This issue of HRDI is the first one to have been produced by the new editorial team, who will be in charge of putting forth Volumes 13, 14, and 15. It is my pleasure and honour to follow in the footsteps of Peter Kuchinke, who led the journal through Volumes 10–12. Like Jean Woodall and Monica Lee before him, Peter has done a tremendous job of raising the standards of the journal and contributing to the advancement of the HRD research field. Having now spent the last four months transferring the editorial office from Illinois to Tilburg University and getting to grips with the impressive manuscript flow at HRDI, I have developed a great deal of acute respect for what the role of editor-in-chief entails – and for Peter's way of shaping that role.
Imagine receiving two submitted manuscripts on average each week, which need to be assessed on their ability to make it through a rigorous review process; sending the majority of those out for review, which means finding at least four suitable referees who are willing to put in precious time; chasing those referees that failed to make the deadline; synchronising three (sometimes two or four) potentially diverging review reports with one's own reading of the manuscript to produce a well-balanced decision letter; getting the associate editor's take on the manuscript, the reviews, and the draft decision letter; sending out the decision letter and review reports to the authors, usually asking for extensive revisions and/or a resubmitted manuscript; after which the largest part of the process starts again, until reviewers and editorial team are in agreement about the added value of printing the manuscript in HRDI; providing feedback to the reviewers about the reports from the other reviewers and the ensuing decision letter that was sent to the author; interacting with the associate editor for the (non-refereed) Perspectives section, who actively works with authors to bring their papers up to HRDI publication standards; having six to eight manuscripts completely ready in time for each issue to be sent to the publisher; logging every single step in the process to avoid loss of information and to keep track of where each manuscript stands; and this is just the primary process of handling the journal's manuscript flow.
Add to this holding three editorial board meetings and one management board meeting every year, usually at the AHRD/UFHRD conferences; organising three ‘Meet The Editors’ sessions for the same events; soliciting new submissions and possible reviewers; interacting with the publisher about the production side of the process; holding (phone) meetings with the editorial team to discuss the shape of the journal; emailing with the management board about the direction of the journal (and the odd crisis); and probably countless other tasks that I have not encountered in my first four months, yet.
I should like to thank Peter very much for doing all this and more on behalf of the journal, for taking HRDI to where it is now: a highly valued and authoritative journal that publishes excellent cutting-edge HRD research, which researchers and scholarly practitioners actually enjoy reading. It will be a hard act to follow!
As editor-in-chief I am extremely fortunate to have the dedicated support of a strong editorial team in accomplishing five high-quality HRDI issues per volume. Sally Sambrook acts as a critical yet supportive sounding board for all decisions I need to make, in her role as associate editor for the refereed section. Sasha Ardichvili puts in lots of effort as well, working with authors in his role as associate editor for the (non-refereed) Perspectives section. Juliette Buiter is the undisputed spider in the HRDI web, taking care of daily business and interacting with almost everyone in her role as editorial assistant. I should like to thank all of them very much for their wonderful contribution to the journal.
This first issue of HRDI Volume 13 is a typically diverse array of articles both thematically and geographically. Our journey starts in Germany, from where Martin Gartmeier, Johannes Bauer, Hans Gruber, and Helmut Heid present their findings of a case study with practitioners in elder care nursing, looking at workplace errors and negative knowledge. This relatively new concept deals with the experiential knowledge of expert professionals about what may endanger the attainment of a particular goal and should therefore be avoided. The study also investigates error-producing conditions in the workplace. The authors conclude that the concept of negative knowledge has potential for better understanding the competence of professionals to avoid errors; however, it should be more purposefully developed on both individual and organisational levels.
Next, we turn to the United States to hear Russ Korte talk about his relational view of organisational socialisation. He offers a qualitative case study conducted among new engineers recently hired into a large global manufacturing company. His conclusions suggest that relationship building is a primary driver of the socialisation process in organizations, which is a relatively new idea. Most of the literature still thinks of the socialisation process as an individual effort, with the newcomer being responsible for learning to fit into the organisation.
Egypt is the context for the third article in this issue. Bob Hamlin, Mona Nassar, and Khaled Wahba present a multiple case study using the critical incident technique, in which they gathered concrete examples of effective and ineffective manager and leader behaviour to identify criteria of effectiveness. The results are compared to behavioural criteria that emerged from studies in two UK hospitals. High degrees of overlap, commonality, and relative generalization occurred across all three organizations, lending strong empirical support to those who believe in universalistic explanations of the nature of managerial and leadership effectiveness.
Our scholarly journey continues to yet another continent, the Asian part of the world, where we find Meena Razvi and Gene Roth focusing on the socio-economic development of low-income women in India. They present findings from a literature review, which describes how NGOs attempt to fill gaps in governmental support for marginalized women in informal work sectors. The NGOs are shown to be capable of serving the needs of these women and, in addition, of providing a broad non-traditional context for investigating HRD processes and services at a national level.
Ann Brooks and Monirith Ly make us stay in Asia with their qualitative case study of research-capacity development at the premier public university in Cambodia. While most research on knowledge management has focused on the private sector, their study offers a different perspective. In this Southeast Asian context, faculty virtue is put forward as a basis on which research capacity can develop; however, with funding levels under pressure world wide, the authors' findings have relevance for richer and poorer nations alike.
In the first of two Perspectives pieces in this issue, Oranuch Pruetipibultham explores the link between the concepts of the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy and Strategic HRD. Thailand's Sufficiency Economy Philosophy introduced a major shift in conceptual thinking about the general development and administration in the country. The article highlights the current attempts to achieve sustainable development, especially after the economic crisis of 1997.
The second Perspectives piece takes us back to the United States and sees Denise Bonebright provide a historical overview of the famous Tuckman model describing group-development stages (forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning). She presents a literature review to trace the history of the model in terms of field practice and academic research. This article concludes our global journey around the HRD world in a little over 80 pages.
Meanwhile, over here in the Netherlands, let me end my first editorial with an invitation. Since a few years, HRDI offers authors the opportunity to submit proposals for a special themed section in an issue. The themed section should have at least a geographical component, usually combined with a substantive issue and typically comprising four manuscripts. All manuscripts go through our normal double-blind review process. We have already published special themed sections dealing with issues in Australia and Eastern Europe, amongst others. Everyone who would like to bring authors from a certain region of the world together to prepare a proposal for a special themed section is very welcome to contact me at [email protected].