RAE publishes in French, for the first time in its history, in this issue. Since 2009, we had already been promoting Spanish as one of our publishing languages, along with Portuguese and English, but we still have costs restriction to include new languages, such as French. However, we opened an exception and considered the argument of the organizers of the Forum “Challenging Anglo-Saxon Dominance in Management and Organizational Knowledge”, published in this special issue, aware of the contribution of the debate among French speakers on this topic.
Therefore, this issue marks one more point to the effort that RAE has been making towards the valuation of multiculturalism in scientific publication. We accepted the risk of including French in this issue, in an exceptional fashion though, because we are anticipating what we believe is the third stage in the digital revolution of scientific journals.
In its first stage, this digital revolution has already promoted major changes in the world of scientific publication by increasing the impact of the journals considered “non-elite” (about this theme, see the article named “Rise of the rest: the growing impact of nonelite journals”, published on October 9, 2014, in arXiv, by Acharya et al.) and place the open access issue in the center of the academic debate (see the editorial of the traditional Science, of September 19, 2014, about the motivation to create its open version).
The second stage in the digital revolution of scientific journals is still at the beginning. The ease to reproduce digital copies has changed the practices of the researchers and of the journals as well, encouraging an insight into the discussion on plagiarism (and self-plagiarism) and the integrity of the scientific production (an interesting article on this there is called “Not all plagiarism requires a retraction”, by Praveen Chaddah, published in Nature on July 9, 2014). RAE, attuned to the state of the art in the industry, has recently implemented an anti-plagiarism system; which will be subject for another editorial in the future.
The translation tools may represent the beginning of a third stage of the digital revolution in the world of academic journals. This third stage is still embryonic and barely noticeable. Indeed, there are many doubts about the effectiveness of machine translations, but the evolution of these tools in recent years is remarkable. If we are not at the point where the translations made by automated tools can be considered reliable, it is not difficult to anticipate a time when we will have access to the thoughts of those who do not speak our language, without necessarily having to use common shortcut of English.
To those who believe that we are in danger of being “invisible” by adhering – although eventually – to a language other than English, with the speed of the evolution of these tools it would not be absurd to think that in a few years we will have high quality translation available at low cost. And when this happens, the incorporation of machine translation tools will become essential to the digital environment of scientific journals.
As long as we do not achieve this level of efficiency in machine translation, we have to consider the cost issues, among others, to deal with a multilingual environment. Therefore, we will continue limited to our current three languages. Perhaps, in a not so distant future, we can expand the range of languages and cultures in which emerging management issues can be discussed easily and properly and, very important, with no loss in the comprehension quality.
This issue is opened by the article of presentation of the Forum “Challenging Anglo-Saxon Dominance in Management and Organizational Knowledge”, signed by its organizers, followed by the four articles approved, “An anti-management statement in dialogue with critical Brazilian authors”, “Resgatando o nexo governança-gestão internacional: por uma nova ordem em gestão”, “O cotidiano e a história: construindo novos olhares na Administração” and “L’apport de la sociologie pragmatique française aux études critiques en management”. The Forum is completed by two guest essays: “Picnic on a frozen river: challenges for genuine management studies in Spain” and “Le champ des études organisationnelles : le regard critique d’un chercheur plurilingue”, respectively authored by professors Carlos J. Fernández Rodríguez, of Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and Jean-François Chanlat, of Université Paris-Dauphine.
We also published the articles “Elementos para discussão da escravidão contemporânea como prática de gestão”, which analyzes slave labor in Brazil, “Fatores que afetam a transferência da aprendizagem para o local de trabalho”, which presents a study in a Portuguese organization, “Crimes corporativos e estudos organizacionais: uma aproximação possível e necessária”, which makes a summary of researches on a relatively unexplored topic in the area, and “‘E se colocar pimenta?’: a construção empreendedora da Chilli Beans”, with the construction of a narrative about the entrepreneurial marketing of a famous brand in the market.
This issue is completed, also in dialog with the theme of the Forum, by a book review about the book “Organizations in time: history, theory, methods” and the book recommendations on postcolonial studies and intercultural dialogs and about organizational studies in the Global South and Latin American perspectives.
Enjoy your reading!
EDUARDO DINIZ | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Mar-Apr 2015
