Genesis, Impact, and Identity of the Journal of Contemporary Administration

ABSTRACT

Context:

just like people and organizations, journals also have an identity. Thus, thinking about the identity of a scientific journal leads, first of all, to an understanding of how its trajectory has shaped the journal’s preferences about what its members understand regarding science and academia. Second, journals refer to how they project themselves in the scientific community, both in terms of rules for judging what is considered valid as research and of the intensity and ways of impacts that they have over scientific knowledge and social reality.

Objective:

given this context, we seek, in this article, to recover distinctive elements of the Journal of Contemporary Administration (RAC) in its genesis, highlighting how this period left a lasting imprint on its identity.

Method:

we use historical texts and testimonies to support our arguments, triangulating the qualitative material with citation, reference, and scientific writing standards to highlight the identity and impact of RAC.

Results:

the analyzes show that RAC, since its genesis, has been differentiated by theoretical, methodological, and empirical rigor. This reflected, over time, its impact and centrality in the academic community.

Conclusion:

we argue that the effectiveness in the construction of RAC’s identity has led it to be the most influential journal in the administration area.

Keywords:
journals; impact; identity; organizational imprinting; scientific community

RESUMO

Contexto:

como as pessoas e as organizações, os periódicos também apresentam uma identidade. Assim, pensar na identidade de um periódico científico remete, em primeiro lugar, a compreender como sua trajetória moldou suas preferências acerca do que seus membros entendem sobre ciência e academia. Em segundo lugar, remete a como ele se projeta na comunidade científica, tanto em termos de regras de julgamento sobre o que é considerado válido como pesquisa quanto da intensidade e do modo como ele impacta o conhecimento científico e a realidade social.

Objetivo:

diante desse contexto, buscamos, neste artigo, recuperar elementos distintivos da Revista de Administração Contemporânea (RAC) em sua gênese, ressaltando como tal período deixou uma impressão duradoura em sua identidade.

Método:

utilizamos textos históricos e depoimentos para embasar nossos argumentos, triangulando o material qualitativo com padrões de citação, de referência e de escrita científica para evidenciar a identidade e o impacto da RAC.

Resultados:

as análises apontam que a RAC, desde sua gênese, diferenciou-se pelo rigor teórico, metodológico e empírico. Isso refletiu, ao longo do tempo, em seu impacto e centralidade na comunidade acadêmica.

Conclusão:

defendemos que a eficácia na construção da identidade da RAC a levou a ser o periódico mais influente da área de administração.

Palavras-chave:
periódicos; impacto; identidade; impressão organizacional; comunidade científica

INTRODUCTION

Scientific journals are one of the bases of the scientific community, since they allow different academic communities to organize their scientific production and outspread their scientific knowledge (Vessuri, 1995). They are the legitimate means to represent what scholars advocate as useful for and valuable as science, as well as to express the social identity of researchers from a given scientific field (Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Bourdieu, 1975; Giampapa, 2011). Nevertheless, one of the core challenges faced by journals lies on building an identity within their own community in order to stand out among other ones (Faems, Filatotchev, Harley, & Siegel, 2016).

Therefore, we aimed at reconstituting the Journal of Contemporary Administration’s (RAC) creation to better understand how its identity, as a generalist scientific Administration journal, evolved throughout the years. Assumingly, its genesis was in the core of the scientific community itself (Guimarães, Motta, Farias, Kimura, Quintella, & Carneiro, 2018), since it was represented by Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Administração (Anpad) - National Business Post-Graduation and Research Association; consequently, the existing demands and pressure observed in Anpad’s formation environment imprint on RAC its constitutive elements.

Addressing RAC means understanding its genesis in the core of the community that has created it as a journal with its own identity and relevance within its own action context. The consolidation of a scientific journal lies mainly in the challenge of establishing its legitimacy in the scientific community in which it intends to succeed. Here, therefore, the notion of community is central in establishing the link between the RAC’s creation and its development in the academic context of Brazilian Administration. According to Harrison and Stephen (1995), communities are shared symbolic systems aimed at representing the different ways adopted by social groups to organize themselves and stand out in society. Belonging to a community means becoming its member; members are mainly marked by groups’ symbolic activities, in other words, by the groups’ specific ways to know, believe, and persuade (Harrison & Stephen, 1995).

Scientific journals are the communication means to outspread the academic discourse of communities they act in, i.e., they must represent and reflect their communities’ discursive process and structure, standards, criteria, and thoughts, according to the symbolic social field of researchers who share similar perspectives (Harrison & Stephen, 1995). RAC has differentiated itself since its genesis, especially because it reflects, through the idealization of its own members, the wishes and needs of the scientific management community in filling gaps left by other journals and scientific communication channels. It also stands out for its impacts and for the perception of usefulness by its members as a legitimate channel of the discursive communication process between peers, thus developing a unique identity that continues to this day.

Our study has helped the best understanding about how organizations are structured and persist due to certain features inherited from their environment based on the organizational imprinting concept developed by Stinchcombe (1965) and on the empirical analysis of their essential features. These features were herein expressed by the understanding of RAC’s genesis, impacts, and identity, since the investigation about these three central dimensions enabled revealing the unique and peculiar trajectory towards building the identity of this scientific journal. We have pointed out how the creation of a journal’s identity must comply with factors considered distinctive and essential. We understand “journal” as an organization that expresses itself in all its editorial actions, in any product, process, or outcome resulting from its actions, be them conscious or not.

We divided the article into three main parts to better introduce the main contributions of our study. The first section recalls RAC’s creation, since its genesis in the core of Anpad’s institutionalization process, in which we demonstrated that the characteristics and positioning of the journal in relation to the others strongly reflected the central concerns of the community about its socially built environment since the very beginning of its existence. The second section highlights the main academic and social impacts left by RAC on its community and surrounding fields; in other words, its trajectory and evolution as a relevant scientific journal in and outside the Brazilian Business Administration academia. Finally, we reflect on these various developments in the current identity of the journal, in order to understand how RAC sought to distinguish itself from other journals in the Administration field, highlighting the current and future challenges, not only in maintaining its legitimacy in the national context, but also in the search for the international insertion of its scientific production.

THE GENESIS OF THE JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ADMINISTRATION

Time leaves indelible marks; although present times bring along challenges different from those in the past, one cannot deny that such marks always make us recall that the past lives. This statement applies to both people and organizations; thus, if we assume that journals are collective entities, we can also say that they are organizations that carry identity features that date back to their genesis. Therefore, we aim at addressing RAC’s identity, as well as the interests and desires of its institutional entrepreneurs at the time of its foundation. We will present the circumstances of RAC’s launching, which forged its differential among academic Business Administration journals.

Our goal is to understand RAC based on its genesis, since organizations are marked by environmental features established at the time of their creation (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013). Hence, we adopted organizational theories to assess the conceptual foundations of RAC’s creation effects on its identity as academic Business Administration journal. We use the organizational imprinting theory (Stinchcombe, 1965) to explain organizational forms set when organizations are launched.

The idea of organizational imprinting was introduced by Stinchcombe (1965) in the text Social Structure and Organizations, which addresses features inherited from organizations’ creation that remain after their foundation (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013). Although Stinchcombe (1965) did not conceptually defined what organizational imprinting would actually be, he highlighted that political and social forces that emerge at organizations’ creation leave their marks on them. Consequently, he has theorized about the association between organizations’ age and structure, since “organizations formed at one time typically have a different social structure from those formed at another time” (Stinchcombe, 1965, p. 163).

Given the lack of definition to organizational imprinting, Marquis and Tilcsik (2013) recently defined it as “a process whereby, during a brief period of susceptibility, a focal entity develops characteristics that reflect prominent features of the environment, and these characteristics continue to persist despite significant environmental changes in subsequent periods” (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013, p. 199). Yet, according to them, this definition concerns three essential features: (1) the existence of a time marked by high sensitivity to environmental influence; (2) the intense impact of the environmental context on such a period of time (to the extent that the organization starts reflecting the elements of the environmental context); (3) the longevity of features acquired at organizations’ creation, despite the subsequent environmental changes.

These three features are observed in RAC’s trajectory; thus, we emphasized its elements to better understand the impressions its creation context left on it. We went back in History, to 1985 and 1986, at the fifth presidency of the Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Administração (Anpad) by Professor Roberto Venosa, to address the first feature, namely: the existence of a time marked by high susceptibility.

This feature was observed 10 years after Anpad Foundation drafting, in 1976, and 10 years before the RAC was prepared for launching during Venosa’s administration, when Anpad’s project was put in place. Anpad association project was closely linked to RAC’s creation project; as highlighted by Venosa, it was extremely dependent on post-graduation programs to carry out its activities, among them, annual meetings or selection tests. Venosa stated that “there was nothing, everything was about to be built” (Machado-da-Silva, 1997a, p. 155).

Anpad was highly flexible because it was not yet strongly built; according to Immelmann (1975) and Marquis and Tilcsik (2013), these brief sensitive periods open a window of “imprintability” that allows environmental conditions to imprint stronger impacts than in other times, when this window is closed. Thus, it is essential capturing the signs of this point in time to understand how it has marked Anpad’s creation, which, in its turn, also marked RAC’s launching, 10 years later.

Anpad had to be created; therefore, it was necessary to create the right conditions to it. Then, as Venosa has said:

the political power [to create Anpad] should gather more than just a few [people], but, actually, many others. It was necessary to have determination, legitimacy, articulation skills, regional representativeness, specific weight in the respective programs, and to be prone to act through teamwork. Initially, it was a 6-year project. … More substantive was sought with greater predictability of resources for annual meetings, a letter of principles, even if not written, greater bargaining power with other areas, greater orchestration capacity with official bodies such as Capes, CNPq, Finep, Fapesp ... (Machado-da-Silva, 1997a, p. 155).

This excerpt shows the social conditions and necessary resources to create a scientific association capable of combining the means through which such conditions are fulfilled by technical resource-capture processes. However, it is important highlighting the need of legitimating a Business Administration field by associating regionally dispersed programs, other scientific fields, and official bureaus.

At that time, talking about legitimizing meant saying that the Business Administration academia should become more technically significant, mainly when it comes to scientific issues. Several actions taken to accomplish such proposition were operationalized based on the two subsequent administrations (Fachin, 2006): the 1987-1988 administration, by Clóvis L. Machado-da-Silva, who was the scientific director in the former administration; and the 1989-1990 administration, by Suzana Braga Rodrigues, who also collaborated to Venosa’s administration as business director.

Professor Clóvis Machado-da-Silva was a faithful institutionalist obsessed with Anpad’s legitimization as a scientific association - he wanted to legitimize not only Anpad, but the scientific field as well. Professor Clóvis was graduated in Sociology, whose questioning about its scientific profile had already been overcome. However, he was very annoyed with the fact that Business Administration was not acknowledged by other fields; nothing better than his own words to highlight such an annoyance:

At that time, several scientific associations were already consolidated, and many others that had been recently, or not that recently, created aimed at broadening their institutional acceptance level. Business Administration, as knowledge and action field, actually more of action than of knowledge, had a very hard time getting wide institutional legitimacy in the context where it was seen as a field composed of professionals tightened by the market and, therefore, lacking the necessary distancing, not to say the necessary analytical ability to produce significant scientific knowledge. This field was oftentimes ignored due to possible bonds to Anpad and to representatives of academic Business Administration research agencies; therefore, it only had a small space in venues like CNPq, Capes, Finep, and Fapesp (Machado-da-Silva, 1997a, p. 155).

For those who have met him, his concept of science and academia followed him throughout his whole academic trajectory. He was very active in the entire Anpad’s consolidation process, but it is impossible denying that this concept would deeply mark the very embryo of the Association, because of his role as institutional entrepreneur and because of those who have followed him in future Anpad administrations and complied with this viewpoint.

As he had mentioned (Machado-da-Silva, 1997a), Anpad’s institutional legitimization project, within the scientific context, was broadened in Suzana Braga Rodrigues’ (1989-1990) administration, mostly because she played a central role in the four previous years. She was the director of two different departments: management (1985-86) and scientific (1987-88). According to her own words, “… Anpad, as a political institution, aimed at reinforcing the legitimacy of its academic profile…” (Machado-da-Silva, 1997a, p. 160). She also shared the concern about recovering Business Administration’s status as science by taking it closer to the Social Sciences; however, she pointed out that, at that time, this discussion was politically irrelevant.

Nevertheless, other distinctive and relevant elements of Suzana Braga Rodrigues’ administration stood out, at that time, and remain famous to present times. The first element is the struggle by programs in different regions countrywide to get space and representativeness, because of resource concentration and because southeastern programs were always more politically influential. The second element lies on the independence of the Business Administration post-graduation model in Brazil, which is quite different from foreign models, mainly from the American one. The third, and last, element regards the increased influence of funding and regulation agencies on programs of this scientific field, which encourage the knowledge construction policy through scientific research.

The following Anpad’s administration, by Tânia Fisher (1991-92), was marked by concern with the legitimacy of its scientific field, but she was mostly focused on its relevance in the international scene. According to Fachin (2006), the representativeness of this scientific field was in the mainstream. The role played by Anpad had to highlight its representativeness in other research associations and agencies. As the struggles for internal legitimation were partially over, Anpad emerged as a political actor claiming for resources in official bureaus (Fachin, 2006) because its scientific field was somehow consolidated, a fact that opened room for an embryonic identity.

In the biennial 1993-1994, Clóvis Machado-da-Silva took office as the first reelected Anpad’s president, but he said that this mandate “emerged from different circumstances,” since the concern with the legitimacy of its scientific field remained real. In his own words: “Despite the yet mistrustful gaze of many other knowledge fields, mainly of the noblest ones, one cannot deny that Anpad already had certain presence in the Brazilian scientific and technological context. Not the one that it can, and needs to have, but the one that was possible to build until that point in time” (Machado-da-Silva, 1997a, p. 164).

For those who knew him, sentences like the aforementioned one lasted for more than one decade, regardless of the fact that they could make people angry. However, at that particular moment, there was something quite different from the former administration. Although there was remaining questioning about the legitimacy of the Business Administration field, Professor Clóvis was back to the old post of president of Capes’ Technical Scientific Council - for two mandates (1989-1990 and 1991-1992) -, which is the highest instance in its evaluation-system. It gave him the highest status in the national academic environment, which went beyond the Business Administration field, a status even more significant than Anpad itself. Because he was a very persuasive person, and with an authority that no other president has had until that moment, he did not face a hard time implementing the concepts of academia set in the 1985-1986 biennial period, when he was the Anpad’s scientific director. Furthermore, the way to reach new ventures in Anpad’s behalf was also opened; among them, one finds Anpad’s establishment as legally instituted company and the “launching of an academic journal bond to Anpad, which had a differentiated profile from the existing ones” (Machado-da-Silva, 1997a, p. 167).

These new ventures became real in the subsequent administration (1995-1996), by President Peter Spink. With regard to Anpad’s legal registration, Spink highlights that the members of the assembly used “…the opportunity to review … the current statutes. Most changes referred to already established practices; however, they were not yet registered” (Machado-da-Silva, 1997a, p. 168). For those who have already passed through the process of creating a statute for an association, it is possible saying that it works much more like an instrument to consolidate ideas than as a mechanism to launch a new phase. Thus, we understand that it was when the window of high susceptibility to Anpad’s influence was closed.

In terms of organizational imprinting, Anpad’s “imprintability” time was getting to its end, but within this time interval, something truly relevant was incorporated to Anpad’s events, namely: the blind review process (Fachin, 2006). More than a mere review practice, the blind review is one of the most important scientific institutions, since it is the criterion to establish what, actually, is scientific, based on a counterfeiting view. This practice was not common in the Business Administration field at that moment, so it had considerable impact, and opened room for the pilot test of an Anpad’s journal. Professor José Antônio Gomes de Pinho was the editor-in-chief of the 1995 EnANPAD annals, which took place in João Pessoa City. The annals were published under the name Brazilian Journal of Contemporary Administration, whose aim was to assess the feasibility of a periodic publication (Fachin, 2006).

The intention to create a journal seemed effectively viable. The so-called Journal of Contemporary Administration, which was the new Anpad’s journal, needed an editor. We do not know what were the eligible names at that time, but we know, based on Peter Spinks’ words, that “everybody was pleased with the news that Professor Clóvis L. Machado-da-Silva was prone to accept the function of editor-in-chief” (Machado-da-Silva, 1997a, p. 170). His nomination was coherent with all his trajectory; nobody else could fit such a function. Then, in 1997, in Roberto Moreno’s administration, the first RAC edition was published.

This deed closed a window of “imprintability” in Anpad; however, another window had opened to the recently launched RAC; soon enough, it became quite susceptible to environmental influence. The RAC’s window was different because several elements composing its environment had emerged throughout Anpad’s maturing process. Anpad was this journal’s maintainer, but not exactly when the journal was being gestated. Truth is, RAC was an Anpad’s project that, although had its own life, was going to reflect this association’s ideas and interests.

At that time, the association was concerned with the socially built environment of RAC, which regarded six items: (1) legitimizing the Business Administration field as a scientific discipline; (2) being acknowledged by the other evaluation fields; (3) unbinding the image of this field as a mere reproducer of managerial experiences, which referred to the critic to managerialism; (4) having great theoretical depth and scientific rigor in research; (5) representing programs from different scientific fields and regions countrywide; (6) having a consolidated article-evaluation logic, such as the blind review.

Actually, after the environmental context was set, it is possible understanding the second feature of RAC’s “imprintability” process, which regarded the considerable impact of concerns with this context on its structure and process (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013). Based on what we have herein highlighted, much of the concerns about Anpad’s institutional environment could be partially solved through the creation of an academic journal capable of fulfilling the acknowledged valid standards of scientific conduct. Finally, it was not possible having a scientific association to represent a discipline without having a journal to certify its knowledge (Vanderstraeten, 2010).

If it was essential for Anpad to have an academic journal to meet its legitimation desire, why did it take 21 years to do so? We would like once more to reference Stinchcombe (1965) to answer this question. According to him, some conditions must be met in order for an organization to rise as the solution for a set of specific environmental issues. The first of them is the existence of an elite to represent the entity among the ones that control essential resources, so that actors in society feel represented in terms of the structures, processes, and organizational aim to ensure that basic criteria will be accomplished (Stinchcombe, 1965). Yet, according to him, power (as the ability to coerce and persuade), individual financial or likely available resources, and moral legitimacy are essential resources. Based on Stinchcombe (1965), “it is possible to achieve discipline within the organization and the consent of those outside whose consent is essential” (Stinchcombe, 1965, p. 161).

Not only the first editor, Professor Clóvis L. Machado-da-Silva, represented the elite RAC needed to gather its material and symbolic resources, but also a body of people who could contribute to the success of the herein addressed venture was gathered. This process would be the second condition to be fulfilled because, although Anpad was launched in 1976, it only became official in 1995. Before it became official, it would be hard imagining how to register a journal, mainly to assure the availability of necessary resources, such as the ones that covered the high printing costs, for example.

The third condition would assure the existence of an organizational apparatus capable of dealing with a journal that is not linked to any educational institution, but that would fulfill Anpad’s ideals of science and academia. Besides, it would impose a fourth condition to justify such an apparatus, namely: the existence of a supplier and consumer market for such a product. These two last conditions were well accomplished by Anpad National Meetings, which gave the simultaneous dimension of material resource, and supply and consume market to a national academic journal focused on research, rather than on managerial application. At that stage, EnANPAD was a great meeting; according to Anpad’s former president, Roberto Moreno (biennial 1997-1998), the event was “…often confused with the association itself, as if it was its reason to be…” (Machado-da-Silva, 1997a, p. 171).

After these conditions were met, Anpad’s direction board, mainly its editor-in-chief, was in charge of selecting historically specific aspects of the environmental context that, in their turn, would forge RAC. As highlighted by Marquis and Tilcsik (2013), this selection reflected the attempts to adjust to environmental demands through isomorphism in order to reduce uncertainties and to become legitimate (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Assumingly, the materialization of RAC’s first edition reflected its will to adjust itself to the environmental context addressed in its mission:

RAC was born with the mission of contributing to the deep understanding about Business Administration due to the outspread of research studies and theoretical analyses that could subsidize academic activities and the Business Administration action. By covering analytical contributions, based on the presupposition that empirical theory and research are interdependent, it intends to contribute to knowledge evolution, dialogue, and innovation in the Business Administration field (Machado-da-Silva, 1997b, p. 1).

This mission aimed at defining some parameters to be met in order to differentiate RAC from other journals, which were tacitly defined. It is why we heard Anpad’s former president and RAC’s editor-in-chief, from 2002 to 2006, Professor Tomas de Aquino Guimarães, to complete and validate some information¹. According to him, since the very beginning, it was clear that it was necessary having an Anpad’s journal independent from any other institution. Such a concern derived from the great endogeny observed in institutions’ journals whose space for articles written by researchers from other institutions that did not have their own journals was reduced. This scenario also highlighted the conflict between programs in regions more or less benefited, because schools without journals felt like they were put aside, since they did not have the same space for their studies. The space was not denied necessarily because of lack of scientific merit, but because they did not belong to the institution editing the journal.

Another aspect highlighted by the professor lied on the will to implement the blind review at RAC, which was not common in other journals. This idea was in compliance with the journal’s first edition: “overall, the aim was to only publish articles subjected to RAC’s appreciation; the trend, at this very beginning, was to gradually increase this portion as it becomes better known by the academic community and by public and private organizations” (Machado-da-Silva, 1997b, p. 1). Actually, if endogeny was great, the blind review was not an obvious process in many journals, at that time.

Another concern of Professor Tomas, which was evident in all RAC and Anpad’s trajectory, lied on having a journal not focused on reproducing a managerial logic. The idea was to have analytically robust and theoretically consistent scientific articles based on high-rigor methodological procedures. RAC should be consumed by researchers, not only by managers; it could, somehow, make its reading harder and reduce its public, which would be more selective and research-driven.

Finally, Professor Tomas also highlighted a common issue in Anpad’s trajectory: the will to consolidate itself as a scientific community by using a journal to represent its qualified scientific production, which was reviewed by peers from the Business Administration scientific community. However, it was the same old wish of its first editor, Clóvis L. Machado-da-Silva, who always wanted to see Business Administration as a discipline acknowledged by other scientific fields. His wish synthesizes the viewpoint of RAC’s founders: reaching the journal’s legitimacy within a scientific order. Actually, in order to reach such a goal, the journal needed to be different.

Based on evidence from the year RAC was launched, and by comparing it to the main journals in this field published in 1997, we could assume that RAC was effectively born different. Figure 1 compares some standards of reference, received citation, and endogeny of RAC to Revista de Administração (Rausp), Organizações & Sociedade (O&S), Revista de Administração Pública (RAP) and Revista de Administração de Empresas (RAE). We used data by Spell, which hots most of national journals in the Business Administration, Accounting, and Tourism fields; together, it corresponds to 42% of the scientific production in these fields. It is important highlighting that the choice for the four aforementioned academic journals lied on their relevance and capillarity at that time. The other journals were either from other fields or did not have enough projection and distribution to reach the whole national academic community.

Figure 1
References, received citations, and endogeny at the year RAC was launched (1997).

Mean values. Data about the 197 articles published in 1997 in the five journals by national authors. Citations received by Spell until March 2020. Endogeny was taken into consideration when at least one author belonged to the institutions that edited the journal. As for RAC, articles by the former presidents were taken into account. Foreign guests’ articles (18, in total) were not taken into account in the calculation.

Legend: Ref.: reference; Ref. Estrang: reference to any bibliographic document published abroad; Journal Ref.: reference to any article published in a national or international journal. Journals: Revista de Administração Contemporânea (RAC); Revista de Administração (Rausp); Organizações & Sociedade (O&S); Revista de Administração Pública (RAP); Revista de Administração de Empresas (RAE).

Spell data pointed out that articles published in 1997 by RAC presented higher citation averages (until present times - six citations per article) than the others, and it highlights the usefulness of its articles to a qualified group of readers, such as researchers. The average of references per article in RAC, in this same year, was higher than in the other journals (28.6 references per article), and this finding points out, at least hypothetically, that the articles aimed at having greater theoretical-empirical fundamentals. The number of references to foreign documents was larger in RAC than in the other ones (68%), and it proves the care authors had in substantiating their studies based on the international literature, because it was not fully accessible at that time as it is nowadays. The number of references to a qualified scientific production that had been reviewed by editors was also larger, because 31% of them were articles published in journals; it shows that literature selection was more discerning in RAC. Finally, RAC’s endogeny was much lower than in other journals, wherein 10% of articles referred to studies written by the two former Anpad presidents.

These results point out that founders’ wish to respond to the pressure for having a journal presenting higher academic and scientific content had been fulfilled; once more, it is important having in mind that RAC was born different - there are more differences that deserve to be highlighted, but they did not fit in a graphic. For example, many texts in other journals had a purely managerial profile; they did not have any concern with a theoretical-empirical argument and would only reflect the interest of applying a managerial tool. Whenever there were citations, many of them would regard other magazines, such as Harvard Business Review, Business Week, among others. Besides, it was common citing non-academic documents and books; therefore, although it is not possible highlighting the effort of some journals to have qualified publications, in volume and consistence terms, we could not say that they were exclusively focused on research, as RAC was.

Besides citation, reference, and authorship standards, we also listed aspects linked to the academic logic addressed in abstracts of articles published by RAC and by other journals in 1997. We assessed the frequency of references to a set of terms that directly referred to the academic research logic by comparing it to that of other journals. The selected terms encompassed the following words: theory, which comprised associated words such as concept, theoretical, and theoretically; method; empirical or empirically; analysis, and correlated words such as analyzing and analytical; study; and research (search or assess).

Figure 2 depicts the crossed frequency of each one of the terms and their journals - they were plotted in a heat map. The lower the presence of green shades, the higher the proportion of articles in journals mentioning these terms. The dendrogram in the upper side of the figure points towards similarities and dissimilarities between journals. The horizontal dendrogram, to the left, evidences similarities and dissimilarities between them.

Figure 2
Differences in terms concerning research (1997).

Terms collected in the abstract of 202 articles published in 1997 by the five journals. Cells regard the frequency of articles that have mentioned each term. Terms that have encompassed more than one word: theory (concept, theory, theoretical, or theoretically); empirical (empirical or empirically); analysis (analysis, analyzing, or analytical); research (research, search, or assess).

Legend: Revista de Administração Contemporânea (RAC); Revista de Administração (Rausp); Organizações & Sociedade (O&S); Revista de Administração Pública (RAP); Revista de Administração de Empresas (RAE)..

As it can be seen in Figure 2, the term research reached 61.9% frequency, which was higher in RAC than in the other journals, as well as the term empirical (14.3%). This finding points towards RAC’s apparently greater inclination to scientific investigation than the other ones. When we look at the frequency of two other terms in RAC, study (42.9%) and analysis (52.4%), it is possible seeing that their frequency was also quite high, although the term study was lower in it than in O&S; the term analysis was a little lower in Rausp. These numbers explain RAC editors’ greater analytical concern than that observed for editors in the other journals. With regard to the term theory, RAC also recorded the second highest frequency (23.8%), which was only below the frequency recorded for O&S. As we understand it, this percentage highlights how theory could play a main role in the articles’ arguments. The frequency recorded for the last term - method - was lower than that recorded for the other three journals (9.5%), although the differences were not significant.

Briefly, based on the heat map, we can deduce that RAC was much more concerned with joining theory and empirical research than the other journals, and it reflects its mission, which was determined by its editor-in-chief in its very genesis. Although RAC was quite similar to Rausp in terms of the words analysis. study and research, it was different from Rausp in terms of the words empirical and theory. Therefore, Rausp was apparently featured as primarily focused on research, rather than on theory. There were also similarities between RAC and O&S in terms of the words analysis and theory, but the same did not happen in relation to the other journals, whose frequency of such terms was low. At that time, it was clear that O&S was featured by non-empirical theoretical analysis.

Finally, the elements that we have highlighted so far have evidenced how “references” have imposed distinctive elements in Anpad at RAC’s foundation environmental context, which has made this journal different from all others in its scientific field, since its very genesis. We will point out the third feature of organizational imprinting: despite all subsequent environmental changes, traces acquired at RAC’s foundation have lasted long (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013). We will address these traces in the analysis applied to RAC’s scientific and social impact and to its identity conception.

THINKING ABOUT THE IMPACT OF A SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL ON AN UNDER-FORMATION ACADEMIA

The main point of organizational imprinting is not necessarily to understand how environmental aspects tarnish the essence of organizations, but, mainly, whether these tarnished aspects remain. On the other hand, organizations are adaptive systems, which allows the features observed at their launching moment to disperse. Furthermore, similar to statements by Marquis and Tilcsik (2013), inertia and institutionalization give organizations the long-lasting traces from their foundation context.

Thus, despite all effective changes time forges in organizations, Stinchcombe (1965) addresses some of the reasons for the persistence of traces observed at the time they are born. These traces can be organizations’ most effective form to reach a target, but this is something we will highlight in our arguments about the successful trajectory of RAC’s rise. Traditionalist forces, the fight for individual interests and ideas can lead to structure preservation; this is a very significant statement to make, because Anpad was many times called “traditionalist” due to the ideas and interests of its elite, which were reinforced in several rites and ceremonies, and mostly reproduced in RAC. The organization may not compete through alternative ways that can threaten its survival, and this finding becomes relatively clear when it comes to Anpad, given its importance to a field that was not yet put in check, at that time, as well as to RAC, whose modus operandi well fulfilled the expectation of the local academic community.

We want to emphasize that, in order for RAC’s journal model to last, some success measures should be put in place. These measures concerned the methods to evaluate its impact as a scientific journal in the current research context.

Defining impact

The debate about science impacts has triggered great discussions in different knowledge fields about their definitions and about how they operate and evaluate these impacts (Adler & Harzing, 2009; Aguinis, Shapiro, Antonacopoulou, & Cummings, 2014; Ashford, 2013; Butler et al., 2017; Lazzarini, 2017; Smith, 2012). Although there was not an ultimate definition, or clear consensus, about science impact concepts, researchers have defined such impacts as the influence on academia and society from benefits deriving from scientific research (Adler & Harzing, 2009; Lima & Wood, 2014). Therefore, analyzing the impacts of the scientific activity means deepening the understanding about how knowledge and results produced by different actors in science are created and outspread to different publics, be them scholars, professionals, or the overall society.

One of the main challenges faced by the discussion about this topic lies on the limits to measure these impacts in order to properly represent the different influences and outcomes resulting from the produced knowledge (Birkinshaw, Lecuona, & Barwise, 2016; Moed & Halevi, 2015). It is so because the analysis of dimensions and levels can considerably change depending on the social-field production if one takes into account that such a production depends on the context where they are developed and promoted (Lima & Wood, 2014; Moed & Halevi, 2015). The scientific field where research is produced is a relevant factor for the aforementioned limit; for example, impacts generated by physicists, biologists, managers, and economists are certainly different; they must be measured according to the possibilities and limits of knowledge production and of their specific fields. Besides, analysis level is an important cutting point, since it will also have different dimensions and impact levels depending on the actor involved in the knowledge production, be it a researcher, research team, journal, university, among others.

Thus, by evidencing RAC’s impacts, we will be the first ones to address the influences and outcomes circumscribed to the most specific scientific field of Business Administration (Mingers & Harzing, 2007; Rosa & Romani-Dias, 2019; Rossoni, 2018b). We intend to trigger a discussion about the likely impacts of scientific journals, given the fact that indicators and dimensions can differ between scientific actors, such as researchers, research groups, and universities.

The discussion about measures and indicators of scientific-journal impacts on the literature is wide, but researchers in the Business Administration field have focused on investigating different sorts of impacts, either in the national or international research context (Adler & Harzing, 2009; Diniz, 2017; Ferreira, 2015; Harzing & Van Der Wal, 2009; Rosa & Romani-Dias, 2019; Rossoni, 2018b).

With regard to scientific journals in the Business Administration field, although there was not yet a clear limit set among the existing impact types, we can classify journals’ impacts into the two main ones: the academic and the social impacts. The main difference between them lies on how to measure and set the dimension of these impacts (Lima & Wood, 2014; Moed & Halevi, 2015). The social impact stands out because it exceeds the limits of its own field and reaches other publics, such as companies, professionals, media, public policies, and society. On the other hand, the academic impact of knowledge production only influences and benefits the social field where the research was carried out in; in other words, the science and academia sphere and the spheres of knowledge production means. Otherwise, when investigating the social impact, we will be understanding how this knowledge disseminated by the journals is transferred and impact business, teaching, and society practices, based on new understandings, models, techniques, products and public, or media debates (Butler et al., 2017; Lima & Wood, 2014; Moed & Halevi, 2015; Sugimoto, Work, Larivière, & Haustein, 2017).

Academic impact

Citations have been one of the main indicators used to calculate journals’ academic impact (Aguinis, Suárez-González, Lannelongue, & Joo, 2012; Smith, 2012). One of the core premises of citations lies on researchers’ use of citations from other research in their articles. These citations are useful and relevant for the academic debate; therefore, somehow, they end up influencing the construction and outspread of scientific knowledge (Simsek, Heavey, & Jansen, 2013). In this sense, based on the mapping of citations given and received by journals, several scientific bases and researchers have been working on developing a series of impact indicators based on the citation relationships between scientific journals (Rosa & Romani-Dias, 2019).

The impact factor, also known as Journal Citation Reports (JCR), developed by Eugene Garfield (Garfield, 1955), is one of the most legitimate metrics used by the academic community. Its first version was launched in 1963 under the name Science Citation Index (Garfield & Sher, 1963) by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which was acquired by Thomson Reuters in 1975. Reuters, in its turn, was incorporated to Clarivate Analytics back in 2016. A weighing procedure based on the number of published articles was implemented, because only counting citations did not properly represent journals’ impacts, since some of them have published much more articles than others. Therefore, the impact factor started being calculated based on the number of citations journals have received in the last two years divided by the number of publications in them. This calculation allows journals that have published a smaller amount of articles, but that have a relevant amount of citations, to be ranked in scientific-impact rankings (Garfield, 2006).

Many other scientific databases started to use similar calculations, such as CiteScore, by Scopus (by Elsevier), and the impact factors of the 2- and 5-year by the database Scientific Periodicals Electronic Library (Spell). These databases were created by Anpad in 2012 to analyze Brazilian Business Administration, Accounting, and Tourism journals. Nevertheless, another metrics, such as the H-Index, SJR, and Eigenfactor were applied, as well as JCR; these indicators are widely used to assess the impact, quality, and relevance of both national and international journals (Rosa & Romani-Dias, 2019).

Although the metrics applied to academic impacts were used to rank scientific databases, associations or governmental organs, and research fostering platforms, the literature enabled a wide debate about their limitations and about a whole range of research aimed at contributing to new metrics and dimensions that go beyond citation-based approaches in journals (Hicks, Wouters, Waltman, De Rijcke, & Rafols, 2015; Kaur, Radicchi, & Menczer, 2013). These propositions go from new measurements based on the analysis of networks (Hoffmann, Christoph, & Miriam, 2014) to bibliometric and scientometric methods (Butler et al., 2017) to investigate the analysis of multi-dimensions of academic impact (Moed & Halevi, 2015) or to support theories such as innovation diffusion (Simsek et al., 2013).

The trajectory of RAC’s scientific impact

Although RAC did not effectively arise from zero, because its prestige was unquestionably associated with Anpad’s status, it entered the scientific communication system of the Business Administration field decades after the most traditional journals such as RAE, RAP, and Rausp. O&S itself was four years old when RAC was launched and it made RAC’s capillarity harder because articles outspread through electronic means were not the standard model and the Brazilian internet was still a rising venture. Besides, any scientific impact measure, including the ones based on citations, took time to be put in place. The simplest measures, such as the 2-year impact, could only be manually listed two years after publication.

The first assessment concerning the impact of Business Administration field journals did not include RAC, because, according to Tinoco (2006), articles published between 1997 and 2002 in this journal were not significantly cited. At that time, Tinoco (2006) observed that RAE was the first journal, among RAE, RAP, Rausp, and EnANPAD, to present the strongest mean impact between 1999 and 2002 (0.357); it was followed by RAP (0.269) and EnANPAD (0.232). These numbers show that despite the limitations in the reference basis of the study, which was limited to four journals and one event, RAE was the Business Administration journal recording the strongest impact.

Two years later, Machado-da-Silva, Guarido Filho, Rossoni, and Graeff (2008) analyzed the impact of EnANPAD annals and of journals classified by Qualis as A or B National in the Business Administration field, in the triennial 2005-2007. Only three years after the last year assessed by Tinoco (2006), based on 22 journals and on 1 event, RAC emerged as the second journal recording the strongest factor of impact, with triennial mean of 0.557. RAE was the journal presenting the strongest impact in the citations factor in the country, at the same triennial: 0.969, on average.

The comparison of RAC’s position in the last two studies about its first 10 years shows that its rise in a short period was clear. Although these studies point towards a rising trajectory, there were no resources at that time in Brazil to capture the impact of national journals on this scientific field. This scenario started to change in 2010 due to Spell’s creation; even having its first impact indicator generated in 2014, Spell had data of impact and citations that date back to 2010 - the newest data of Spell’s impact dates back to 2018. Figure 3 shows the trajectory of RAC’s impact since 2010.

Figure 3
Trajectory of the 5-year impact of Spell’s journals from 2020 to 2018.

Spell’s data, by taking into account the 5-year impact without self-citation: (www.spell.org.br/impacto; recovered on February 20, 2020). Top tier journals listed by order of impact: 1^st Revista Contabilidade & Finanças; 3^rd Revista de Administração de Empresas; 4^th RAE-eletrônica; 5^th Revista de Administração; 6º Revista de Administração Mackenzie; 7^th Revista Contemporânea de Contabilidade; 8^th Revista de Contabilidade e Organizações; 9^th Revista de Administração Pública; 10^th Organizações & Sociedade; 11^th Cadernos EBAPE.BR. All the others: 110 of a total of 121 national journals of impact in Spell.

The comparison of RAC’s 5-year impact on the period to the impact of the other 10 most central journals (top tier) and to the impact of all other journals composing Spell shows that RAC switched positions with RAE as the journal recording the strongest impact on the Business Administration field, although there was significant growth in this indicator in all journals. Since 2016, RAC is the national journal of the Business Administration field showing the strongest impact, either in the 2-year window or in the 5-year one, with or without self-citation. It is curious that, almost 20 years after RAC’s launching, it emerged to such a position and reached the status expected by its founders, not only in terms of structure and processes, but also in terms of impact (Mau, 2020).

However, when we talk about scientific impact, we cannot reduce it to the impact of citation averages. There are other impact measures that aim at capturing the centrality and prestige of a journal based on networks of citations (Hoffmann et al., 2014). We analyzed citations’ structure in journals indexed to Spell’s database in 2018 and plotted them in the graph to have some empirical evidence rather than only the factor of impact (Figure 4).

Figure 4
Citation network between journals in Spell (2018).

Data collected in articles published by Spell in 2018 (www.spell.org.br; recovered on February 20, 2020). Only citations received from articles published between 2013 and 2017, which concerned the last five years, were taken into consideration. Cited journals: 120. Citing journals: 118. Graphic visualization method: Kamada Kawai. Most labels were hidden in order to facilitate visualization. Color highlight clusters formed by citations presenting greater redundancy. The red and green clusters are the most central ones; they are mostly formed by journals of the Business Administration field. The blue cluster is predominantly formed by journals of the Accounting field. The yellow cluster, in its turn, shows the great presence of journals of the Tourism field.

Figure 4 shows that RAC is the most central journal because it is positioned right at the center of the network, whose position is generated by the visualization algorithm itself, which centralizes more central nodes and puts away the most isolated ones. Table 1 lists some citation and centrality indicators of networks encompassing the 10 most central journals in order to complete the provided information. RAC is the most centralized journal in the network; it recorded the largest number of citing journals (73.9%) and the largest number of citations (248). With regard to impact without self-citations for 2- or 5-year publications, RAC’s impact was only lower than that of Revista Contabilidade & Finanças, which addresses publication of the Accounting field.

Table 1
RAC's centrality in the Business Administration, Accounting, and Tourism fields in 2018.

Journals	Weighed centrality1	Citing Journals2		Citations	Impact3
					5 years	2 years
Revista de Administração Contemporânea	144,4	88	73,9%	248	1,017	0,663
Revista de Administração Mackenzie	121,5	79	66,4%	204	0,776	0,298
Revista de Administração Pública	111,1	64	53,8%	220	0,648	0,535
Revista de Administração de Empresas	108,7	66	55,5%	194	0,754	0,611
Revista de Administração	101,8	70	58,8%	153	0,685	0,400
Cadernos EBAPE.BR	88,3	53	44,5%	173	0,603	0,523
Revista Contabilidade & Finanças - USP	80,8	47	39,5%	147	1,158	0,843
Revista Brasileira de Marketing	80,2	56	47,1%	154	0,518	0,292
Organizações & Sociedade	75,3	52	43,7%	122	0,669	0,508
Brazilian Business Review	65,7	48	40,3%	93	0,500	0,333

• Note. Similar to the graph, the analyses were based on articles published by Spell in 2018, which took into account citations received from articles published between 2013 and 2017.
• ¹
  We used a measurement that weighs the centrality of journals (numbers of citers) according to the number of citations received by each one of them (for details, see Opsahl, T., Agneessens, F., & Skvoretz, J. (2010). Node centrality in weighted networks: Generalizing degree and shortest paths. Social Networks. 32(3), 245-251. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2010.03.006).
• ²
  Number of Spell 's journals that have cited at least one article between 2013 and 2017 from the journal cited in 2018.
• ³
  Impact without self-citations.

Besides impact, what does such a centrality mean in RAC’s citation network? It points out that, besides being the most cited journal, RAC is referenced by most journals in its scientific field, which concerns its usefulness as theoretical-empirical reference for a whole set of readers. Moreover, it gives RAC the status of the journal presenting the greatest capillarity, because it reaches different topics within the same field. Furthermore, the weighed centrality measurement we have adopted to capture how the citation frequency and the centrality of the journal that cites it are entangled, reinforcing RAC’s role in outspreading knowledge in the Business Administration, Accounting, and Tourism fields. Thus, although RAC still has lower impact than other journals, it is impossible denying that RAC’s influence sphere is wider than that of journals from other scientific fields.

To the best of our knowledge, the reason for the emergence of such a centrality does not regard only the concept of academic quality built by RAC, but also the fact that, similarly to EnANPADs, RAC has always provided information for multiple thematic fields, and it favored its wide spectrum of citations. Unquestionably, RAC is the journal recording the strongest impact either in terms of results or of amplitude of knowledge produced in the country by the Brazilian Business Administration community. Now, it is imperative unfolding what would be the social impacts of RAC’s production.

Social impact?

Although science is a field presenting its logic, it is unquestionable that other fields, including that of RAC, make pressure to define the topics and issues deserving investigation. Actually, having its own logic does not necessarily imply having full autonomy, because science is not self-sufficient, it depends on resources made available by actors from the political, economic, and societal fields. Such a dependence poses exogenous pressure on science, since it has to be more responsive to the impact of its products on fields that go beyond the scientific one. Actually, the fact that science deals with its own ethos (Merton, 1996) does not mean that it will stop being influenced by society’s priorities (Wilson, Procheş, Braschler, Dixon, & Richardson, 2007).

The concerns of science go beyond research quality itself, but focus on whether it is useful indeed. This is a legitimate concern, because the aim of science is to make people’s lives better (Smith, 2001). It is also valid to research about Business Administration; however, the main issue of science always lied on defining the way to assess the effect of research on society (Grieco, Michelini, & Iasevoli, 2015). An intense discussion about the social impact of research emerged in the last few years to answer to this question (Rawhouser, Cummings, & Newbert, 2019); it was so intense and outstanding that we can state that the term impact became a cliché, because there is no business school report website or annual management report where the term is not found.

But why so much ubiquity now? Science has been argued for its outcomes for a long time, but, currently, there are two essential movements that need to be better assessed in to help understanding the prevalence of the concept of social impact of research. The first movement regards the advancement of post-truth policies that, in their turn, put in check the role of science through disinformation (Lewandowsky, Ecker, & Cook, 2017). The second one concerns the contemporary focus on socio-environmental sustainability policies, projects, and business; social impact assessments (SIA) extrapolated its means because it worked as model to the scientific field.

Some authors believe that we live the post-truth era (Lewandowsky et al., 2017; Lockie, 2017; Sismondo, 2017), which is featured by mismatch between messages often outspread in social networks and the facts substantiating them (Sismondo, 2017). Despite the lack of evidence that such messages are true, a crowd of individuals believe in their truth because they are in compliance with their beliefs and interests (Lockie, 2017). The opposite is also real: much of what is effectively fact is seen as untrue because it does not fit the beliefs of certain publics. Consequently, since science works with facts that often displease established beliefs, it ends up being the aim of people who try to discredit it.

With regard to the second point, the idea of “social impact assessment refers to assessing (as in measuring or summarizing) a broad range of impacts (or effects, or consequences) that are likely to be experienced by an equally broad range of social groups” (Freudenburg, 1986, p. 452). Since much of the social impact assessment (SIA) concerns evaluating the outcomes of policies driven by social research, the scientific field and the field of evaluating the impact of social policies got closer to each other and this process has shaped simultaneously a new research field and the object to be chased for social impact (Becker, 2001). This claim was expressed by the ways to measure the social impact of research (Smith, 2001), which, in its turn, similarly to socio-environmental concerns, are more recurrent in any activity, including the scientific one (Grieco et al., 2015).

Addressing the social impact of research does not mean only talking about the benefits of research to an external audience, it also concerns the interaction forms between academic communities and other stakeholders, no matter if this contact is direct or not (Molas-Gallart & Tang, 2011). Thus, the social impact of research goes beyond researchers’ activity, because it can be mediated by any product created by them (Molas-Gallart & Tang, 2011). Furthermore, it is possible to consider that research has social impact, as well as that it makes it possible for stakeholders to understand the reality and consequences of their actions, and allows them to anticipate correction measures (Burdge, 2002). The great challenge lies on creating mechanisms to measure activities dispersed in space and time (Aguinis, Ramani, Alabduljader, Bailey, & Lee, 2019; Butler et al., 2017; Pulido, Redondo-Sama, Sordé-Martí, & Flecha, 2018; Sugimoto et al., 2017).

Some knowledge fields mostly driven by technology, the so-called “hard sciences”, show more evident outcomes, for instance, the economic exploitation of patents deriving from cooperation between universities and companies (Moed & Halevi, 2015), and the creation of products and software (Smith, 2001). However, scientific fields seen as “soft sciences”, such as Business Administration, whose products are lesser tangible, face the challenge of exploring the alternative differences and forms of scientific research to influence professional practices, public and political debates, and society as a whole (Lima & Wood, 2014). Smith (2001) points towards alternatives that go beyond products, applications, and direct intervention. He added four more dimensions to the evaluation of social impact of research; all of them are quite useful for research on Business Administration: (1) publicizing the research; (2) producing analytical content; (3) teaching activities; (4) participation in councils and committees.

Publicizing the research is one of the main revolutions to amplify the impact of science in journals’ scope due to the rise of the internet. The availability of journals in the internet enabled wide outspread of academic articles, whose previous accessibility was often limited to college libraries or research institutes. Although the impact of citations linked to scientific databases has been one of the cores of the academic behavior in the last decades, researchers recently have discussed the role of social media and networks in journals’ visibility and outspread, because these processes have turned these databases into sources to measure the social impact of different research (Butler et al., 2017; Sugimoto et al., 2017). The term “altmetrics” has been used to represent the investigation field interested in understanding the many forms and means to outspread scientific communication in social media, to allow greater use diversity and the transparency use and to show the interest in the produced scientific knowledge.

Sugimoto, Work, Larivière, and Haustein (2017) carried out a literature review and identified several platforms outspreading scientific knowledge, among them: social networks, blogs, videos, and electronic encyclopedia. Although most research focused on the use of these platforms by researchers, some studies have already investigated the presence of journals in social networks (Pulido et al., 2018; Sugimoto et al., 2017); the medical field stands out for promoting and outspreading research knowledge. Hawkins, Hillman, Carlos, Rawson, Haines, and Duszak (2014) showed that the promotion of research published by Journal of the American College of Radiology (JACR) in Twitter have considerably increase the access to its website and the number of views in published articles due to its commitment with different user types.

It has been a while since researchers on different fields, including the Business Administration field, have books, texts, case studies, technical reports, teaching material, consulting diagnostic, and research tutorials available for the production of analytical content. All these materials clearly had impact on production, extrapolated the academia and influenced a wide range of stakeholders (Molas-Gallart & Tang, 2011; Smith, 2001). The problem is that such a production type is hardly measured as research-related activity; not to mention that these materials can be classified.

It is important mentioning that impact is not limited to scientific production, but it also concerns “influence.” Aguinis et al. (2019) analyzed the references from the 38 most used books at graduation level in different fields of Business Administration; they focused on understanding pluralistic ways to analyze the impact of academic research and identified that the most cited references mainly result from academic sources that derive from articles published in journals, more than those found in magazines, books, and other sources. Besides, other relevant conclusion of their study lied on the lack of correlation between a journal’s impact and the number of citations received from journals and books. This finding highlights that, although journals can have lower impact (academic), they can have stronger impact on other scopes, such as teaching social impact on graduation, and vice-versa.

The teaching activity shows that much of the content produced by researchers works as teaching material, because it is limited to the teaching activity itself. Some authors advocate that journals can play a core role in such activity for some journals, including those in the Business Administration field; they often publish teaching cases and, more recently, tutorial articles that are extremely useful for lecturers. These materials are essential given their impact on faculty; there are evidences that teaching cases and tutorials make the use of active learning strategies easier. These strategies, in their turn, can improve students’ development (Sinnayah, Rathner, Loton, Klein, & Hartley, 2019).

Finally, the fourth dimension mentioned by Smith (2001), participation in councils and committees, concerns the action logic of universities as “third-flow activities,” i.e., the use, application, and exploitation of knowledge outside the higher education sector (Lockett, Wright, & Wild, 2015). Because Administration is a soft science, these activities regard researchers’ participation as managers, advisors, or consultants, mainly due to professors’ expertise in this field; but such a role is unlikely applicable for journals.

The value of activities linked to the social impact of research is unquestionable; however, these activities operate at multiple levels and dimensions (Adler & Harzing, 2009), which makes it extremely hard to have indicators capable of reliably measuring them. This difficulty can somehow contribute to the status of second-tier activity in science given to them by some individuals. According to Mau (2020), the quantification process adds value to these activities, because it forces the comparison between actors by pushing them to compete. Consequently, measuring these activities can turn qualitative differences into quantitative differentiation, and hierarchize the status. Different from the academic impact, the social impact does not happen in a systematic way.

Thinking about RAC’s social impact

Journals are scientific communication means, but it significantly limits their social-impact actions; however, despite their restrictions, some impact actions are reproduced by journals, which allows their evaluation, regardless of all limitations faced to quantify these impact actions. Given the lack of rankings focused on reliable indicators of journals’ social impact, we will address RAC’s social impact actions.

RAC’s actions to make its research public were recently seen in the great effort by its current editor-in-chief and by Anpad to create mechanisms to increase the outspread of its scientific production. Besides the rearrangement of its website and the elaboration of its version in English, there was intense effort to incorporate “altmetrics” to its website, mainly through PlumX Metrics’ incorporation to it (https://plumanalytics.com/learn/about-metrics/; recovered on April 27, 2020). This finding shows RAC’s interest in capturing the impact of its publications, rather than just of its citations. The journal aims to better understand how its publications are outspread in social networks, blogs, databases, and repositories.

A Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/tac.periodicos recovered on April 27, 2020) was another action taken by RAC to outspread its research, although it was apparently discontinued. This page aimed at providing information about screens of new editions, but many posts only tried to make scientific communication more palatable for the great public by using tools such as infographics and videos. Moreover, some articles had journalistic profile to be easily understood by the non-academic public. Although it is not a common practice in national journals, having the support by scientific journalists to turn less technical texts into texts more attractive to students is an alternative, because these texts can make the learning process easier (Galvão, Felicio, Ferreira, & Noll, 2020). It is essential mentioning that RAC has been looking for new ways to complete the outspread of article-related materials by posting presentations and other resources in platforms like Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/ recovered on April 27, 2020) and Mendeley (https://data.mendeley.com/ recovered on April 27, 2020).

The second set of RAC’s impact actions concern the outspread of analytical contents that go beyond traditional scientific articles. Two extremely relevant initiatives by RAC must be herein mentioned, for example, the publication of technological articles. According to Motta (2017), this technological production aims at linking scholars to practitioners whose prevailing approach lies on problem solving, not on its in-depth understanding. Based on Martins and Mendes-da-Silva (2020), “the tutorial articles must approach and help researchers, beginners, and experts to perform and implement, in an objective way, aspects and empirical techniques relevant to a scientific research in Administration” (Martins & Mendes-da-Silva, 2020, p. 272).

The third RAC’s impact action refers to the production of teaching-support materials; it is a space opened to the publication of teaching cases. According to Faria and Figueiredo (2013), the demand for teaching participatory methods, including teaching cases, has been growing in the Business Administration field. Although it is not a new strategy, the impact of teaching cases on executive education is undeniable, not to mention that such a material - which demands great production effort - allows lecturers, who are the main stakeholders of scientific knowledge, to use high-quality practical material without having to produce it themselves. In education terms, it is essential highlighting that analytical contents, such as technological and tutorial articles, can be used as teaching material, mainly at Post-Graduation level. In addition to these two types of documents, there is the recent initiative by RAC to implement the data, material, and open code policy (Mendes-da-Silva, 2019), so that students can use its databases to have access to trainings in analytical techniques.

Finally, RAC’s fourth social impact action: the importance of the journal based on its academic propositions to change the way of thinking about the public and private management is, in our viewpoint, the most intangible of all. Management, no matter where, tends to be libertarian, it makes empiricism the rule, rather than the analysis supported by data. Thus, we believe that it is necessary thinking RAC as the symbol of cultural changes in managerial practices countrywide, because this journal represents the Brazilian Administration academia. Sentences like “it is the eye of the breeder that makes the cattle grow” or even “those who have the means, rule, and those who are wise, obey,” although clearly mistaken from an effectiveness standpoint, still have room in the practical environment, since academic knowledge on management is still not taken that seriously. But it has to change.

Establishing an identity to RAC

As we have highlighted since the very beginning of the present article, we have recovered distinctive elements of the Journal of Contemporary Administration’s (RAC) genesis; therefore, it is worth trying to establish the RAC identity by taking them into consideration. We assumed that a journal can be understood as an organization, which allowed us to think about identity itself and about the identity of organizations as a set of central, different, and long lasting factors (Albert & Whetten, 1985). If a journal has an identity (Faems et al., 2016), it was likely built over four aspects: identity as the reflection of cultural aspects of the context the organization is immersed in (Hatch & Schultz, 2002); identity emerged from the interaction between the organization and its stakeholders (Scott & Lane, 2000); identity as the projection to the external context in order to typify a role in the community (Ashforth, 2001) to build an image (Hatch & Schultz, 2002); and, finally, identity based on features established at organizations’ launching - which must leave a long lasting imprinting in identity (Kroezen & Heugens, 2012; Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013).

It is important showing whether these features are actually long lasting, so we evidenced that the main elements at RAC’s launching remain alive. We assessed whether aspects linked to the academic logic found in the abstracts of RAC’s articles in 1997 (see Figure 2) presented a long lasting trajectory. Next, we evaluated the frequency of the six terms analyzed between 1997 and 2002, namely: analysis, study, research, theory, empirical.Figure 5 illustrates the trajectory of these terms on a yearly basis. These terms lasted long, although they presented punctual variations whose mean frequency followed the labels in the legends. Of the six terms, study was the only one presenting significant variation (χ² = 40.56, p < 0.05). This finding shows that, although more than 20 years have passed after its foundation, RAC’s science-related elements remain textually found in articles’ abstracts, at proportions similar to those observed at its launching.

Figure 5
Occurrence trajectory of terms concerning research in RAC (1997-2020).

Terms captured in the abstracts of 934 articles published from 1997 to 2020 by RAC. Documents lacking abstract were excluded from the study. We pointed out the mean frequency throughout this period in the legend of each term. Terms comprising more words: ttheory (concept, theory, theoretical, or ttheoretically); empirical (empirical or empirically); analysis (analysis, analyzing, or analytical); research (research, searching or assessing).

We compared terms regarding the scientific logic found in the abstract of articles published in 1997 (Figure 2) to that in publications from 2019, and compared the frequency of RAC’s terms to terms in RAP, O&S, RAE, and in the other journals in Spell’s database. Rausp had to be excluded from the comparison because it did not use abstracts in Portuguese in articles indexed to Spell. The frequency of each one of these terms was crossed to each one of the journals in the heat map (Figure 6). The frequency pattern of terms is RAC was quite similar to that from articles published in 1997: research (55.6%), analysis (66.7%), and study (63.9%) presented high frequency, as well as theory (38.9%) and empirical (11.1%), which showed higher frequency than that of other journals. Similar to 1997, the joined presence of terms related to theory and empirical research highlighted that RAC has been looking forward to be the journal matching these two elements. It is an important feature because, despite factor time, it makes RAC different from the other journals.

Figure 6
Co-occurrence of terms concerning research (2019).

Terms captured in the abstracts of 2,978 articles published in 2018 by four journals and by the average of all others. In total, 114 assessed journals. Rausp was excluded because it did not present abstracts in Portuguese in articles indexed to Spell database. Documents lacking abstracts in Portuguese were ignored. Cells concern the frequency of articles that mentioned each of the terms. Terms comprising more than one word: theory (concept, theory, theoretical, or theoretically); empirical (empirical or empirically); analysis (analysis, analyzing, or analytical); research (research, searching, or assessing). Legend: Revista de Administração Contemporânea (RAC); Organizações & Sociedade (O&S); Revista de Administração Pública (RAP); Revista de Administração de Empresas (RAE).

Patterns of terms in other journals, most of them recent and presenting low Qualis Capes score, are another important item to be highlighted. They often present patterns similar to those of RAC and RAP, whose emphasis in some terms was even greater. It is interesting giving an institutionalist explanation to it; based on DiMaggio and Powell (1983), isomorphic processes operate through coercion (Qualis evaluation), standards (authors’ expectations, reviewers, and indexers), and mimicry (by reproducing practices of the most central journals) in case of lack of clear effective criteria. However, according to Tolbert and Zucker (1983), the institutionalization was relatively late, many were launched from the mid-2000s on, but yet this isomorphism took place in the intension to legitimize these journals among their public, but they were not necessarily concern with complying with their mission or processes. Although we cannot state that RAC triggered this isomorphic process, it is impossible denying that its model represented a rising academic logic in the Business Administration field.

We compare RAC’s reference standards to standards of other journals, as shown in Figure 7. Similar to what was observed in 1997, the mean reference per article (61.7 references) in RAC is quite higher than in other journals (42.1) that focus on empirical theoretical backgrounds. The percentage of qualified-production citations (journals) is also higher in RAC than the mean recorded for the other ones (62% against 48%). Despite such an emphasis on journals’ articles, RAC did not abandon production use in national journals (7%), although it was lower than in the other ones (10%), as well as did not abandon the use of books (17%), whose use, in many cases, regarded the concern with theoretical deepening. Our understanding about this reference standard is that, besides the academic rigor, RAC aimed at the dialogue between national and international scientific production, as well as at the combination of theory and empirical research, all at the same time. This combination also highlights the traces already marked in RAC’s foundation.

Figure 7
Types of documents referenced in Spell articles published in 2018.

Data collected at Spell in 2018. Mean references per article: 42.1 references; RAC: 61.7 references. *Other types of referenced documents: book chapter; teaching case; dissertation; editorial; generic; journal reports; magazine reports; monography; bibliographic note; others; report; summary; thesis or dissertation summary; thesis; web; working paper.

We must assess whether the official discourse of RAC was coherent with that at its foundations in order to confirm the argument that its foundation context has marked its identity. Nowadays, RAC’s discourse in its website, more than 20 years after its creation, leaves no doubt:

Based on a regional perspective and on an interdisciplinary attitude, RAC is in the vanguard of theoretical and methodological innovation by welcoming significant and empirical contributions that investigate and problematize relevant matters of economic, social, and political concern, mainly where these new approaches advance. We prioritized the empirically engaged work, as well as studies that promote critical epistemological approaches and amplify conceptual limits, use theory to act in an innovative way and, consciously, sail through knowledge production policies, in and outside the academia (original griffin). (Revista de Administração Contemporânea, n.d., n.p.).

In essence and substance, what is nowadays found in RAC’s website reproduces its 1997 mission. Except for the term regional that, in our analysis, was never a distinctive element of the journal, the herein adopted evaluation points out that RAC’s genesis, impact, and trajectory were the central and distinctive elements of its identity, the role of the generalist journal of the Brazilian Administration academia, whose science conception concerns the analytical rigor strongly supported by the interdependence between theory and empirical research. It is worth pointing out the RAC’s identity, based on the statement by its former president, according to whom “the scientific community and the scientific communication cannot be separated from each other” (Guimarães et al., 2018, p. 526).

It is clear that RAC’s identity is not reduced to these elements, since many other elements are distinctive in its trajectory. Thus, by respecting the multi-face nature of identity, as well as the intertemporal coherence of other elements, we reveal each element that has manifested itself in our analysis:

1. RAC is the journal representing the Brazilian Administration academia, whose consolidation got mixed with the history of the consolidation of this scientific field itself;

2. This period reflects the generalist and interdisciplinary concept of management and organization, which opened room for the different thematic axes that have composed the Business Administration discipline in the country;

3. RAC was born to be big, given its local centrality and strong influence on knowledge outspreading in the Business Administration field in Brazil;

4. It was always a critical time to managerialism, since it stood out for theoretical deepening, methodological rigor, and academic relevance. This finding lies on the fact that RAC is a journal focused on scientific critics, be it through theoretical-empirical studies or essays;

5. It is an exclusively Brazilian journal concerned with Brazilian issues, although it does not exclude the input by foreign authors or internationalization initiatives;

6. It is independent from any higher education institution; it stands out for authorities’ regional diversity and for its struggle against conflicts of interest in publications, mainly, against endogeny;

7. There is a consolidated evaluation logic that presents wide participation of the academic community aimed at rigor, quality, and impartiality;

8. It always aimed at content innovation and editorial processes; it was always open to new publication formats and to new scientific communication technologies;

9. Although it was not mentioned before, this journal has open access to its content and meets the Brazilian tradition of ensuring free access to knowledge. This position implies advocating for policies focused on broadening the access to complementary data and documents, as well as on the maximum transparency possible in the editorial process.

Implications of RAC’s identity

Identity building concerns the role performed in a given community; thus, instead of discussing theoretical and practical implications, we pointed out the application of its consequences, as well as RAC’s reflection of the exercise of its identity. It is not necessarily the view of its editorial board or of its maintainer, but the analysis of what was distinctive in its trajectory. We herein drew a concept of future to RAC, which, based on our understanding, is already in place.

We emphasized that RAC’s scientific identity stands out for its theoretical, methodological, and empirical rigor. To the best of our knowledge, RAC is already consolidated as a journal of academic articles, although we are not certain about whether its body of reviewers has embodied such an identity. However, we want to highlight that this logic must be found in the other documents published by RAC; teaching cases, technological articles, and tutorial articles must be subjected to the same demands of theoretical-conceptual review applied to academic articles. Because the format and objective of these products are different, the essential aspects of the concept of a scientific product shall not be put aside; otherwise, they could not perform RAC’s identity.

We understand that the open-science policy was recently implemented by RAC (see Mendes-da-Silva, 2019), and it implied the adoption of the data access, materials, and codes policy, as well as of authors’ contributions and open evaluations (Martins, 2020). It was an important move to make research more transparent and replicable; therefore, important journals in this field, such as the Journal of International Business Studies, recently made changes in their editorial policies (Beugelsdijk, Witteloostuijn, & Meyer, 2020) by incorporating a “data access and research transparency” (DART) approach. This transparency and open data policy can mitigate publication bias, whose inconclusive or negative outcomes are excluded from the editorial process, on purpose; therefore, it shines light on what Petty, Stephenson, and Hadley (2019) call dark data: data that point towards negative results or that would refute data available in publications. The adoption of these policies also imposed the need of thinking about the review of Anpad’s Good Practices in Scientific Publication Handbook, which is an important normative part of research ethics in the Business Administration field.

RAC must emphasize its “glocal” nature - global + local -, whose aspects related to the international logic of scientific production are entangled to the features and idiosyncrasies of national managerial knowledge production. Something that was already mentioned by Alcadipani and Rosa (2011), but that we had brought to the context, is the limited role of a journal; RAC is a central and relevant journal in Brazil and its strength lies on this very factor, because we have a large community in Brazil. However, in order to grow and to have the representativeness it deserves, RAC needs to deal with the global game of the scientific communication, where it remains a peripheral actor.

It does not mean mimicking the global publish or perish model; according to Alcadipani (2017), “the attempt of people in Southern countries to copy the functioning logic of Northern countries, without having the same social, cultural, and economic basis … by producing a bad copy that did not bring any benefit to us” (Alcadipani, 2017, p. 407). Not to mention that the benefits from copying this logic are not evident; for example, Rosa and Romani-Dias (2019) observed that national journals in international databases presented low performance in terms of impact when they made the transition to English. These authors pointed out that, although little cited in these databases, impacts mostly resulted from self-citations or from citations of Brazilian authors who have published in international journals. Journals in the English language transition adopted a communication model that implied article visibility and impact loss in their country of origin. Rossoni (2018a), for example, advocated for the maintenance of the Portuguese language as the way to ensure the legitimacy and impacts of journals in their language of origin, because, then, they tend to be more accessed, downloaded, and cited.

In practical terms, we understand that RAC must emphasize the bilingual publication model, according to which the same article is published in the Portuguese and English versions in order to meet the search for internationalization and not to lose knowledge outspread in the country of origin. This model was adopted by other journals that have made article visibility possible, as well as that have achieved wide access by Brazilian scholars and that have look forward to project their publications to the international public (Nassif, 2019; Tonelli, 2019). RAC must conduct special calls for the participation of foreign authors who bring expertise and visibility to journals, without decharacterize their local logic. Researchers such as Diniz (2017) and Rosa and Romani-Dias (2019) pointed towards the challenges of attracting renamed foreign authors to broaden the visibility and legitimacy of national journals at global sphere.

We know that these actions can pose risk of overlap with the Brazilian Administration Review (BAR), which was born as Anpad’s scientific production internationalization project. However, to the best of our understanding, for RAC to become internationally big and central, similar to its national profile, there is no alternative rather than trying to stand out in the international scenario by keeping its local essence.

Moreover, RAC must go onwards its internationalization project by marking its presence in two great international indexers: Scopus and Web of Science. Although Brazilian journals have most of their citations resulting from national journals or from journals from more peripheral regions, whose citers also have low impact (Rossoni, 2018a), it is not possible highlighting that international researchers, and most of all, the national ones, take into account the presence in these bases, in one option or in the other, as condition for publications. RAC’s national and international position, in comparison to other Brazilian journals in the same scientific field, does not justify the fact that it is not indexed in these two databases. We know that the acceptance of these bases does not depend only on the editorial body and on Anpad’s direction board, but it has been seen as a field project, as it was already articulated by previous initiatives in our academic field (Kimura, Carneiro, Alperstedt, & Neto, 2014). Finally, if there is a journal that represents the Business Administration research field in the country, this journal is the Journal of Contemporary Administration.

CONCLUSION

We herein evidenced the formation of the Journal of Contemporary Administration’s identity based on the idea of organizational imprinting. We searched for what was distinctive in its genesis, which was strongly influenced by the political and social context of the consolidation of Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Administração (ANPAD). Testimonies, historical texts, and assessed data have pointed out that the central and distinctive element of its identity lied on its position as the main generalist journal of the Brazilian Business Administration academia, whose concept of science concerns analytical rigor, which is strongly supported by the interdependence between theory and empirical research. We observed the effectiveness of RAC’s identity construction through analyses of its scientific and social impact on the Brazilian Business Administration community. This process took us to the point of stating that RAC is the most influential and central academic journal in this field. Finally, we highlighted some implications of RAC’s built identity and indicated the course of future actions.

• END NOTE
  1. The interview given by Professor Tomas de Aquino Guimarães was carried out by videoconference on February 29, 2020. The interpretations about the facts reported in the interview are the sole responsibility of the authors.
• Funding
  The authors would like to thank FAPERJ (process E-26/203.238/2017) for their financial support.
• Copyrights
  RAC owns the copyright to this content.
• Plagiarism Check
  The RAC maintains the practice of submitting all documents approved for publication to the plagiarism check, using specific tools, e.g.: iThenticate.
• Peer Review Method
  This content was evaluated using the double-blind peer review process. The disclosure of the reviewers' information on the first page is made only after concluding the evaluation process, and with the voluntary consent of the respective reviewers.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 June 2020
• Date of issue
  Sep-Oct 2020

History

• Received
  05 May 2020
• Accepted
  05 May 2020