Editorial

Citation

Mallett, O. and Porter, G. (2015), "Editorial", Personnel Review, Vol. 44 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-05-2014-0119

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Personnel Review, Volume 44, Issue 1

While academic publishing continues to evolve, with influences including calls for open access and the pressures and incentives of journal ranking guides, there remains a unique place for books as somewhere ideas can be developed, empirical findings presented in-depth and different audiences reached. Among other influences on judgements of academic quality and value, book reviews in academic journals are crucial to the vibrancy and debate produced by monographs, edited collections, textbooks and other books. Personnel Review has an important role to play in this debate by providing a specialised, international forum for the exchange of ideas and research programmes amongst academics and personnel professionals.

This brief editorial is to introduce ourselves as the incoming Book Review Editors and to encourage reviews, especially from new reviewers. First, however, we want to thank Dr Tracy Scurry who undertook the Book Review Editor role for the previous six years, a period which has included many interesting and valuable reviews. Marking her hard work, Tracy has been succeeded by two Book Review Editors, Dr Oliver Mallett and Prof Gayle Porter.

Oliver is a Lecturer in Management at Durham University Business School. He spent nearly ten years working for the UK Government’s Department of Work and Pensions before joining academia. His recent research, undertaken as part of an ESRC/SAMS Business and Management Development Fellowship, focuses on follower-centric approaches to leadership, considered as a socially constructed process, and how these relate to personal and social identity within organisations. He is also involved in ongoing research exploring informality and employment relationships in small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Gayle is a member of the Management Faculty at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. Her industry experience includes technical work in the oil and gas industry, finance and accounting with a Fortune 500 company and consulting on training programs and employee development. She received her PhD in Management and Human Resource from The Ohio State University. Gayle’s research explores various organisational supports for realisation of employees’ full potential and her publications focus on workaholism, work ethic and work passion.

As the incoming Book Review Editors, we believe that book reviews should seek to provide discerning overviews of and critical engagement with recent books of interest to the journal’s broad readership. This requires book reviews that, even when brief, are at the same standard of consideration, rigour and quality of writing as the articles published in the journal. They should summarise the content of the book and offer an assessment of the relevance and, where appropriate, the value of the title to the readers of Personnel Review.

The journal’s readership includes practitioners, educators, researchers and students in the field of human resource management. We therefore encourage a range of reviewers, reflecting the different audiences for different books (e.g. research, policy, practice and pedagogical) and the diversity of standpoints within the HRM community. There is also scope for longer, more discursive reviews that open up debates or new insights, drawing out and engaging with particular themes or topics across several new titles within a review. We invite anyone interested in reviewing in general, in relation to a particular title or with an interesting idea for a review or collection of reviews to get in touch with us.

Oliver Mallett and Gayle Porter