This year has gone by very fast, and it is my second year as Editor-in-Chief of BAR. What a great experience! It is a learning process that has kept me daily in touch with the academic and scientific word in its most pure essence. Having the chance to first hand read the work from researchers from Brazil and abroad is a challenge and a continuous learning duty.
During the last two years, BAR has gone through some changes: it has adopted continuous publication process of articles, and now it takes about 92 days to process an article that is approved to continue the evaluation process, before being published. Also, we started to accept articles related to Public Administration and Accountancy, broadening BAR’s scope to almost every area of the Administration field.
The contribution of Action Editors, Associate Editors and Reviewers has shown to be extremely relevant for BAR’s continuous search for excellence in the Administration publication of scientific articles. I can tell you that the quality of the reviews has improved and both Associate Editors and Reviewers are tending to timely respond to their tasks. Authors have shown more interest in having BAR as an outlet for their work, considering that the number of submissions has increased, specially this year. This is great! We are getting more competitive and we are literally, raising the bar of BAR.
2016 was a year of exchanging ideas and getting to know editors of top tiers Journals in Brazil. Fruitful conversations were possible in three different occasions during the year, and it is interesting to find out that we tend to share the same challenges (problems and opportunities) as Editors-in-Chief.
It is important to remember that the Administration (Management) Academy in Brazil has achieved a level of maturity that calls for new Journals to be launched, with thematic topics as it happens outside Brazil, specially in the American Academy. The most traditional Journal, that doesn’t have focus in a specific area of the Administration will face new competitors and thus, will need to find ways to continue to improve their publications and attract authors with high quality papers. If this really happens, some questions that arise can be like: how many new Journals does our Academy will hold without losing quality? Should the most traditional and old Journals reinvent themselves? It will be interesting to see new changes in Brazilian and in the world, all related to the academic publication of business, administration and management research in conjunction with the paths and trends that new periodicals will bring as inspiration and challenges for us.
I wish that 2017 will come with inspiration, courage and interesting research questions, so that we can come up with relevant contributions to the development of our area of knowledge.
The current issue has seven articles as follow. We hope that you appreciate and learn more by reading them:
The first article “Redefining the Relationship between Intellectual Capital and Innovation: The Mediating Role of Absorptive Capacity” by Alessandra Cassol, Cláudio Reis Gonçalo, and Roberto Lima Ruas aims to analyzes the relationship between absorptive capacity, intellectual capital and innovation. The main purpose of this research is to demonstrate that absorptive capacity can leverage the relation between intellectual capital and innovation potential. The method was a single case study using exploratory and descriptive research strategies and applying both quantitative and qualitative techniques.
The second article “Top Human Resources Managers Views on Trade Union Action in Brazilian Corporations” by Antonio Carvalho Neto, Wilson Aparecido Costa de Amorim, and André Luiz Fischer presents the perception of human resource (HR) top managers at strategic level in Brazilian corporations regarding labor union activity. It is a quantitative study about the perception of 354 experienced HR top managers on the unionization of employees, influence of the union on the organization, recognition of the union for labor negotiations and the existence of an advisory committee (workers’ council) within organizations.
The third article “Inked Careers: Tattooing Professional Paths” by Gabriela DeLuca and Sidinei Rocha-de-Oliveira states that the concept of career has an interdisciplinary and historical constitution, which includes persons, groups, organizations and society. Given that, authors aim to deepen the interactionist notion of career from the understanding of a deviant path, supported by a theory and a method appropriated to the cited call for interdisciplinary approaches. Dilemmas and conflicts emerged as important analytical categories. Although necessary, these two concepts were not sufficient to contemplate analyses in their entirety. For these reasons they conceptualized a third possibility of controversy during a career: the inquiries.
The fourth article “What Accounts for Plural Forms of Governance Structure in the Same Industry or Firm - The Case of the Brazilian Electricity Industry” by Daniel Lopes and André Leite indicates that Governance structures are described as a spectrum with the market and vertical integration as its poles. During the past decades, the theoretical and empirical work aligned with the New Institutional Economics sought to understand the factors that determine which transactions will run through the market and which will run within the firms. Thus, the objective of this article is to investigate these plural forms in the Free Contracting Environment of the Brazilian Electricity Industry.
The fifth article “Network Effects on Radical Innovation and Financial Performance: An Open-mindedness Approach” by Marcelo Gattermann Perin, Cláudio Hoffmann Sampaio, Daniel Jiménez Jiménez, and Juan Gabriel Cegarra-Navarro examines how companies can achieve high performance through certain organizational behaviors (open-mindedness and social networks) and innovation. The impact of open-mindedness in defiance of basic assumptions and processes could motivate the use of internal and external networks. These social networks are the cornerstone for the creation of knowledge and the construction of radical innovations, which in turn trigger the transformation new knowledge into organizational performance.
The sixth article “Internal Corporate Social Responsibility and Performance: A Study of Publicly Traded Companies” by Flávia Cavazotte and Nicolas Corteze Chang focuses on how the relationship between social responsibility and the financial performance of companies has yielded ambivalent results. Since investments on different areas of social responsibility can promote distinct outcomes, in this study we focus on internal corporate social responsibility (I-CSR), that is, investments on employees. The goal of the study is to verify if outlays on I-CSR affect organizational performance. (The first author is a BAR’s associate editor and the procedure to accept this article has followed ANPAD’s good practices manual and all the recommendations to assure the ethical aspects in such situation).
The seventh article “Service Providers’ Willingness to Change as Innovation Inductor in Services: Validating a Scale” by Marina Figueiredo Moreira, Tomás de Aquino Guimarães (member of the BAR’s Editorial Advisory Board) and Jean Philippe, explores the willingness of service providers to incorporate changes suggested by clients altering previously planned services during its delivery, hereby named Willingness to Change in Services - WCS. Authors apply qualitative research techniques to map seven dimensions related to this phenomenon: Client relationship management; Organizational conditions for change; Software characteristics and development; Conditions affecting the teams; Administrative procedures and decision-making conditions; Entrepreneurial behavior; Interaction with supporting organizations. (The second author is a member of the BAR’s Editorial Advisory Board and the procedure to accept this article has followed ANPAD’s good practices manual and all the recommendations to assure the ethical aspects in such situation).
Happy New Year!
Salomão Alencar de Farias
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
2016
