Editorial

Citation

Heap, J. (2002), "Editorial", Work Study, Vol. 51 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ws.2002.07951aaa.001

Editorial

Welcome to Vol. 51 No. 1 of Work Study – a new year, a new volume. This is a time when we make some cosmetic changes to the journal to ensure that it keeps "up to date" and looks fresh. However, it's also a time when I, as editor, take stock of content and analyze it in the context of the changing academic and business worlds to ensure that it continues to reflect the needs of its key stakeholders. (After all, productivity is about the pursuit of beneficial change, so a journal dedicated to productivity improvement that didn't itself consider change would be a poor role model.)

So, will you, the reader, notice any major changes? Well, it depends on whether you're looking for changes in quantity or quality. Work Study has just got bigger. The productivity field continues to throw up new methodologies and techniques, it continues to advance into new areas of application, and there are increasing numbers of case studies of the well established approaches to productivity and quality improvement. We have decided to reflect this growth of application in a growth of the core content of Work Study – the main papers. We will continue to ensure that these reflect a balance between "theory" and "practice"; one of the key strengths of the journal is that it brings together theorists and practitioners, to learn from one another.

Of course there's always a danger that "more means worse", that the quality of the papers will not be maintained as we publish more of them. Well, you'll have to trust us (for now) on this one. You will no doubt decide over the next several months whether we have managed to pull off "the trick" of growing content and maintaining quality. All I can promise is that we aim to try. We have an editorial advisory board that aims to source papers from around the globe – to ensure that we don't miss important developments just because they're taking place in the USA or in the Pacific Rim or …

I also maintain my links into the various global productivity networks – see the report from the World Productivity Congress in this issue – so that Work Study covers as many bases as it can. However, Work Study represents part of this global network, and the readers form a community in their own right. So, if the journal doesn't meet your needs or if you think that it needs tweaking somewhere, then let us know. We value feedback and will act on it. Isn't that called continuous improvement?

So, welcome once again to the volume with more volume.

John Heap