Editor's Notes

• Date: 01 September 2016
• Published date: 01 September 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21245
• Author: Mark A. Hager

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N M  L, vol. 27, no. 1, Fall 2016 © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/nml.21245

Journal sponsored by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University.

EDITOR ’ S NOTES

AS SUMMER OF 2016 TURNS INTO FALL, I realize that I am more than halfway through

my three-year term as editor of Nonprofi t Management & Leadership . I may have the option

to consider an additional term, but this half-way point provides the opportunity to pause and

refl ect on the work of the journal and what I have learned from it, and what is possible for

the future. My own work with the journal is not yet refl ected in the published impact factors,

but the day of reckoning for my strategic direction of the journal is not far away. Certainly,

the honeymoon is over: the early parade of colleagues writing to voice their support has

slowed to a trickle, and the excitement of learning and honing the journal ’ s processes has

given way to a quiet monotony of review, solicitation, and decision-making. I have settled in.

I continue to have opportunities to represent the journal in various venues, which gives me

the chance to talk to prospective authors and reviewers about the niche served by Nonprofit

Management & Leadership . One such recent opportunity was at the annual meeting of the

Academy of Management , held in Anaheim this past August. The Academy might be described

as the professional association for business school faculty, but the wide tent of management

is represented across the conference and among its membership. This includes the Public and

Nonprofit Division of the Academy , which features its own sessions, events, and awards. I had

the great pleasure of participating on a panel of journal editors titled “Publishing in Public

and Nonprofit Journals: Why Would I Do That?” I want to share some of my observations

about this panel, and some of the observations I shared at it.

The moderator opened the panel by asking each of the five panelists to reflect briefly on the

distinctiveness of the sector, and why we therefore need journals that are specific to “public

and nonprofit.” Fortuitously, I was the last of the five panelists to speak. This worked to my

advantage since the other four panelists represented journals with rather clear ties to the field

of public administration, which provided me the opportunity to emphasize the distinction

between public administration and nonprofit sector research, and to directly challenge the

notion that the two constitute one “sector.” I acknowledged that the distinction was more or

less stark in different parts of the world, but that in the United States there is a clear divide

despite the fact that many nonprofit scholars have taken up newly developed slots in public

affairs schools across the country. Scholars in these schools are the people who feel these

divisions most keenly. As I opined how “nonprofit” is something different from the “public”

represented by the previous speakers, I saw much head nodding among the nonprofit sector

scholars in the audience.

However, I did not skirt the question entirely—the one that asks why we might need to have

journals that are specific to our subfields. Since we were convening at the Academy of Man-

agement , there was an unspoken assumption that the best management scholarship should

aspire to publish in the best general management journals, such as the Academy of Man-

agement Journal or the Academy of Management Review . I suggested, however, that authors

should instead seek to publish their work in the venues where their audiences are most likely

to see and therefore cite their work. If nonprofit sector scholars publish in those general man-

agement journals, their nonprofit sector scholarship audience is less likely to become aware