At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st Century and JOB's 32nd Volume, it is appropriate to reflect on what has been achieved in the century's first decade. While we do not live in the world envisaged by Stanley Kubric in his 1968 science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is certainly a different world to the one we lived in 10 years ago. The decade will be remembered for the events of September 11, 2001 and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, but many other things have changed fundamentally as well. In particular, it is most characterized by the relentless advance of technology and globalization.
There is, however, one aspect of life that remains constant. This is that the world we live in is defined by the activities of one species, homo sapiens, the people. As a consequence, no understanding of any phenomenon can be complete without an understanding of the human emotions, cognitions, and behavior that underlie it. This dictum applies just as much in ''hard'' disciplines like engineering and technology as it does in the social sciences, as National Aeronautics Space Agency (NASA) learned from the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster of February 1, 2003 (Starbuck & Farjoun, 2005). Indeed, my own motivation from switching from a career in engineering to the study of behavior in organizations was motivated by this realization (see Ashkanasy, 2007).
Consequently, scholarly interest in the study of organizational behavior continues to burgeon. As I noted in my editorial at the end of JOB's third decade (Ashkanasy, 2009: 18), ''there is much going on in the field of OB at present. The field is already hot, and is liable to get hotter.'' In support of this contention, submissions to JOB in 2010 so far (i.e., as I write this) are already approaching the 2009 record of 614, despite my warning at the beginning of the year (Ashkanasy, 2010: 1) that, ''Publishing today is more difficult than ever.'' With so many submissions coming in, I am often asked, ''Well, isn't this just because more academics are encouraged to submit to high visibility journals like JOB?'' and, ''Doesn't this mean that quality must be dropping?'' But, as I noted in Ashkanasy (2010), this is not the case at all. Although it is true that scholars worldwide are being encouraged to submit their work to A Γ journals, the quality of submissions to JOB is in fact rising, rather than dropping off. For instance, the number of submissions that rely on single-sitting, self-report questionnaire data is decreasing as the message to the effect that such studies will no longer be published in this journal gets out. Moreover, submissions that elicit a desk-reject note from me advising authors to learn the basics of planning, conducting, and reporting research are now close to extinction.