Happy Anniversary! Editorial Self-Celebration and Economics Journals' New Roles at a Time of Radical Specialization
The economics discipline is admittedly changing, as it grows in size and variety under the impact of research specialization. The monolithism of neoclassical economics is now challenged by a multiplicity of mainstream research programs, which significantly deviate from the neoclassical core, have their origins in other disciplines, and are pursued by separate scholarly communities. In general, specialized economics journals express the shared goals, practices, and language of different research communities. Their increasing importance might therefore not only reflect today’s fragmentation, but also signal that they have started playing an active role in shaping the ambitions, norms, and vocabulary of economics communities. The aim of this paper is to contribute to understanding whether journals have become a significant force in shaping economics. With this purpose in mind, we focus on editorial self-celebrations for reasons that are both straightforward and imaginative. Journals aspiring to play a prominent role in the discipline are more likely to express this intention publicly. Any editorial materials, and among them self-celebrations, are in fact “the voice of a journal connecting with its readership”, as it has been observed (Verhagen et al. 2024). While journal editors can conveniently employ introductions to special issues to announce their ambition to “guide” specialization in research, anniversaries may provide a good opportunity to notify, albeit perhaps in a subtle way, the journal’s ambition to become an indispensable platform not only to disseminate, but also, and above all, to directly structure research. Editorials for journal anniversaries, in fact, typically look forward, when proposing reconstructions of the collective memory represented by articles published over time. This is because anniversaries are “complex acts” (O’Doherty 2023): by telling the story of a journal’s past, anniversaries create a “we”, that is, the shared meanings required to establish a (however peculiar) culture (see Grey 2023), which (as happens with anniversary journalism and collective memories) is used for present aims (Zelizer 1995). Our study analyzes all English editorial materials from Business, Business Finance, Economics, and Management journals indexed by Web of Science, published between 2015 and 2025, with “Anniversar*”, “Celebrat*”, or “Years” in the document title. 172 articles are scrutinized, with the aim of disentangling the individual “acts” of community building, identity making, and status aspiration that anniversaries represent, and of understanding how such acts interact. In so doing, we are interested in detecting, in particular, patterns of specialization and self-referentiality. We then discuss such patterns as predictors that journals can act as “local” but powerful authorities of a post-foundational, increasingly fragmented discipline, wherein the rough pyramidal hierarchy of the past is replaced by a much wider basis of “minarets” (to borrow from Pencavel 1991) - journals, precisely.
Area:
Keywords: Economics journals; Anniversaries; Economics as a discipline; Specialization
Please Login in order to download this file