As we assumed the editorial responsibility for the journal in January of 2013, we announced a number of changes. These included expanding the leadership structure of the Editorial Board. New members were added and attention was given to expanding the number of associate editors and the pool of reviewers drawn upon to review manuscript submissions. Over the next year, a series of discussions were held with Editorial Board members and others to consider ways to strengthen the journal, to generate more manuscript submissions, and to improve the manuscript review process. We also gave serious consideration, in concert with the other members of the Editorial Board, to rebranding the journal.
Effective January 2014, the name of the journal was changed from Administration in Social Work to Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership, and Governance. We believed the new name was more inclusive than the former name. Further, we believed that the new name of the journal enabled us to maintain a focus on management, while also adding increased focus on leadership and governance. In order to manage all the changes we envisioned and in the light of many workplace job demands, it was decided that one of us (Edwards) would serve as editor-in-chief, having certain particular responsibilities, while the other (Austin) would serve as editor.
At the time the name change was implemented, we announced a restructuring of the editorial leadership group. We created five associate editor roles, each with a particular focus. These foci included knowledge development (Bowen McBeath), nonprofit sector (Karen Hopkins), public sector (Nancy Dickinson), for-profit sector (Michalle Mor-Borak), and practice arena (Tom Packard). We hoped that this new structure would result in an increase in the numbers of manuscripts being submitted and that the journal’s impact factor would also increase; this has turned out to be the case, with the numbers of manuscript submissions having increased from 78 in 2013 to 132 in 2016 and the impact factor having increased during the same period from 0.46 to 0.57.
Another goal was to enhance the manuscript review process and reduce the time from submission to decision. We accomplished this, in part, by recruiting more manuscript reviewers and by developing and implementing a new set of review criteria, which can be seen in . Associate Editor Bowen McBeath took the lead in developing the evaluation criteria, which were well received by both reviewers and authors. And the time from submission to decision was reduced significantly over the past few years.
Figure 1. Peer review criteria.
In addition to our inward focus on strengthening the journal, we also sought to enhance our external focus. Over the past several decades we were struck by the lack of editorial collaboration among the editors of the major macro social work practice journals—namely, the Journal of Community Practice, the Journal of Policy Practice, and our Human Service Organizations journal. This seemed particularly striking given that all three journals are published by Taylor and Francis (formerly Haworth Press). In the process of reaching out to other editors and in the midst of the startup of the Macro Practice Commission designed to reassess the future of practice following the pioneering report by Professor Jack Rothman in 2011, our publisher was encouraged to print marketing flyers that featured all three journals for dissemination at national conferences. In addition, we launched preliminary conversations and communications with the senior editors of the other journals. These efforts were soon stalled by changes in editorial leadership and an inconclusive search for a common publishing agenda (e.g., a shared special issue on the interrelationships of different types of macro practice). It is hoped that new leadership at all three journals will help move the collaborative agenda forward in the years ahead.
In our efforts to expand our relationship with the Network for Social Work Management, we added two new awards to our list of outstanding contributions to the literature. The original award, the Slavin-Patti Award, for outstanding research on management practice, honored our journal’s first two editors, Si Slavin and Rino Patti, The two new awards also honor pioneers. The Burt Gummer Award for an outstanding literature review is named for Burt Gummer, whose prodigious contributions to the journal can be found in the many literature reviews he published to inform practice. The other new award, Mary Parker Follett Award, for outstanding contributions to organizational and management theory, honors the contributions of Mary Parker Follett, one of our early pioneers in human service management, who also built a substantial following among scholars in public and business administration through her efforts to promote theory-informed practice. A senior member of our HSO Editorial Board, Professor Jean Kruzich, has played a leadership role in helping a committee to annually identify the winners of all three awards, which are presented each year at the annual conference of the Network for Social Work Management. We continue to reach out to the network and to our publisher to gain their assistance in promoting the journal by placing selected articles and the contents of our journal issues in the weekly network e-news publication, which has expanded to reach thousands of practitioners, nationally and internationally.
Other outreach efforts have included monitoring the presentations at multiple national conferences to identify and encourage manuscript submissions. In a similar way, we have reached out to senior colleagues to organize special issues of the journal, and we greatly appreciate the support of Hillel Schmidt and Jennifer Mosley, who each coedited a special issue during our tenure as editors. Another form of outreach took the shape of guest editorials that included reflections on management practice and organizational research by senior and junior scholars and senior practitioners. Many of the contributions from practitioners were featured in the journal when we celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2016 at the network’s annual conference in Los Angeles, where the HSO journal editor (Austin) received the Chauncey Alexander Lifetime Achievement Award.
As we both entered the seventh decade of our lives when we took on the editorial leadership responsibilities, it was clear in our minds that we would be transitional leaders with the clear goal of strengthening the journal and identifying future leadership. This process included recruiting the next generation of leadership to help us lay out a future pathway in the form of a strategic plan. We are very appreciative of the efforts of Bowen McBeath and Karen Hopkins for their leadership in developing the plan and for their willingness to step into the leadership role as coeditors beginning in 2018. The next editorial from our new leaders will feature elements of the strategic plan and their hopes and dreams for the future of the journal. Each of our new editorial leaders brings special qualities and experiences to our efforts to develop and share knowledge related to the management, leadership, and governance of human service organizations. Karen Hopkins (University of Maryland School of Social Work, with a PhD from the University of Chicago) has been a long-term leader of the University of Maryland's management program and an active scholar in the field that focuses on different levels of management. Bowen McBeath (Portland State University School of Social Work, with a PhD from the University of Michigan) has also made substantial contributions to the field of organizational research related to human service organizations with a deep commitment, like Karen’s, to develop the next generation of management practitioners and scholars. Both Karen and Bowen have served as officers on the board of the Society for Social Work Research, and Karen represents HSO on the Board of the Network for Social Work Management. As you might guess, we are very proud of our successors and are ready to assist them in the years ahead.
Finally, we want to acknowledge the immense contribution of our Editorial Board members, who are the lifeblood of the journal, in the form of repeated contributions of time and effort to evaluate manuscripts for possible publication. Without the board members’ support, it would be impossible to sustain the journal. In a similar way, we want to recognize the profound contributions of our managing editor, Alexis Crosta, who has provided the steady hand and oversight needed to produce five issues per year or 25+ issues since she began her service to the journal. Without her support, the issues would not have appeared in a timely way.
We also want to thank those hardworking colleagues who work behind the scenes to make HSO a leading journal in the field. At Taylor and Francis we want to recognize the outstanding work of our editor, Abby (Abigail) Carson and our marketing director, Veronica Sydnor. The future visibility of the journal is in the hands of our publisher and the Network for Social Work Management, and we are most grateful for the support of Lakeya Cherry, network CEO, for her efforts to strengthen the relationship between the journal publisher and the members of the network.