PUSHING FORWARD: MAKING DRMJ APPEALING FOR ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCHERS WORLDWIDE
MATEJ CERNE
University of Ljubljana
TOMISLAV HERNAUS
University of Zagreb
Volume 6, Number 1 of the Dynamic Relationships Management Journal (DRMJ) marks one year since the new editorial board took over the journal. Despite many interesting and potentially impactful articles that we have published in the previous two issues, attracting a larger number of high quality submissions covering business phenomena in different countries has been a challenge. Therefore, this has remained the highest priority for the editorial team, which we already presented as a mission in our first editorial a year ago: "to increase the quality, quantity and international nature of submissions."
There are many activities that the editorial board has engaged in in the past few months to increase the visibility of DRMJ. Perhaps the most important one has been a continued interaction with Scopus to potentially include our journal in their abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. This process has now moved into the phase of detailed examination of the quality of articles published in the past two volumes of DRMJ, and hopefully we will hear back from Scopus with some positive news soon. Additionally, the editors have attended several international conferences (Strategic Management Society conference in Milan, Italy; European Association for Work and Organizational Psychology in Dublin, Ireland; European Academy of Management in Glasgow, Scotland; Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Atlanta, USA) where we have promoted our journal in editorial meetings as well as to presenting scholars potentially interested in submitting their research.
We would also like to inform our readers about two exciting new developments that aim to contribute to our mission. The first one is the aim to publish a special issue each year, related to a topic
that is relevant, timely and theoretically important for scholars in the field of management and organization. Next year (Volume 7), this will be the second issue, and it will stem mainly from best papers presented at the 5th International Conference on Management and Organization organized by the Slovenian Academy of Management (SAM) revolving around the central theme of Management and Organization in the Digital Society (please see call for submissions at the end of this issue). Therefore, papers in the conference and later in the special issue of DRMJ will relate to the digital economy, digital society, digital labor, and how organizational structures and processes respond to these changes in the nature of work and in the work environment.
The second development aims to further increase the attractiveness of DRMJ, and is related to the editorial decision to introduce the annual DRMJ best paper award. Thus, published articles of outstanding quality will not go unnoticed. Instead, their author(s) wil receive a special recognition on the DRMJ website and a plaque denoting their achievement. We hope to further enhance the appeal of our journal this way, and potentially attract additional high-quality submissions. We will start with this initiative next year (2018), making papers published in any of the two issues in Volume 7 eligible for this award.
Turning to the papers in this issue, the first one is a study of Alenka Slavec Gomezel looking into the impact of firm owner's characteristics (strong social ties, weak social ties, and entrepreneurial self-efficacy) and firm's characteristics (legal status, firm age, and tangibility of assets) on small firm financing in terms of bank loans and trade credits. It is based on a sample of 497 respondents from Slovene small manufacturing firms, and founded in the analysis using Structural Equation Modeling.
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Second, the paper of Tomislav Hernaus and Ivan Matic delves into business groups in Croatia, and examines how their organization design and corporate governance differs in the private vs. public sector. Their comparative analysis contributes to better understanding of organizing practices of the largest business systems in Croatia, and offers specific insights about the divide between the private-and public-sector business groups.
The third study is reported by Nada Zupan, Ljupčo Eftimov, Katerina Jovanovska and Darko Petrovski, and looks into the development of university graduates. Their study is based on samples of students, professors and employers in The Republic of Macedonia and examines joining efforts of employers and educational institutions. Their discussion is aimed at providing suggestions on how to close the existing gaps, focusing on a closer collaboration between education providers and employers in order to improve youth competencies and employability.
The final paper of this issue addresses the buzzwords of fourth industrial revolution and digital transformation, and presents an article such as we would like to see in the announced special issue from the SAM conference 2018. It is written by Petra Ajdovec, Robert Kovačič Batista and Matjaž Vidmar, and is based on a bibliometric analysis (combining co-citation and bibliographic coupling techniques) of the field of research on the intersection of industry 4.0 (denoted by robotization, digi-talization, virtualization and big data) and business/management. The key implication of their study is that the management and business research on industry 4.0 lags behind natural and technical sciences. Their findings offer promising avenues for management and organization scholars, and confirm the relevance of the forthcoming special issue of DRMJ.
To conclude, we continue our endeavor to further establish DRMJ as being THE journal of dynamic relationships management, and relate to the most timely and relevant developments in our fields. We invite potential contributors to submit their work and join us in this mission !
Matej Černe and Tomislav Hernaus
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