. We owe them a debt of gratitude and are pleased to announce that Professor Cornelius will continue with the journal in an advisory capacity as consulting editor in 2022.
As we write this editorial, we are conscious of the enormous global challenges facing humanity. The climate conference in Glasgow has just concluded with mixed results, the world is emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic which has impacted individuals and employment in profound ways, war and terrorism continue to rage and we continue to witness systemic racism and the rise of the new right. As scholars writing and researching human resource management issues, our ability to influence the context and drivers of managerial and policy makers' decision-making for the greater good has never been more critical. We also need to comprehend the impact of managerial decision-making not only on employees but also on their families, the wider environment and society. We surmise that our discipline has been challenged in identifying and capturing the potential for individual and collective agency on a global scale.
As human resource management academics from Australia and Canada, and as the new editors-in-chief of Personnel Review, we take up this challenge and responsibility. We believe that human resource management scholarship should be meaningful and have value beyond individuals and organizations. We are committed to the United Nations Sustainability Goals and highlight the relevance of goals focusing on healthy lives and well-being (#3), gender equality and empowerment (#5), decent work (#8) and the reduction of inequality (#10) to human resource management theory and practice. To address these global challenges, we invite contributions that address these goals and challenges from a human resource management perspective.
We also encourage contributions from allied disciplines including the sociology of work, industrial and organizational psychology, organizational behavior, as well as employment and industrial relations that are innovative, offer a global perspective and capture different world views and ways of knowing. We seek to publish papers that build human resource management theory and demonstrate a strong potential to make impactful and practical change. In this way, we can better engage with practitioners across the globe and demonstrate the impact of our discipline. We will be calling for special issue proposals that address contemporary human resource management challenges, provocation pieces and research notes that report breakthrough findings.
We thank our team of associate editors, editorial board members and the many reviewers who share their time and expertise generously. As we recover from the pandemic, we are cognizant that we have all faced considerable challenges over the past two years. We acknowledge the many frustrations that academics have experienced globally and the importance of journal publications for academic career development. We are committed to continuously improving our processes and we are open to suggestions. We value our community of scholars, and we ask for your continued support as we work to strengthen Personnel Review and make meaningful and impactful contributions to our discipline.
