Editorial

I am an Associate Professor in Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour in Maynooth University School of Business in Kildare, Ireland. I have previously worked as a lecturer in Technological University Dublin, Ireland (formerly known as Dublin Institute of Technology) and SKEMA Sophia Antipolis, France (formerly Ceram). My research interests include narrative research, careers, migration and identity. I have published in international peer-reviewed journals, including Human Relations, Journal of Business Ethics and the International Journal of Human Resource Management, and I sit on a number of editorial boards. I am also the academic programme director of the BBS Business & Management undergraduate programme in Maynooth University, the flagship degree programme in the School of Business. Prior to academia, I worked in product management and project coordination functions at the Europe, Middle East and African (EMEA) headquarters of multinational corporations in the IT sector in both Germany and France.

For the past four years, I have been an Associate Professor (senior lecturer) in Strategy in the Department of Management, Leadership and Marketing, which is located within the Ulster Business School at Ulster University, Northern Ireland. Prior to this, I have worked in Queen's University Management School, Belfast, Northern Ireland and University of Abertay in Dundee, Scotland. My research interests are in the areas of innovation management, university technology transfer, business models and competitiveness. I publish frequently within high quality international journals such as Technovation, Management International Review, Journal of Business Research and R&D Management to name a few. I have also co-edited several special issues within journals such as the Journal of Business Research, Studies in Higher Education and the Journal of Technology Management. I also sit on the editorial board for the International Small Business Journal and help to chair the special interest track on business models within the European Academy of Management (EURAM) conference.

The island of Ireland punches above its weight in terms of internationally renowned and well-published scholars and researchers. However, the Irish Journal of Management's aims and scope are not bound by geography. As a completely open access journal, our authors, editorial board, research subjects and readers of the Irish Journal of Management have an international and diverse multi-stakeholder reach. The Irish Journal of Management is currently listed on the academic journal quality guide (ABS list) and is available in a wide range of indexing services which opens up the reach of your research. A list of these indexing services can be found on the journal website: https://sciendo.com/journal/ijm.

We plan on growing our international presence, readership and impact over the upcoming years. To do so, we rely upon our authors’, editorial board members’ and readerships’ support to promote the journal to researchers across the globe who are looking for a home for high quality, original research within and tangential to mainstream management.

We hope to publish special issues regularly in order to draw attention to important topics, and therefore we welcome special issue proposals which we will collate and review annually. Special issue proposals should be emailed to ijm@iamireland.ie before the 30th September each year. Any submissions past that deadline will be reviewed at the next date. Special issue proposals should include a detailed call for papers listing potential themes for authors to consider, CVs of special issue editor(s) and a strategy to attract papers to your special issue.

We would like to sincerely thank all reviewers for the Irish Journal of Management, who volunteer their time and expertise to ensure all the papers published in the journal reach their full potential. To recognise these invisible, behind-the-scenes contributors, we will publish all review contributors, who have produced quality and timely reviews for papers, on our website https://iamireland.ie/journal.html on a biennial (every two years) basis. To ensure the anonymity of the peer review process, we will not share whether the reviewers reviewed accepted/published papers or not.

In this first issue under our editorship, we are delighted to present five papers beginning with the inaugural article in the ‘Distinguished International Scholar Series’. In this piece, Professor Tom Kochan of MIT Sloan School of Management is interviewed by Professor Bill Roche, University College Dublin, Ireland. The ‘Distinguished International Scholar Series’ invites renowned and influential management scholars to share their thoughts on topics to which they have contributed over the years. In the interview, Professor Kochan reflects on the evolution of industrial relations, work, employment and human resource management. Dr Felicity Kelliher, Waterford Institute of Technology (Ireland), who is the past chair of the Irish Academy of Management, provides a teaching note after Professor Kochan's interview to direct ways in which Professor Kochan's interview may be used pedagogically for debate and discussion on topics pertaining to management studies.

The is followed by four research papers. Dr Margaret Tighe and Caroline Murphy's paper explores the employment supports for people with mental health difficulties in Ireland. This paper is timely in the context of Covid-19 and the raising mental health concerns globally. The need for a comprehensive, multi-stakeholder support system is underlined in their research.

Galit Klein and Batia Ben Hador's research paper concerns ethical practices in the workplace, by focusing on the compliance or lack of compliance with unethical requests that external recruitment specialists may receive from their clients. They draw on research collected from recruitment specialists in Israel to drill down into the compliance with such requests using the Basic Human Values theory. Their findings expose the complex situation that recruitment specialists face when encountering unethical requests. Personal values and the peculiarity of the case or situation are important considerations for these employees when faced with unethical requests.

Lauren Bari's research paper proffers a detailed review and analysis on self-employed women in Ireland. Using Labour Force Survey data, Lauren explores trends in female self-employment in Ireland between 2003 and 2019 and develops a profile of this underexplored labour market group. Her research finds that this relatively small cohort in the labour market increasingly consists of highly educated and professional women in relatively high-paid sectors, opting for flexible working arrangements.

Vinod Dumblekar and Upinder Dhar's research paper looks at the innovative way that gamers and business simulation game competitions express goal-oriented behaviour, goal setting and performance enhancement at work. Their research produced an instrument to examine the construct of perceived game self-efficacy and found eight factors. These game self-efficacy factors could be instrumental in employee selection, development and performance enhancement via goalsetting, training and coaching.

We hope you enjoy reading the diverse mix of research and topics in this issue, and we look forward to receiving your own research papers for consideration of publication in the Irish Journal of Management in the future.