โ Scribed by Denise M. Rousseau; Yitzhak Fried
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The Chinese curse says ``May you live in interesting times''. From the looks of things, all of us are both cursed and blessed. Economies are undergoing radical changes and the nature of work and work settings shifts too. The shift from organization to organizing, where work settings and roles are more ยฏuid, challenges many assumptions, particularly for those of us in Organizational Behavior. We understand that this shift has nothing to do per se with Cary Cooper's decision to retire as editor-in-chief from the Journal of Organizational Behavior. Wherever he is, there will be interesting times. Nonetheless, this is an opportune moment to outline some future directions for JOBรdirections we believe will be part of a sea-change in the ยฎeld of Organizational Behavior.
We are in a period of innovation in forms of organizing and modes of work, whose impact on workers and responsiveness to their needs and demands are unknown but potentially very great. It is ยฎtting that in the time of so much change this journal should have the acronym and aectionate nickname JOB' (that's job' not to be confused with the Biblical Job). The future direction of Organizational Behavior will to some ways depend on what the term `job' comes to mean.
Under Cary Cooper's leadership, JOB published research addressing the positive psychology of behavior in organizations: focused on individual responses where quality of life and work might be improved, work group processes better understood, and forms of work and organizing better designed for improved individual and ยฎrm outcomes. As JOB undergoes its own transition, we wish to convey that we hold as enduring values the importance of understanding the impact of work on workers and ways in which workers shape their workplace. Even while these values still hold, there is a need to expand scholarship to understand new forms of organizationally relevant behaviors and to test the assumptions that contemporary changes have surfaced.
JOB continues to advocate a multilevel approach to organizational research. Traditionally, however, this has meant a focus on the tangible levels of analysis comprising the corporate ยฎrm: persons, work groups, and the organization itself. The shift from organization to organizing makes more salient another `slant' regarding units of analysis. Tight time frames, escalating interdependence, and increased amount of work performed outside the conยฎnes of traditional organizations suggest that scholarship must also expand its focus to new units of behavior, such as events and activity cycles. Diane Vaughan's work on the Challenger disaster adopts an event focus. Ben Schneider's research on service quality addresses the service encounter. Such discrete events as a disaster or such repeated activity cycles as service encounters may mix and match traditional levels of analysis and be dicult to understand via the old corporatist framework. Scholarly study of the new organizing will involve expanding our conceptual frameworks and methodologies.
Contemporary organizational changes make salient that multiple sides can exist to any given organizational phenomenon. Just as compulsory layos can be studied with regard to their
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You may or may not have noticed that Mass Spectrometry Reviews has reached a major milestone with the publication of the 25th volume. Both we, the present members of the Editorial Board, and you the readers, owe special thanks to those who have contributed to the success and growth of the journal. I