Editorial

Citation

Sarkis, J. (2006), "Editorial", Management Research News, Vol. 29 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/mrn.2006.02129faa.001

Editorial

In the future, as part of my editorials, I will take time to introduce articles that will appear in the journal or upcoming journals. Sometimes I will also try to relate an article to previous works that we have already published, since we are an archival journal. Overall, the articles in this issue exemplify a number of the key characteristics of Management Research News and my vision of the journal. First, each of them went through the review and revision process within a two to three month time period which I feel is a rapid turnaround for this subject area. Part of this short turnaround time is due to the quality of the initial manuscript submissions that were made. Higher quality initial submissions generally mean fewer revisions and therefore quicker turnaround time for publication. I also must thank the authors for their speed and promptness in making their revisions because without strong reviewer and author participation in this process, this goal would not be reached.

Another characteristic of these papers is their international flavor. As many will notice we have a sub-title for our journal that focuses on international research, "Communication of emergent international management research". The reviewers we used for these and other articles are located throughout the globe and represent eastern, western, northern, and southern hemispheres of our global community. The authors represented in this particular issue include European, American, and Australian locales. We continue to encourage authors from a broader community and expect to be represented with Asian and hopefully African research in the near future. It is within our plans to further encourage this international focus of our journal by offering special issues about various regional areas throughout the world. We would especially like to encourage those regions which are underrepresented in the management literature. If you are aware of underrepresented international regions that you think can benefit from a specially focused management research issue, we would like to hear from you. But, we will leave the discussion of special issues for a later editorial.

Another characteristic goal of the journal is that management principles and research can be applicable to a wide variety of situations including private, public, governmental, for-profit, and non-profit organizations. You will see that our first paper is not your typical private for-profit organizational management type research and that is why I bring this additional characteristic to the forefront. Let me now introduce some of the papers that appear in this issue of Management Research News, using the order of their appearance to structure the presentation.

For our lead article, Kavanaugh, Duffy, and Lilly provide insights into additional health care service management with a focus on human resources planning and management, and specifically nursing. In their paper, "The relationship between job satisfaction and demographic variables for healthcare professionals", they investigate some characteristics of why and when nurses seem to be happy in their job situations. For this study, they found that plateauing occurred in terms of job satisfaction over the length of the years the nurses were in the job. But, an upturn occurred after a few years. They found that this characteristic may have practical implications for the development and implementation of certain mentoring programs so that valuable and experienced nurses do not leave due to job satisfaction difficulties.

Keeping our flow of articles within the human resource management field, but switching geographical locations, we next introduce the results of a study titled, "The utilization of part-time and casual work for managers, professionals, general, and administrative staff in large Australian organizations", by Nesbit. This paper also relates to our first paper in this journal on volume flexibility in the services industry. Since volume flexibility in a service setting is greatly dependent on personnel resources, a strategy to manage this type of flexibility is employed using part-time, temporary, or casual employees. But, the interesting twist of this article is not necessarily on just temporary workers who are operational or general workers, but those that are more professionally and managerially oriented. The major finding here has gender implications in that females dominated the non-standard work category. The authors point to further need to understand what some of these initial findings mean in terms of where the casual workforce occurs and what the gender differences mean.

The third paper in our issue takes us to central Europe, but also focuses on smaller’enterprise management, especially from a strategic planning perspective. Smaller enterprise research in many of the main stream management (non-entrepreneurship literature) is underrepresented. Thus, we will try to further encourage this aspect of research. Strategic planning for smaller organizations is also relatively rare, since many smaller organizations need to fight-fires and typically do not do longer term visioning and thinking. Kraus, Harms, and Schwarz in their paper’"Strategic planning in smaller enterprises – new empirical findings" seek to investigate the role that strategic planning has for these smaller enterprises. Essentially, they found that the most successful firms formalized their strategic planning process. Thus, they found that strategic planning is not a luxury, but a necessity for small firms to grow and prosper. Fighting fires may help in the short run, but for long-term sustainability the organization needs to formally integrate strategic planning.

Our last two papers focus on some methodological issues related to management research. Each provides a meta-methodological approach for investigating a related research stream. The fourth article for this issue is by Jack and Raturi, titled "Lessons learned from methodological triangulation in management research". In this paper, the authors look back on their three approaches to investigate issues of volume flexibility in the capital goods industry. They provide insights into the generic methodologies, which included the use of case studies, primary data acquisition, and secondary data acquisition studies. This type of triangulation provides a robust evaluation of their topic which would include both depth and breadth of investigation. For researchers looking into triangulation, they provide their experiences, both good and bad, with this type of research.

Our final paper moves us into a different methodological approach and discipline. Lefley, in his paper, "A pragmatic approach to management accounting research: a research path", shifts the focus onto completing a pragmatic research agenda that helps to guarantee the usefulness and practicality of findings. With his many years of experience as a manager and director of for-profit organizations, he understands the role of the practicality of research and how organizations can more immediately benefit from those results. Similar to emerging research approaches in the vein of action research, Lefley introduces his experiences with pragmatic research. Standard academic research is grounded in theory, Lefley argues and shows that research should also be grounded in pragmatism. Part of this pragmatism is meant to take a complex set of ideas and make them practical and useful. This article is written by someone who can look back on years of research to make practical sense of a very important research stream.

We believe that these initial articles will set the stage for many more high quality and timely works from a variety of disciplines.

Joseph Sarkis