Editorial

Citation

Roberts, B. (2010), "Editorial", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 24 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijem.2010.06024gaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Educational Management, Volume 24, Issue 7

This is the final issue of 2010 and I now look forward to the 25th year of my time as editor of this successful international journal. I owe a great deal to many people and in the first editorial of 2010 I will refer to them in more detail. The first issue of that year will be a special issue, the first of two, with this one guest edited by Petros Pashiardis and Stefan Brauckmann.

Turning back to this year there have been some changes. Perhaps the most significant of which is the use of ScholarOne Manuscripts as a conduit through which papers are now received and refereed. I am very grateful to all those referees existing and newly recruited who have helped me to handle this.

Turning your attention to the current issue there are again six papers from around the world, namely the USA, Australia, Pakistan, Spain, India and the UK.

The first paper is written by Dr Brian Hemmings and Russell Kay of Charles Sturt University, New South Wales. The work is on “Research self-efficacy, publication output, and early career development”. The study was designed with two purposes in mind: first, to investigate the relationship in self-efficacy beliefs about research on publication output; and second, to identify the relationship of self-efficacy beliefs about research to the publishing outputs of new lecturers. The results of the study involving two Australian universities, pointed to a clear relationship between research self efficacy and publication output. The testing of the regression model showed that a large proportion of the total variance in publication output could be explained by three measures of research self efficacy, and a fourth had a degree of influence when entered first in a multiple regression analysis.

Kunal Sharma, Deepak Sood, Amarjeet Singh and Pallvi Pandit have produced a second linked paper on strategic architecture for e-learning at a university (Himachal Pradesh, India). The purpose of this paper is to unravel a “strategic architecture” for e-learning for a traditional Indian community and to provide guidelines as to how to carry the implementation of e-learning into the future. The author acknowledges that the review is restricted to secondary sources, but nevertheless ventures the view that the university will need to re-engineer itself in order to understand how competition will differ in the future in order to capture future opportunities. The paper provides guidelines as to how to implement e-learning which will be beneficial to both staff and students.

Inés Küster and María Elena Avilés-Valenzuela of the University of Valencia give a case study of market orientation in a university. The study analyses the relationship between market orientation and results in the field of higher education and considers the importance of teaching staff market orientation in a developing country (Mexico). The results show that campus market orientation has a positive significant impact on the school’s market orientation but not on the teaching staff’s market orientation. However, teaching staff market orientation does impact on job satisfaction. The author acknowledges potential limitations as the work was carried out in one university and other Mexican universities could demonstrate other characteristics. Also, this is the first application of the market orientation scale in another context from that from which it was originally designed. The study is also centred upon administration and teaching staff using self-evaluation. The author’s findings would suggest that university administrators should take measures to increase and maintain market orientation in the teaching staff and consequently assist their job satisfaction. In order to join forces in a common good an atmosphere of cohesion must be developed and a system of incentives put in place to motivate market oriented behaviour and the adoption of an internal marketing focus.

In the next paper, Rodiger Voss, Thorsten Gruber and Alexander Reppel contribute work from an online IT study entitled “Which classroom service encounters make students happy or unhappy?” The paper explores satisfactory and unsatisfactory student-professor encounters in higher education from a student’s perspective. The critical incident technique is used to categorise the interactions and to reveal quality dimensions of professors. The results of the critical incident sorting process support previous classification systems that used three major groups to thoroughly represent the encounters between students and professors. The results also revealed ten quality dimensions of professors, corroborating previous research in this area.

Ehren Jarrett, Teresa Wasonga and John Murphy write on “The practice of co-creating leadership in high and low performing high schools”. The study examined teacher perceptions of the practice of co-creating leadership and its potential impacts on student achievement. The results of the study found that teachers in high-performing schools scored significantly higher on perceptions of the practice of co-creating leadership dispositional values and the presence of institutional conditions facilitating co-creating leadership. High-performance schools had high correlations. Regression analyses indicated that active listening, deep democracy, and evolving power significantly predicted teachers’ perceptions of the impact of dispositional values and organisational conditions on student achievement.

The final paper is from Mian Sajid Nazir and Muhammad Shakeel Aslam of the COMSATS Institute of IT in Lahore, Pakistan. These authors are concerned with academic dishonesty and the perceptions of Pakistani students. Academic dishonesty has been a matter of great concern in higher education for the last few decades. The dishonest behaviour of students at graduate and undergraduate level has become a severe issue for the education and business sector. This research addresses this matter by investigating the perceptions of students towards academic dishonesty and exploring the security and penalties for dishonest acts.

Brian Roberts