Why We Need a New Management and Business Review Journal

The primary reason for developing a new journal is that we have over 20 million potential readers of such journals worldwide who have a broad range of needs for knowledge about management and business practices. The existing sources – including Harvard Business Review (HBR), Sloan Management Review (SMR), and California Management Review (CMR) – and the enormous amount of information available on the internet meet a fraction of these readers’ needs.

Over 200,000 business school professors worldwide have roughly 1,500 research journals and practitioners’ journals focused on specific business disciplines. Over 98 percent of these professors never attempt to publish to HBR, SMR, or CMR. Many of them could be motivated to write papers for MBR with its broad community involvement, a different editorial structure, and different editorial processes.

To evolve a platform that encourages a wide range of writings that bridge the gaps between practice, education and research, we will emphasize the following:

1. A much wider global perspective: MBR will cover a much wider global perspective than any existing journal.  During the current decade, the high-income industrialized countries have started to account for less than 50 percent of the global gross product, and China has become the largest economy in the world based on purchasing power parity.  This shift, combined with the continuing rise of global networks for production of goods and services, has created new paradigms of managing organizations.

2. In-depth coverage, rigor, and value density: We plan to publish articles that are rigorous and cover topics in depth.  Furthermore, articles in MBR will be succinct and precise, ensuring that readers get maximum value per minute for the time they spend in reading.

3. Drawing on an untapped pool of authors: Since we plan to rely on numerous cosponsoring and partner schools, we expect to draw on a larger pool of academics who work on real-world problems than other publications do.  Most people in this pool do not publish in HBR, SMR, and CMR.  Articles from this pool, from the consulting community, and from practitioners will be the primary sources of papers for the Management and Business Review.

4. Disseminating practical results from research journals:  Some articles in academic research journals are pertinent to practice, but the practitioners rarely read them because they are written for academics. We plan to invite their authors to write “practitioners’ versions” of such articles and we plan to conduct workshops to help them in their rewriting.