Editorial Vol. 8

We have just completed our first full year as co-Editors-in-Chief of the Journal of Organization Design (JOD). When we stepped into our roles, we defined five key goals:

In what follows, we review the progress that we have made against our goals and discuss our aspirations for the year ahead.

Most importantly, we continued to publish high-quality papers in a variety of formats— a tradition established by the journal’s founders. These formats reflect JOD’s mission to provide authors more customized vehicles through which to express their ideas. In 2018, in addition to publishing research articles, we published research primers and organizational zoos, as well as commentaries, case studies, and point-of-view articles.

We published articles on companies such as Bitcoin and Rocket Internet and on subjects such as ecosystems, collaborative organizations, and open platform organizations. We published papers on M&A that explored learning, valuation, and post-merger integration. Our authors explored NK landscapes, design thinking, worker engagement, and the development of a scientific-based theory of organizational design. In the coming year, we will continue to lead with high-quality research articles, and expand the variety of formats published.

As a priority, we continue to work toward inclusion in the various abstracting and indexing services important to this field of research. We have focused on meeting the various criteria for these, including recruiting an influential and expert Editorial Board and ensuring we adhere to JOD’s high editorial standards to publish robust and important articles across a diverse range of topics within our scope, while maintaining a regular monthly publication schedule. Our acceptance rate in 2018 was 22%, and the rate of submissions continues to increase. In fact, in 2018, we received more submissions than in the prior 2 years combined.

We have added to the roster of Associate Editors and Editorial Board members and charged them with seeking out novel and interesting manuscripts while maintaining high editorial standards. The extraordinarily diverse and high-caliber senior editorial team rivals that of any top journal in the field of organizations or strategy. These Editors’ dedication and hard work continues to ensure that the authors who submit to JOD receive timely and high-quality reviews. We also gratefully acknowledge the contributions of our reviewers, who provide timely and insightful feedback to manuscripts submitted to JOD.

Special collections continue to be an important vehicle through which JOD advances understanding of fundamental theories and emerging phenomena of organization design. In 2018, we started to publish a special collection on “Fading Hierarchies and the Emergence of New Forms of Organization,” guest-edited by Stephan Billinger, Maciej Workiewicz, Børge Obel, and Charles Snow. We announced a call for papers on “Corporate Headquarters in the 21st Century” (to be guest-edited by Sven Kunisch, Markus Menz, and David J. Collis) and another one on “New Trends in Organization Design” (to be guest-edited by Børge Obel, Richard M. Burton, Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson, and Erik R. Larson). Special collections accounted for about 40% of all submissions to JOD in 2018. In 2019, we will announce two new special collections. The first call for papers will focus on formal and informal organization (lead Guest Editor: Phanish Puranam). The second will focus on organization design for social innovation (lead Guest Editor: Anne-Claire Pache).

Finally, Springer Nature is working to promote our authors and content. Their promotional efforts have helped to garner a global readership with 79% of visits coming from outside of North America. Content usage is also high, with articles being accessed more than 72,200 times in 2018, and our articles are frequently shared and discussed on social media sites such as Twitter. In addition to video abstracts, we have begun to offer our authors the chance at a blog contribution.

Although we are pleased to report significant progress against our goals, it is important for JOD to continue to receive quality submissions and to expand our readership. Therefore, we encourage you to send us your manuscripts! As a reminder to our potential contributors and readers: the mission of the Journal of Organization Design is to publish theoretical and empirical research on organization design. At JOD, we welcome contributions from scholars in any discipline and from managers in all types of organizations and industries. We seek to publish high-quality work that will be used not only by design scholars, but also by the designers and managers of organizations.