Editing MCQ at the dawn of the new millennium

Abstract

First, I’d like to congratulate MCQ on its 20th birthday, and thank the founding editors, JoAnne, Christine, and Paul, for conceiving of the journal and getting it started. I have subscribed to the journal since its first issue and ever since have considered it one of the first choices for publishing my own research and finding research that is closest to my interests. That it has grown and flourished 20 years on is a credit to the founding editors and to the community of scholars who have supported it. In considering the current editors’ request that we former editors reflect on our experience of editing the journal and how our experiences reflected our particular slice of the journal’s history, I looked back at what I wrote in my editor’s introduction (Zorn, 2000) in my first issue (Volume 14, Number 1) as well as perused the articles and forums for the three volumes that I edited (14 to 16). What emerged for me were several tensions or challenges that I grappled with at the time. Some of these certainly reflect my idiosyncratic values, biases, and interests, but I also think that to some degree they have something to say about the history of the journal and of the study of management/organizational communication at the time. I will organize my essay around four such tensions.