With the release of this volume, Business Ethics Quarterly (BEQ) marks its 25th year of consecutive publication. BEQ was conceived by Patricia Werhane and Thomas Donaldson, both of whom were untenured professors at Loyola University in Chicago at the time. Pat and Tom went on to become leaders in the field of business ethics and two of its most accomplished scholars. Pat served as our first Editor in Chief (1991–2000). Tom has been a long-standing member of the editorial board and recently joined the BEQ leadership team as an Associate Editor.
BEQ filled the need for a high-quality, nonprofit journal focused on business ethics—one that actively encouraged a wide range of business ethics scholarship, including normative, conceptual, empirical, and historical work. The journal has had an interdisciplinary focus from its inception; as Pat noted in the inaugural issue, BEQ was founded with the intention “to develop a dialogue between disciplines.”Footnote 1 Given the range and complexity of issues confronting scholars who study the ethics of business and the social and political contexts in which businesses operate, the founders envisioned the journal as a forum for dialogue among scholars in multiple disciplines. Lisa Newton designed the original cover image for BEQ; while twice transformed over the years (including with this volume), her basic design has been featured on every issue of the journal. In the initial years of BEQ’s publication, Al Gini utilized his organizational skills to produce the journal and keep it running smoothly. He remained involved with the journal in various capacities for over twenty years.
Subsequent Editor in Chief George Brenkert (2000–2006) broadened the editorial board to include a wider range of disciplinary representation; appointed the journal’s first “Area Editors,” the predecessors of our current “Associate Editors”; and facilitated the inclusion of the journal on Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports. His successor, Editor in Chief Gary Weaver (2006–2011), increased the number of associate editors, broadened the international scope of the editorial board, and directed the first major change in the size and layout of the journal.
The dedicated work of our current team of associate editors and our editorial board and authors has resulted in BEQ being ranked 1st of 50 journals in Ethics and 16th of 110 journals in Business by the 2013 Journal Citation Reports. In addition, BEQ has received a UK Association of Business Schools 2015 Academic Business Journal ranking of 4 in the “General Management, Ethics and Social Responsibility” category. To give this some context, of the forty-four journals on this list, four received the highest 4* ranking; three (BEQ among them) received a 4 ranking; while the remaining thirty-seven journals received a 3, 2, or 1 ranking. BEQ is the highest ranked specialty journal in business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and business and society.
It is fitting that, as we celebrate our 25th anniversary, we simultaneously begin our first year of publication by Cambridge University Press. Our new partnership with Cambridge gives BEQ significantly greater global reach and is anticipated to increase the journal’s already substantial impact and distinction; at the same time, the Cambridge affiliation will provide our authors with enhanced global dissemination of their scholarship and the additional benefits that come with being published by one of the world’s great academic presses.
I have taken this opportunity to update the cover image of BEQ, while retaining the existing size and layout of the journal. We are also pleased to have introduced our new ScholarOne manuscript management system, which should provide authors and referees with an enhanced interface with the journal. Moreover, as a part of our new partnership with Cambridge, we have joined the social networking realm, creating a Twitter account to provide readers with regular updates on cutting-edge research, new articles, book reviews, special issues, calls for papers, and the like. Follow BEQ on Twitter @BEQJournal.
BEQ’s focus is on the advancement of knowledge of business ethics, corporate responsibility, sustainability, and the ethical dimensions of market-based societies and relationships. Our mission is to publish work that makes strong contributions to theory development, whether normative, conceptual, empirical, qualitative, or historical, while ignoring artificial disciplinary boundaries that can easily constrain novel theory development. At BEQ, we seek not merely to provide an outlet for business ethics, corporate responsibility, and sustainability scholarship, but to provide the best quality work in the field to our readers.
Currently, BEQ has six calls for papers in process on a range of exciting and undertheorized subjects such as gender and business ethics and environmental sustainability. We welcome proposals for new calls for papers on subjects that have not received sufficient attention from scholars, that require rethinking or reconceptualization, or that might benefit from rigorous empirical scrutiny. The special section in the current issue on Social Justice and the Corporation, edited by Wayne Norman, is a good example of a themed set of articles that challenges conventional wisdom. Five years ago, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of BEQ, Joseph Heath, Jeffrey Moriarty, and Wayne Norman wrote a survey article on the intersections of business ethics and political philosophy.Footnote 2 In it, they argued first that there wasn’t much of an “intersection” worth celebrating, and second that there was indeed a need for one—for the sake of the projects of both scholarly communities. Their challenge has since been taken up explicitly in many scholarly articles.
More generally, business ethicists have paid greater attention over the past decade to the political responsibilities of corporations and their leaders. Yet, as noted in the articles in this issue’s special section, new work that spans these disciplinary boundaries has been rather unidirectional, with business ethics scholars at the forefront of advancing theory in these areas. Few political philosophers working on theories of justice have looked at the complications arising for their theories about equality and markets when we open up the “black box” of corporate governance and hierarchical corporate command structures. Business ethicists have recently pried this black box open, as have scholars in most subfields of economics and the other behavioral sciences in recent decades. The articles by Wayne Norman, Pierre-Yves Néron, and Abraham Singer in this special section explore the challenges raised by this recent research, both for political philosophers thinking about justice in market economies and for business ethicists who look to existing liberal theories of social justice to ground their justifications or critiques of corporate governance and managerial authority. While this special section emphasizes the intersections between business ethics and political philosophy, other forthcoming special sections and special issues will take on equally important and interesting themes that emphasize the intersections between corporate responsibility and marketing, corporate responsibility and international business, and—even more broadly—multidisciplinary perspectives on corporate responsibility and gender and on business ethics and environmental sustainability, to name just a few examples of themes to be taken up on the pages of BEQ in the near future.
On behalf of the entire BEQ editorial team, I extend a hearty thanks to our authors, referees, and readers for a remarkable 25 years; we look forward to continuing to publish engaging, pioneering, and influential research in the years to come.
