Editorial

Citation

Selmer, J. (2013), "Editorial", Journal of Global Mobility, Vol. 1 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-06-2013-0035

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Global Mobility, Volume 1, Issue 2.

How do you win an uphill battle? The lessons from history are crystal clear: Not easily! Nevertheless, all new academic journals have to perform such battles, whether they like it or not. In the case of JGM, we are engaged in an uphill battle because we are not yet well known and we are not yet ranked (which may take a few more years). However, we have won our first “skirmish” by publishing JGM's inaugural issue. Although this is a good start, the battle continues and here is the second issue of our first volume.

So, how do we conduct such a battle? We do it by adopting an old marketing slogan – we try harder! That means, we have to be better than our competitors. Our main competitive tool is providing a better service than many established academic journals, offering a prompt and professional revise and resubmit procedure. To this effect, we have established our one-month turnaround policy for the first submission. We also have the best reviewers within the field of global mobility, guaranteeing that each manuscript receives high-quality, developmental feedback. Fighting all our current uphill skirmishes, we learn how to compete in a tough market for academic journals. And when JGM becomes better known to our target market of scholars and other interested parties, the editorial team of the journal will be better equipped to take JGM to ever new heights of interesting topics and scholarly quality.

Accordingly, it is worth repeating what JGM stands for and what we publish. JGM is the only academic journal to consistently and exclusively focus on global mobility issues. That means, all authors’ papers will be read by like-minded scholars and practitioners. The coverage of JGM ranges from traditional business expatriates to new emerging themes, such as NGO expatriates and diplomats. The main focus is on white-collar or skilled workers or professionals and their immediate context at work and outside work. JGM welcomes all kinds of rigorous research methods, but prefers empirical contributions, with quantitative or qualitative methodology or a mixed-methods approach. However, we are also very interested in thorough theoretical developments and focused literature reviews. JGM would like to publish research at various levels of analysis – individual, team, and organizational. We also encourage research from a variety of domains, such as psychology, sociology, strategic management, economics, (among others), as well as interdisciplinary studies.

To keep in touch with an audience interested in global mobility issues and research, we use the JGM LinkedIn Group for journal updates/news, hot topics, and sharing current research projects with peers as well as seeking new collaboration. The expanding group currently has several hundred members from both industry and academic institutions.

In this issue

The second issue of JGM features five papers again indicating the depth and the breadth as well as the high quality of the new journal. The first paper, authored by Vesa Suutari, Chris Brewster, Kimmo Riusala, and Salla Syrjäkari, presents an interesting analysis of different types of international assignees using interview data from assignees and HR managers from a single company. New forms of working internationally are important, yet, compared to classical expatriation, we do not know much about these types of international work, neither at the individual level, for example, regarding specific motives and problems, nor at the organizational level, for example, in terms of HRM policies and practices. The second paper, written by Ibraiz Tarique and Ellen Weisboard, examines adult third culture kids (ATCKs) as previous research indicate that adults who grew up in international environments are better able to adjust globally. By empirically investigating antecedents of dynamic cross-cultural competence in ATCKs, the current paper contains new and significant information about essential components of the ATCK experience. The third paper, by Adrienne Isakovic and Mary Whitman, deals with an under-researched topic in a little investigated part of the world. Similar to previous studies, findings differed from traditional investigations of organizational expatriates. The results of the study have practical implications for recruitment and mentoring of academic SIEs in general and in the United Arab Emirates in particular. The fourth paper, by Christian Yao, makes a good contribution to the literature by introducing a study of the relatively neglected career capital development of Chinese expatriates and explores their symbolic capital effects. Based on data from semi-structured interviews, a model incorporating social, organizational, and individual dimensions is developed. The fifth paper, authored by Pauline Vromans, Marloes van Engen, and Stefan Mol, discusses the cultural similarity paradox as explanation for experienced adjustment difficulties of expatriates and how their under-met expectations regarding transfers to culturally similar countries leads to additional adjustment difficulties. This paper provides a theoretical addition to extant research and the concept of presumed cultural similarity paradox is a useful contribution to the literature in different ways.

Despite the uphill battle of JGM, history teaches us that such difficult battles can be won. With the advice of editorial advisory board members, the general command of the editorial team and an army of scholars as authors, reviewers and readers, I am convinced that this uphill battle will be a victorious one for JGM.

Professor Jan Selmer
Department of Business Administration, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark