English/US
BAR (Brazilian Administration Review) and Journal of Contemporary Administration – RAC (Revista de Administração Contemporânea) are undergoing changes to their editorial scopes. The key principles of these changes are: establishing editorial scopes that clearly differentiate both journals; adopting an inclusive stance, encompassing the various ANPAD’s Academic Divisions; and communicating these changes to the scientific community.
Each journal has also experienced managerial updates to ensure the implementation of such changes and agile processes for reviewing manuscripts.
BAR aims at the global dissemination of theoretical and empirical studies developed in both Brazil and elsewhere. Articles submitted to BAR should not be focused on a specific country or region. They should rather report on theoretical, applied, or methodological advances to the frontiers of knowledge in a global scale.
BAR’s target audience is the global academic community interested in business, public administration, management, and organizational studies. Thus, manuscripts submitted to BAR are expected to highlight a topic of global interest and relevance.
Importantly, BAR does not publish teaching cases, theoretical essays, opinion articles or purely applied technical material. Systematic literature reviews will only be considered if they address current issues, both for developing theory and applying it in organizations.
The managerial updates within BAR include: constantly releasing special issues focused on themes and objectives defined in the editorial scope; establishing a permanent team of associate editors to ensure the implementation of the editorial scope, to improve the review process and to reduce the review deadlines; accepting submissions in Portuguese (which must be translated into English if the manuscript is accepted) to encourage submissions, reduce costs to authors, and speed up the review process.
In turn, RAC has carried out a historical review of its most cited articles and contacted people who participated in the journal’s birth. This process has showed that the journal’s name, “Contemporary Administration” had not been chosen at random. The journal’s scope was then redefined drawing on the notion of contemporary. This process involved RAC editors and ANPAD’s Board of Directors.
It was defined that “RAC is a journal focused on contemporary issues without losing sight of historicity and future perspectives. It publishes studies related to the management of companies, public organizations or civil society. It seeks interdisciplinarity and epistemic plurality to position itself at the academic vanguard with a special regard for ethical issues, diversity, responsibility, governance and sustainability. The objective is to publish studies of quality, relevance and impact, which can contribute to advancing the scientific debate and respond to the society’s contemporary challenges.”Novelties include: 1) the possibility of submitting new types of manuscripts, namely theoretical essays (literature reviews must be submitted to BAR) and provocations 2) expansion of the scope of tutorial articles to encompass methodological articles, thereby opening up a new avenue for methodological innovation, 3) creation of a Forum on Brazilian thinkers and institutions that have contributed to the advancement of administration in Brazil, with a view to recollecting the memory of our intellectual production and encourage the production of original knowledge.
These changes are expected to define a clear line between BAR and RAC, expanding the the scientific community’s possibilities of submission and improving both journals’ impact.