These are auspicious times for the Asia Pacific Journal of Management (APJM). Over the last decade or so APJM has firmly established itself as the leading general management journal focused upon Asian organizations and their relationship to the global economy. All indicators point to continuing growth and development: submissions to the journal have doubled over the past 3 years from 345 in 2009 to over 700 in 2012. Readership, as measured by full text downloads, has increased dramatically from some 66,000 in 2008 to almost 120,000 downloads in 2011. Moreover, this readership is geographically diverse, in percentage terms the readership is very healthy in the UK (which accounts for 14 % of full text downloads), followed by China (13 %), Australia (10 %), the USA (9 %), and Germany (6 %). Since its recent inclusion in the Social Sciences Citation Index, APJM has received two very respectable impact factors: 3.35 in 2010 (reported in 2011) and 3.06 in 2011 (reported in 2012). These impact factors rank us in the top 20 management journals worldwide and the first among all management journals with a declared regional focus. All of these are very encouraging. I can say I am delighted to begin my term as APJM’s Editor-in-Chief in this journal’s 31st year of publication.

At the beginning of this century the newly appointed Editor-in-Chief, Kulwant Singh (National University of Singapore), set out to raise the journal’s profile by internationalizing its editorship, authorship, and readership. Each of the following three Editors-in-Chief, Andrew Delios (National University of Singapore), Mike Peng (University of Texas at Dallas), and David Ahlstrom (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), maintained the course set by Kulwant. The recent performance of the journal along with global trends in the academic world suggests that there is little need for change in APJM’s mission and overall direction. Consequently, there will be substantial continuity in editorial policy of the journal during my term as Editor-in-Chief. This continuity is best reflected in the ongoing composition of the editorial team. Mike Peng will continue as Consulting Editor to be joined in the same capacity by Dave Ahlstrom. I would like to acknowledge the guidance and assistance of both in frequent conversations over the past year. I am most gratified by the decision of each of the current 21 members of the senior editorial team to stay on in their role for the foreseeable future. I thank each of them for their continuing commitment and support for what the journal is trying to achieve. I also would like to thank Daniel Shapiro, Dean of the Beadie School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Steve Harvey, Dean of the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, and Hasan Pirkul, Dean of the Jindal School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, for their support. APJM is privileged to enjoy strong support from the publisher Springer. I look forward to working with Springer’s editorial director Nick Philipson (New York), Saraswathi Sabapathy of the Springer editorial office (Chennai, India), and Jurgen Torres of Springer’s production office (Manila, The Philippines), as well as with their respective editing and production teams. Last but not least, I know I will be counting on the institutional memory of Rachel Pinkham of the University of Texas at Dallas, who will continue to serve as Managing Editor.

While the journal is based on solid foundations and has developed a strong editorial capacity there is always going to be room for improvement. The challenge ahead is to increase our recognition as a top-tier “A” journal. Increasing the journal’s reputation as a top-tier journal will happen only when management scholars routinely prefer to publish their best Asia related research in APJM. The importance of impact factor is clearly important in this regard and the journal is doing well on this indicator. Less easily measured but equally important in the longer term process of reputation building is the quality feedback authors receive from its reviewers. Many readers of this journal have at some point in their career received reviews of their work from the AMJ and AMR, two of the management field’s most prestigious journals. Most would agree with me that even when reviews are accompanied with a rejection letter (as so many are), the feedback received from AMJ and AMR’s review is always of the highest standard and—once thoroughly digested—always strengthens a paper’s quality. Over the years the editors of these two journals have succeeded in fostering a culture of engaged and constructive reviewing among the Academy’s community of scholars. Editors at AMR consider reviewing to be both an ethical and professional responsibility for authors who submit their work to it (Trevino, 2008). AMR’s “Information for Contributors” makes clear that there is an expectation that submitting to AMR implies a willingness to review for it as part of a quid pro quo. Developing and sustaining a culture of constructive and engaged reviewers is a long institution building exercise. We will know that APJM is recognized as a top-tier journal when we hear contributors and other stakeholders talk about the high quality of feedback they receive when submitting their best work to our journal.

Reviewing for APJM is not always an easy task. Most submissions are authored by non-native speakers of English who are writing in a second or even third language and I wholeheartedly commend APJM reviewers who, with patience and perseverance, help so many authors to clarify and polish their contributions. APJM harbors a developmental role with respect to new authors. Over the last decade numerous management scholars educated and based in business schools in mainland China have published their first English-language manuscripts in APJM. The past and present members of the senior editorial team can be justly proud of their achievement in nurturing successive generations of Asian management scholars and helping them launch and establish their publication careers. Nevertheless, sustaining our commitment to academic mentorship is going to be a challenge with the current levels of growth in submissions because the burden of reviewing will inevitably increase. However, our pioneering work in mentoring new authors is all the more necessary as a new generation of management scholars is now appearing in the new wave of business schools springing up across the Middle East and South and Central Asia. I want to take this opportunity to remind all our stakeholders who have an interest in building a world-class community of Asian management scholars of their responsibility to undertake a fair share of the reviewing load. Authors who would like to submit their papers to APJM should be careful to read the journal’s aims and scope, some published articles in APJM, and current and recent editorials. There were several recent helpful editorials on the journal’s aims and scope (Ahlstrom, 2011a), avoiding desk rejection (Ahlstrom, 2010, 2012a), and a checklist for authors in submitting papers to APJM (Ahlstrom, 2011b, 2012b).

To lay claim to being the leading management outlet of all Asia we will need to widen this journal’s geographic coverage with a more balanced attention to issues in other rapidly developing Asian countries. Our coverage of managerial issues in a large country such as India is not as deep as it should be. The forthcoming Special Issue of “Entrepreneurship and Innovation in India” will go some way to achieving this balance. Moreover, our coverage of managerial issues in what might be described as Islamic Asia might also be improved. While we publish a healthy stream of research about countries with large Islamic populations such as Indonesia and Malaysia (Ahn & York, 2011; Dieleman, 2010), political developments suggest there will be research opportunities to examine emerging issues in Islamic Asia. Politics is always in the driving seat of institutional and economic change. Just as the collapse of communism and the opening of China in the 1980s generated decades of exciting research opportunities in Asia, so too will the social and political effects of the Arab Spring ripple across the Asian region. A trickle of articles on emerging issues in these contexts are beginning to appear in APJM, for example on Iran (Farashahi & Hafsi, 2009; Soltani, Syed, Liao, & Shahi-Sough, 2012), Pakistan (Yousaf, Sanders, & Shipton, 2013), and Central Asia and the Caucasus (Ismail & Ford, 2010; Ismail, Ford, Wu, & Peng, 2013). But many of the region’s most populous and wealthy states are quietly on the move making gradual political changes that will lead to growth in interregional trade and investment. For example, the growing engagement of Chinese firms in Central and South Asia will undoubtedly provide fascinating contexts for management researchers. In summary, Asia remains a wide and fertile territory in which APJM can play—and play well.

Special Issues and conferences

APJM will continue to publish Special Issues on leading-edge management topics relevant to the Asia Pacific region. In keeping with its developmental role, the publication of a Special Issue is normally preceded by a Special Issue Conference, which provides authors with an opportunity to present a preliminary version of a paper and receive feedback from members of the senior editorial team and other conference participants. Table 1 provides details of recently published Special Issues as well as information on forthcoming and planned Special Issues. I draw your attention to the recently announced Special Issue Conference on the theme of emerging economy multinationals and home country effects edited by Bersant Hobdari (Copenhagen Business School), Peter Gammeltoft (Copenhagen Business School), Klaus Meyer (CEIBS), and Jing Li (Simon Fraser University). In a new departure but consistent with the objective of internationalizing this journal’s authorship and reach, this Special Issue Conference will be the first to be held in Europe hosted in Denmark by Copenhagen Business School in September 2014. For more details on the relevant deadlines please see the call for papers on APJM’s website: http://www.springer.com/journal/10490.

Table 1 Recent and planned Special Issues in APJM
Full size table

First issue of 2013

APJM typically receives a large number of macro-oriented submissions in strategy, corporate governance, entrepreneurship, and international business issues (Chen & Chu, 2012; Chen, Li, & Shapiro, 2011). But I have noticed in recent years that there is significant growth in the number of micro-oriented submissions dealing with managerial issues from the perspective of human resource management (HRM), organizational behavior, and labor relations (e.g., Lam, Huang, & Lau, 2012; Li, Hui, Ashkanasy, & Ahlstrom, 2012). This growth is reflected in the first issue under my editorship, where each of the 14 papers published can be classified micro-oriented. The papers in this issue are broadly grouped around three main themes. The first five papers are concerned with the effects of strategic HRM tools and high-performance work systems upon key organizational outcomes such as firm financial performance, internationalization, and employee satisfaction. The second group of five papers is concerned with organizational citizenship behavior, organizational commitment, and—in a new area of growth in this literature—occupational commitment. A third group of four papers deals with organizational antecedents and outcomes related to supervisory behavior and leadership values. As is now standard for APJM, these papers are set in a range of empirical settings ranging from Australia, Greater China, Korea, and South Asia. Anyone interested in learning more about leading-edge research on Asian HRM and organizational behavior issues could do no better than to read the papers published in this issue.