Although I have previously reported on the Web statistics concerning OMJ in a quite recent newsletter to the Eastern Academy of Management, I thought it appropriate to report them in the journal itself as well. During the 2015 volume year, OMJ maintained its 20–25% acceptance rate with an ever-increasing rate of page views and full downloads of its articles globally. People from 104 countries made these downloads and page views, and in 2015, according to this metric, a new country was first in readership by a wide margin. For the first time, Australian articles were the most viewed and downloaded, beating the United States 26% to 17%. Past annual leaders have included the United Kingdom along with the United States. The following tables show the 2015 results. shows the virtual flat-line increase in four categories including total page views, Table of Contents views, Abstract downloads, and full article downloads over the past 3 years. You will notice that each of these categories more than doubles from Q1 of 2012 to Q1 of 2016, taking full article downloads from just under 2000 in Q1 of 2012 to about 5000, 3 years later. The other three categories show similar rates of growth. shows access by countries in order from Australia to Peru during this publication year. All statistics have been compiled by our publisher, Routledge, Taylor & Francis.
Table 1. 2015 journal access by country.
Figure 1. Full text downloads and page views via standard platforms for Organization Management Journal by quarter.
Author nationalities do not mirror readership access directly, but while the majority of authors are from the United States, we are proud to count co-editors from Ireland, the Netherlands, and Australia among our ranks, and 2015 authors from Korea, Italy, Australia, India, the Netherlands, and France.
Finally, we have two tables showing the most popular articles downloaded. shows those articles most downloaded from among those published in 2015 (articles from earlier in the year will have had a longer opportunity to have been downloaded). shows those articles most downloaded during 2015, regardless of the year that they were published in OMJ (the oldest one of these goes back to 2006). Congratulations to the authors whose articles appear in one of these tables, especially to Lynn E. Miller and Richard M. Weiss, as well as Susan D. Baker, Erica L. Anthony, and Susan A. Stites-Doe. These two articles appear on both lists! And special kudos to the five articles authored by Mary C. Gentile, Kerri A. Crowne, Norman T. Sheehan, Peter Arsenault and Sue R. Faerman, and Charles Wankel. These five articles, going back to 2009 in two cases, were the most downloaded articles of the year 2015. If you have not read them, go online and treat yourself to them.
Table 2. Top accessed articles from volume 12 (2015).
Table 3. Top accessed articles in 2015.
New articles and reviews in this issue
This issue adds to the list of articles this journal has published in its history as an academic journal. At some point one of them may top the “most accessed” list. We have one article in Current Empirical Research and two in Teaching & Learning, along with two very articulate reviews in Research of Note to share with you in the issue.
Our first article, a major piece of research by a five-author collaboration, is entitled “Reflexive and Selective Competitive Behaviors—Inertia, Imitation, and Interfirm Rivalry,” by David Lanier Major, Patrick G. Maggitti, Ken G. Smith, Curtis M. Grimm, and Pamela J. Derfus. It is an analysis of how firms engaged in interfirm competitive rivalry choose their marketing strategies from among those observed in their competitors and those preferred by their own teams and executives. In an ambitious study over a 6-year period that included longitudinal data from 58 firms and some 2,164 industry-specific, firm–rival dyads from 11 industries including hard goods manufacturers, general retailers, utility providers, and national supermarkets, the five authors used the awareness–motivation–capability (AMC) perspective developed by Chen and colleagues (Chen, Citation1996; Chen, Su, & Tsai, Citation2007) to help them analyze marketing activities chosen via reflexive behavior learned from strategies formerly used within rivalries versus developing new ones to enhance marketing results. It would obviously be highly advantageous if a firm could predict its competitors’ marketing activities such as mergers and acquisitions, alliances, product introductions, advertising campaigns and product announcements, and product innovations, for example, but this research does not get to that question. It does introduce an insightful approach to a structure for future research in that arena.
We are also featuring two articles united by their focus on avoiding bias and ensuring justice. In the first one, “Enhancing Teacher Credibility: What We Can Learn From the Justice and Leadership Literature,” authors Barbara A. Ritter, Patricia R. Hedberg, and Kim Gower present a theoretical approach to understanding how instructors can ensure credibility with students. They use the lenses of Implicit Leadership Theory (ILT) where the teacher is seen as the leader, in tandem with organizational justice, where students are keenly sensitive to issues of distributive and procedural justice within the classroom environment and the curricular and grading decisions.
In the second article in the Teaching & Learning section, “Revealing Gender Bias: An Experiential Exercise,” authors Linda M. Dunn-Jensen, Scott Jensen, Mikelle A. Calhoun, and Katherine C. Ryan deal with the subject of bias, especially unconscious bias, and how it can be surfaced through an experiential exercise. With their original exercise using an adaptation of the British game show “Golden Balls,” the authors are able to uncover hidden biases among participants and then deal with them in the processing of the exercise. This leads to high-level discussion about biases hidden in people and how to deal with them, as well as how to design interaction when the designers must realize that participants will have personal biases, especially gender biases, of which they are ignorant. These two articles reflect uncommon depth and have serious implications for any readers looking to improve their classroom presence and goals.
In the Research of Note section, we present two detailed and thorough reviews. The first of these is a review of the 2015 book by Martin Ford entitled Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. In her review, Joanne L. Tritsch entertains a serious discussion of the subject of the book, which is the threat of automation and technology to the workforce at upper as well as lower levels. Pointing to the fact that the United States has gained 40 million people with no corresponding increase in number of jobs since the 2008 recession, Ford suggests that automation and technology have also contributed greatly to the inequality of income within the country. He specifically focuses on the tech threat in relation to health care and higher education, two areas that have been relatively immune to date, and explores one solution that may seem quite perilous but that has been suggested by government-sponsored committees—a guaranteed minimum income for all workers, somewhat indexed to their level of education. This book seems quite intriguing.
The second review is of Per L. Bylund’s 2016 book The Problem of Production, as reviewed by Erik Markin and Vishal Gupta. In his book, Bylund takes on the theory of the firm from an Austrian economic perspective in which the marketplace has created widely diverse firms but is also going to be responsible for their devolvement into uniformity and commonplace practice. The trajectory of the firm within this context is discussed through an examination of productivity. In the end, Bylund focuses on how it is up to entrepreneurial innovation to break through to stimulate firms to lead the process of growth and development and positive economic change.
Finally, our issue concludes with a traditional contribution, an enhancement of Kristin Backhaus’s Presidential Address at the 2015 Eastern Academy of Management annual conference in Philadelphia, PA. In it, Kristin relates how effective leadership is developed through effective mentorship of the potential leader. Sometimes it is key figures in one’s early life and/or career, and sometimes an organization can play a role, too. Kristin brings up key people and then shifts to the role of the Eastern Academy of Management and its members, as well as the role of Organization Management Journal, where she was a co-editor, in helping her develop her leadership skills. Kris is, of course, a past president of EAM and now a dean at her university, a career path that began with her first job as executive assistant to the then-dean several years earlier and before her graduate study had begun. As professor, OMJ co-editor, and dean, she has begun her own pivotal role contributing to the leadership development of many, many others.
References
- Chen, M. (1996). Competitor analysis and interfirm rivalry: Toward a theoretical integration. Academy of Management Journal, 21(1), 100–134.
- Chen, M.-J., Su, K.-H., & Tsai, W. (2007). Competitive tension: The awareness-motivation-capability perspective. Academy of Management Journal, 50(1), 101–118. doi:10.5465/AMJ.2007.24162081