Although the annual meeting of the Society for Business Ethics (SBE) was convened virtually this year, there was nothing virtual about the journal awards for outstanding article and outstanding reviewer that we present each year at the conference. I recap those awards below and also comment briefly on journal impact metrics, which are updated each year during the (northern hemispheric) summer months.
Article Award
The process for selecting the outstanding article award winner began with nominations from BEQ’s editorial leadership team of articles that appeared in print issues during 2019. A committee of associate editors then reviewed the nominated articles, selecting a winner and runners-up. The committee this year consisted of associate editors Jerry Goodstein, Kelly Martin, and Juliane Reinecke.
As the outstanding article published in 2019, the committee selected “Weeding Out Flawed Versions of Shareholder Primacy: A Reflection on the Moral Obligations That Carry Over from Principals to Agents” (BEQ 29[4], 519–44) authored by Santiago Mejia. This article challenges current thinking and advocates for a middle ground between “minimal” and “maximal” versions of shareholder primacy based on thoughtful; well-reasoned; and clear, compelling arguments. As one committee member observed, “it is difficult to imagine a more fundamental topic in business ethics research.”
The award committee also elected to recognize the excellence of two runner-up articles. One is “Can Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives Improve Global Supply Chains? Improving Deliberative Capacity with a Stakeholder Orientation” (BEQ 29[3], 385–412) by Vivek Soundararajan, Jill A. Brown, and Andrew C. Wicks. These authors bring together three immensely important topics—MSIs, deliberative democracy, and stakeholder theory—in a way that can inform empirical as well as theoretical research in areas such as political philosophy, global governance, international management, and political CSR, among others. The other runner-up article is “Paying People to Risk Life or Limb” (BEQ 29[3], 295–316) by Robert C. Hughes. The committee was especially struck with the timeliness and relevance of this article in light of the risks that essential workers have been taking in the current pandemic. Hughes develops normative arguments regarding the ethics of offering hazard pay that are clear, persuasive, grounded in relevant literatures, and supported by practical examples. This is, in the words of one member of the award committee, “a great example for writing engaging theory papers” for BEQ.
All of these authors deserve our applause and congratulations for standout contributions to the journal and to the field.
Reviewer Award
Each year at the SBE conference, we recognize an individual who has served as an exemplary reviewer for BEQ over a period of recent years. In doing so, we spotlight the essential contributions that reviewers make to the ongoing success of the journal. This year, we presented the award to Niki den Nieuwenboer (University of Kansas), a member of our editorial board whose reviews are consistently outstanding: thorough and constructive, with thoughtful advice for both author and editor. As we congratulate Niki, I also take this opportunity to thank all in our scholarly community who continue to lend us their time, energy, and expertise serving as manuscript referees. I am ceaselessly impressed with the magnitude of improvement we see in manuscripts on their path from submission to publication that is directly attributable to the prodigious efforts of our reviewers.
Journal Metrics
Each summer brings updates to citation statistics that purport to capture academic impact in the ambit of scholarly journal publication. Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports now has BEQ’s five-year impact factor at 4.116; on this measure, BEQ ranks fifth among fifty-five journals in ethics across disciplines and professional fields. BEQ’s latest Scopus CiteScore of 4.9 places the journal fourth out of more than six hundred journals in philosophy. While it might be gratifying to share numbers that show the journal in a favorable light, it is important to bear in mind that these and other citation metrics draw too much attention in relation to their precision and validity and invite overreliance in processes involving funding, appointment, and promotion. As stewards of an ethics journal, we are obliged to be especially mindful of how these metrics distort rather than enhance the identification of what qualifies as premier scholarship. More gratifying than the numbers themselves is the commitment by BEQ’s publisher, Cambridge University Press, to foster improved practices in the evaluation of research and journal prestige that limit reliance on citation metrics of dubious value.
