I am pleased to take this opportunity to recap this year’s Business Ethics Quarterly (BEQ) article and reviewer awards, which were presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Business Ethics (SBE) in Chicago in August. I will also offer a brief update on the journal’s impact ratings.
Article Award
At the SBE meeting we presented the award for an outstanding article published in the journal in 2017 (volume 27). The process of selecting the award winner begins with nominations offered by members of the journal’s editorial leadership team. A committee consisting of associate editors Andreas Georg Scherer (University of Zürich), Tom Donaldson (University of Pennsylvania), and Scott Reynolds (University of Washington) then reviewed the nominated articles, selecting a winner and also recognizing two runner-up articles.
The winning article is “Empowering Women Through Corporate Social Responsibility: A Feminist Foucauldian Critique” (BEQ 27[4], 603–631) authored by Lauren McCarthy. McCarthy’s article scrutinizes accepted narratives of corporate social responsibility’s impact on women, and uses a Foucauldian lens to reveal individual experiences of resistance and self-making. The work here is quite timely, tackling a pervasive issue with a thorough and carefully reasoned analysis. McCarthy insightfully balances existing perspectives on gender with her own novel insights, demonstrating that CSR can be an empowering exercise that should be understood as a self-directed process rather than merely a corporate initiative. McCarthy’s article appeared in the journal as part of a special section on gender, business ethics, and CSR; the guest editors of that section—Kate Grosser, Jeremy Moon, and Julie Nelson—also deserve kudos for their role in bringing the award-winning article to fruition.
One of the runner-up articles is “Talk Ain’t Cheap: Political CSR and the Challenges of Corporate Deliberation” (BEQ 27[2], 183–211) by Cameron Sabadoz and Abraham Singer. The award committee highlighted this article for illuminating the significant but previously unconsidered challenges firms face when practicing corporate deliberation. Sabadoz and Singer provide critical insights and recommendations on how corporate deliberation can be applied to improve political corporate social responsibility. A subtle yet trenchant critique and constructive extension of deliberative theory are key strengths of the contribution this article makes.
The other runner-up article is “The Problem of Unilateralism in Agency Theory: Towards a Bilateral Formulation” (BEQ 27[2], 163–182) by Sareh Pouryousefi and Jeff Frooman. According to the award committee, the time was ripe for this article’s fresh assessment of the virtues and limitations of agency theory in normative business ethics. Pouryousefi and Frooman adroitly challenge agency theory’s assumption of unilateral obligations. They propose, instead, a novel bilateral perspective, one that not only better captures the reality of principal-agent relationships, but offers the norm of reciprocity as a solution to agency risks.
My editorial team and I congratulate these authors for their splendid contributions. It is an especially gratifying aspect of the editor role to be able to honor the fine work of our colleagues that appears in the pages of the journal.
Reviewer Award
At the SBE meeting we presented an award given annually to recognize one individual as an exemplary reviewer for BEQ. The outstanding reviewer award highlights the essential contributions that quality reviewers make to the ongoing success of BEQ. This year we honor Jeff Harrison (University of Richmond) for his service to the journal as a consistently excellent reviewer combining high standards with insightful comments and developmental feedback. It is also worth noting that Jeff agrees to review frequently and delivers on time. In addition to congratulating Jeff, I wish to express my gratitude to all of you in our scholarly community who have lent your time and expertise during the past year to write reviews that are informative and constructive. The journal is fortunate to be able to count on you for your contributions, which are essential to sustaining its reputation as a leading multidisciplinary outlet for high-quality scholarship in business ethics.
Impact Ratings
Each summer brings annual updates to statistics that purport to summarize academic journal impact. Among the most widely trafficked of these is Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports impact factor. Newly released data situate BEQ’s five-year impact number at its highest point to date, 3.958, which ranks second among fifty-one journals in ethics. BEQ’s Scopus CiteScore of 2.13 places the journal seventh out of more than four hundred journals in philosophy.
