This volume represents the fourth issue published during my tenure as editor at the European Management Review (EMR). Editors often complain about the service that they have to give to their endeavor, and I will concede that the service, while not great for a journal that is still growing, is not minor. There is no monetary reward as editor, and furthermore, for the reviewer there is no monetary reward either. The scale of information technologies permits for-profit publishing enterprises to create a greater number of journals, often highly specialized. All of this market expansion falls upon the shoulders of volunteers.

There must be some reward in all of this work. Perhaps there is satisfaction in steering research in certain directions. Editors vary tremendously in their intervention in this regard, and sometimes one has to blink the eyes a few times as the contents of the journal reveal once again the predilection of the editor that is not widely shared. Of course, there is also abuse, as when editors publish their own work or insist that others publish in deference to their previous research. After all, the expectation is that the editor should be capable, but yet not self-serving. There is consternation if an editor fails to watch the ship, and submissions are not processed quickly. While many authors are gracious in accepting the decision of reviewers and editors, a few are upset and offended. Sometimes they are right. Errors in judgment are made, and the editor is responsible, though happily not yet liable.

The rewards can be extrinsic, but one then should not rely too much upon this possibility. Rather, there are considerable intrinsic rewards to see younger scholars publish their early work in your journal. Editors can be committed to particular domains and gratification is earned by being able to irrigate arid lands and watch a new ecology develop. Aesthetics matter deeply. The pleasure to the eye of holding an issue filled with interesting, articulate, and grounded research is not minor.

Forgive me then, if I take as my recompense the pleasure of seeing the articles in this issue come to print. Given the title of Bruno Frey's article, you might surmise that I am begging for an award by my above comments. However, Frey's article hardly is a recommendation to view an award as a free gift. To the contrary, an award creates a complex bond between the giver and the recipient. Frey's view is that this bond is between a principal and an agent through which the principal wishes to earn fame for the award and a psychological commitment by the agent, and the agent wishes to earn an extrinsic though non-monetary compensation.

Many may be put off by his characterization of this relationship as principal and agent. Paul Duguid surely is not pleased by the characterization and explains why in a prose that is so dangerous that one is tempted to forbid him the use of his literary gifts less he should harm someone. The target of his ire is the equation between award and compensation. Duguid describes the rise of the supply of awards during the Belle Epoque (those decades prior to World War I), suggesting that their creation was the outcome of cultural contagion. Furthermore, he disparages the contention that awards are valued for their compensation. Instead, he proposes that the awards are a relation between the donor and the relevant others in society. Awards signal values and they are also a kind of propaganda. In all, Duguid is willing at the end to concede merit to Frey's argument, but the concession is a guarded one.

Barbara Czarniawska offers an interpretation of cultural sociology. Like Duguid, her eye is on the public nature of the award. If an award is compensation, then why make the award public? The donor must then wish to achieve some larger purpose. Czarniawska notes that many public events are held not for the 'agent' but for the community. Marriage is one example, but one event that clearly removes the utility of the agent from the analysis is a funeral. Of course, neither one should be seen as an award. Rather, they represent public rituals that form identities through participation. Awards play a similar role. Their value is to the community. None of this is lost on an awardee who soon discovers that her/his role is to meet the social expectations. These expectations include the wearing of formal dress and pretty hats, which often do great damage to individual pride but much good for the social collective.

An award is different than a prize that appears to lack the community dimension that Czarniawska emphasizes. If a donor is interested to promote a cure for cancer by offering a sum of money, then this award is more correctly called a prize. Prizes are indeed interesting and also have been studied. Because of a subtle cultural contagion, prizes are the rage in many circles these days. These circles include a suggestion by a US congressman to give a billion dollar prize for major innovations that help mankind. It was noted by a few educated observers that the incentive of the last 900 million dollars might be superfluous. But if the purpose of the prize is to be the biggest, then the logic is hardly that of a careful rational calculation and is not likely to arrive at a social optimum. Awards, notes Frey, avoids all of this messiness, because the criteria of worth is much vaguer.

After all this gloved and charming criticism from economic outsiders, it is fitting that Nikolaj Foss provides an insider's view. He remarks perceptively that Bruno Frey is a tight-rope walker who remains loyal to his discipline while disloyal to its orthodoxy. Frey questions that people are only after personal gratification and monetary reward. Consequently, he has explored with considerable skill what makes people happy, such as whether marriage makes you happy or happiness makes you get married. He has written eloquently on the arts and economics, willing to pose and answer such questions as whether the 'market produces bad art' or if 'arts policy can be left to democracy'. Indeed, Frey's interest in politics predates his extension of psychology into economics. We can see a residue of this interest in his analysis when he decides that a decentralized government is more likely to bestow awards than a centralized one.

Foss takes mild issue with some of Frey's views on awards. He raises the intriguing observation that firms rarely bestow awards, whereas the public sector does. He speculates that the public sector lacks the ability to provide high-powered incentives, whereas rent-seeking by employees discourages firms from engaging in awards. The speculation made me recall Evsey Domar, the growth economist who also taught a class on socialist economics, discussing why the Soviets gave out prizes to workers, then noting how the New York City bus system also puts up pictures of the bus driver of the month. Of course, the communist system often did tie such awards to material incentives, often in incredibly crass ways. Work productivity was highly incentivized and good performance led to rewards that had very high scarcity value. I remember seeing workers coming home in East Germany carrying baskets of red strawberries, which could not be found in the stores, and the redness against an otherwise black-and-white image remains scratched in my memory. It is easy for us to forget how relatively small material rewards can be extrinsically meaningful for people of modest incomes. Much like lotteries, an award even if small and arbitrary carries often a compensation that is valued. In this recognition, Foss is fundamentally right to insist that the awards address often both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. The public sector is not greatly handicapped in providing awards coupled with small compensation.

Still, the comparison of the public and private sectors is engaging. Awards seem to be partly an outcome of the competition between the state and the society. Almost by a logic of a genealogy of morals, the state and especially its democratic incarnation did not so much inherit the orders and medals of its aristocratic predecessors as they transformed these symbols into servants of legitimizing the state. I would not want to dare too much here, or otherwise I would provoke the plume of the better historian Paul Duguid. However, I will dare the answer to Duguid's question of why were so many awards created during the Belle Epoque by suggesting that States, under democratic pressures, and their civil competition fought to legitimate themselves by borrowing the symbols of the past. Or, to the same effect, States sought to cheapen (forgive me for the expression) the value of the awards of the ancient orders, inclusive of the church in the case of France, by simply issuing more. Such a policy is clearly plausible in the recent history of knighthoods in the UK, in which presumably respectable lords and sirs share their titles with football players and self-made millionaires. And if a current prime minister is a bit too liberal in bestowing them upon friends and supporters, the greater goal of democratizing the social values of England might still be served.

Awards and titles are not the same thing, yet they share much of the same symbolic territory. The title of Professorship means, and has meant, a lot more in Germany and Germanic countries than in the US; it has no meaning of distinction for the university educator in France, since a professeur is also someone who teaches at the secondary school. In Germany, the title is registered and even the spouse may use the title before her (usually his) name in the form of Herr Professor Dr. If the bearer has two degrees, it is Herr Professor Dr. Dr. Letters would be, and no doubt still are, addressed as Sehr geehrter Professor Dr. In its competition with the West, East Germany was clearly perplexed what to do. It adopted the policy using Sehr geehrter Genosse (much honored Comrade) in formal letters, but amended the policy for professors as Sehr geehrter Genosse Professor Dr. All of this is pretty silly in retrospect, but it speaks clearly to the issue of the negotiated use of titles and awards as symbolic weaponry between the State and its civil or ecclesiastical usurpers.

Awards, prizes, and titles, these are symbols that yet have economic consequences. What then about rankings? By chance, Lena Wedlin provided us with an insightful study of the impact of ranking upon business schools. The first place in the rankings is a type of non-monetary award, even if its attainment results in increased student applications, demand for its educational services, and charitable gifts. Moreover, deans are very interested in these rankings, because they provide a degree of public information regarding their performance. Faculties are often skeptical, often leading deans to despair that 'they are the only group that doesn't take yes for an answer'. The job of the dean is to persuade the faculty to cooperate and, by no accident, perform higher on the criteria used for the rankings. In this sense, the rankings do reflect the dean's performance to negotiate, cajole, and incentivize the professors who often have other preferences.

Wedlin argues that rankings have come to generate a template for performance, extending from a customer orientation to employability. Having been part of a business school that was one of the first to choose to undergo this transformation (the Wharton School), I can surely attest to the perceptive shift of power from the faculty to the students (Bowman and Kogut (1995) provides an early overview of these changes). There are many positive aspects to this change, for after all, professors are all too often title hungry and prestige oriented, in which students are often a troubling dimension of the job that needs to be controlled. In many institutions, a faculty has low economic rewards and high-prestige incentives. No wonder, that institutions much per the comments of Foss establish teaching awards, sometimes with attached compensation.

In Europe, this low-level equilibrium has not gone unnoticed. In some universities, students have unions and they demonstrate and strike. In the UK, a revolution took place in the 1980s and much of it heavily contested that resulted in transparent incentives attached to the number of degrees awarded, the throughput of students, and later the amount of research under the national research exercise. The latter feature has proven to be a boon to researchers who see universities compete for their CVs when the fifth year review turns up. In other words, the Red Queen effect has not entirely gone against researchers, who have admirably created their own institutional weaponry to counteract the educational 'template' imposed by the State. It is not altogether clear whether the imposition of national templates and incentives have worked against the quality of UK universities, even if the process of change often lacked 'taste'.

Why then should the ranking game be any different than the changes imposed by the State? I believe there are a few possible reasons. One is who gains. In the case of the business school, the students seemed to gain in power, leaving aside whether we agree their education improved. In the case of the UK at least, my outsider analysis is that the university became more powerful at first, because it had the incentives to change (otherwise facing the cut in state support) and hence the financial resources if successful. It had to impose on, or persuade, a recalcitrant faculty to accept these changes. In some well-known cases, the modern administration of the university is still quite contested. Yet, at the end of the day, we see a creeping-up of salary, presumably related to merit. Faculty, stubborn and persistent, are not entirely the losers either.

This analysis of the business school via the UK university is revealing. For the power has not shifted permanently to the students. Initially, deans instinctively realized that customer orientation could not be enforced by stick or by wage. So they relied upon creating 'work councils' as in Germany after World War I, in which students met with faculty in 'quality circles' and evaluations were published. The weapon was to cut at the heart of the faculty reward system, social standing and pride. Students succeeded in having grades withheld from employers, and they followed a code of honor among themselves called the 'no tell' policy: you should not volunteer the information to prospective employers. Deprived of grades as a weapon, harried by the public scrutiny of their classes, professors devised a number of strategies. These included the World War I trench equilibrium: I don't bother you too much, and you don't bother me too much. Other faculty invested heavily in scale, in which they could dispense of their teaching in a few months. The growth of information technologies, such as power point, routinized teaching and encouraged the sharing of material. Schools had to think through carefully how technologies should be integrated. In addition, some of the teaching became off-loaded to projects that connected students to firms or to adjunct faculties who came invariably to play a larger role, posing complex questions of governance, and of inclusion versus exclusion. Finally, as Wedlin notes, faculties have learned that the role of grades as 'grading' students in ranks must be recovered in order to balance the external ranking of schools and their faculties.

Deans realized that this additional pressure on faculty required some thinking to avoid nuclear escalation. Schools invested more heavily in infrastructure. Classrooms improved, the infrastructure of the supply of teaching materials – from getting the documents to their reproduction and to their dissemination – evolved rapidly, and the attention to job placement moved to center focus. MBA education became more expensive, especially as these services migrated to undergraduate programs. Schools sought to finance these investments by raising more charitable gifts, by creating more executive programs, and by increasing tuition subject to competition.

Business schools clearly became businesses. Because the MBA degree is expensive, and became more expensive, students (and executive education participants) demanded more. Because the degree signals selection, schools competed to establish reputations that students could leverage to attain the high-paying jobs they wanted. The pressure on the faculty was considerable, as was the pressure on deans as well.

As someone very much present during these changes, I share the ambivalence towards rankings that is evident in Wedlin's paper. For unlike the UK situation, the rankings did not come from the legitimate State sector but from journalists and the business press. They used no doubt terrible methods in calculating their rankings, and the reality that such terrible methods could be so efficacious in coercing Schools to meet the template rankled the faculty who prided themselves on knowing at least how to do research. But the press was powerful, because of reasons the well-trained economists of business Schools understood. Since education is a difficult good to evaluate, its value is tied closely to the reputation of the provider. Challenging the quality of the institution is to yank the chain that links value to School reputation to faculty pride.

Yet, as Wedlin notes, the expansion of MBA education put evermore universities underneath the public microscope by subjecting them to rankings. Schools changed their definition of the relevant organizational fields, and moved to self-comparisons with international schools. Arrogant national schools, who were satisfied with being number one because of budgetary decisions made by government ministries, had to confront the prospect of being lowly ranked. The rankings, crude and unscientific, changed the mentality of national and local monopolies of prestige and consequently shifted the monopoly over the assignation of cultural capital from the State towards the market.

Wedlin's account does not address a central question of whether the quality of education has gone up. Education is indeed a hard thing to measure. My guess is that the change is better understood as categorical rather than as ordinal. Education moved from teaching one set of skills to another set of skills. Experts will tell us that education must be participative, but it could be that it must be participative because we have now legitimized this criterion. The globalization of the curriculum has pushed to greater homogeneization, while perhaps sacrificing some of the lessons learned in a more artisan regime.

However, my participant observer status tells me that faculty has not entirely lost. Salaries grew higher relative to a national index in many countries, the call for research has required a reduction in teaching, and routinized teaching has an efficiency, even if creating many moments of 'quiet desperation'. It is possible that a fundamental shift in equilibrium inside business schools and universities has occurred among faculty, students, administrators, and the State and other external actors, with a larger pie compensating for some of the invariable shifts in relative power and prestige.

Wedlin's article will no doubt provoke similar reflections among readers, because her article touches on our profession, identity, and community. I suspect that there will be debate regarding the two sides of her argument, namely, that there are identifiable isomorphic pressures and that there is a template. One way to state Wedlin's claim is that there are templates of evaluation, but that schools vary dramatically in their practices and in their strategies. These practices consist of teaching styles to teaching content to research allocations. Correlated to these practices are the strategies, which vary quite substantially, with many business schools investing substantially in research and in Ph.D. programs and many choosing an opposite positioning. The public templates behind the rankings need not map uniquely, or isomorphically, onto the choices of universities and the schools of business. Wedlin provides a fascinating account of the variety of responses by the schools from where she gathered her interview material.

One may take some comfort that the market pressures imposed by the Press on schools are also imposed on them. The interest in rankings increases sales, and increased sales invite entry. As Wedlin notes, the rankings differ, some including research, some emphasizing gender participation in governance. The imperfect correlations among publications provide more space for creative positioning than a decade earlier.

Without belaboring the fit too much to our earlier description of the State and the market, the final article by Bruce Carruthers describes the evolution of British financial markets as arising out of a combination of political and market forces. It is at one time a criticism of the view that an infinite regress of credible commitments upholds institutions and institutions are the rules of the game, and at the same time a criticism that actors are constrained by social forces and lack agency.

As one of the leaders in economic sociology (he heads the division in the American Sociological Association), Carruthers is a veteran of the debates between economics and sociology and within the sociology of economic markets. In his remarkable history of British capital markets, Carruther already sought to discount the view that England succeeded because the State credibly refrained from confiscatory intervention. Instead, he demonstrated that the political ties were correlated with economic rivalry, and it was the rivalry between the Whigs and the Tories that lead to the use of markets to compete over new economic opportunities.

It is this argument that Carruthers develops in further detail in this article. He adds, though, an intriguing dimension in describing how much the British imported from Holland regarding not only financial markets but also fiscal policies, such as excise taxes. This diffusion of 'institutional technologies' (to apply a phrase that Andrew Spicer and I used in the context of Russian capital market development) from Holland to the UK was demand driven. It was not the isomorphic pressures that Wedlin identifies, but rather the knowledge of better practices (presumably realized through the economic and political networks between Holland and England) that political leaders saw as an effective way to raise capital for the State. The increased efficiency of taxation, along with political rivalry, provided the fiscal ability for the State to borrow from lenders and to repay them. Political rivalry, not political stability, drove the market development.

Carruthers ends his article with the observation that rules are less interesting as abstract institutions than as guidelines to micro-behaviors. This observation then inverts the notion of rules as globally known norms to one in which actors follow local rules. Such innocent myopia is the stuff of historical investigation, and of sociological imagination, insofar that the accumulation of these rule-driven behaviors succeed in driving the creation of macro-institutions, such as financial markets.

One of the most important centers of research for the formal study of this type of analysis is BETA, an economic and management research laboratory situated at the University of Strasbourg. BETA is one of the biggest social science research centers in Europe, with a strong focus on doctoral education and formal and quantitative modeling. Despite this aesthetic of formal modeling, BETA is a very porous institution, with a crafted strategy of 'boundary spanners' by which to diffuse their results and by which to collaborate.

Patrick Cohendet and Patrick Llerena have written a very engaging 'project report' on the history of BETA, emphasizing in particular the work in the area of knowledge. Their account, filled with clear passion for their common journey, describes the creation of a 'common language' that took a generation to build. I was particularly struck by their story of the visit of the famed René Thom whose discussion of percolation theory led to a series of internal discussions. They write that 'immediately this concept found a profound echo in all the small communities that were working together'. Indeed, one might conclude that the idea percolated across their knowledge community, bonding them into a common language. Their research and ideas are the language by which they understand their own collective history.

If one takes the time to read many of the publications mentioned in their article, it is fair to conclude that there is no exaggeration that many important ideas were first discussed in their small communities. Technical ideas, such as random markov fields, form the abstract basis for the statistical models of dynamic network formation being investigated by Tom Snijders at Groningen and Oxford. Percolation, or phase transitions, is found now discussed in the American Journal of Sociology. The use of simulation, and agent-based models, increasingly informs management publications, including publications in the EMR.

All of this is daunting to the outsider. But once inside BETA, the feeling is quite the opposite. If the A in BETA is applied, and the researchers have deep interest in the field that extends to intensive participant research. Being a member of a doctoral 'jury' at BETA means that one might be reading a formal model, a simulation, a statistical estimation, and field research in one thesis.

There are a few other laboratories in France following correlated trajectories and which deserve broader recognition in Europe and internationally for their achievements. BETA has, however, an unusual positioning because of its location in Strasbourg and hence in the symbolic heart of Europe. One hopes that its love for percolation achieves the coupled oscillations of a transnational research community.

The success of a research community such as BETA poses the question of the value added of any journal, including the EMR. The answer is that a journal, as any mechanism of transmission, has the power to by-pass local networks and diffuse broadly information and analysis. But a review cannot compete against the rich sharing and creating of knowledge situated in vibrant communities. Its advantage must lie in its reach rather than its depth.

Yet, very often social science journals fail to deliver the goods because they place too much trust in distributed systems of evaluation that often do not agree. As a result, the reviewing process becomes slow, papers cycle through revisions, and authors struggle to render their work more homogeneous in order to avoid an exotic spice from offending one of the diverse reviewers. Because editors need reviewers, they naturally sympathize with them rather than with the authors.

Kevin Tsang and Bruno Frey propose elsewhere that journals employ an 'as is' policy. A paper is submitted and reviewed 'double blind' by referees. The editor then decides to accept or reject; it is the authors' choice whether to revise the article by incorporating referees suggestions. Tsang and Frey note that authors tend to get serious about editing once the article is accepted, indicating that public scrutiny is the greater incentive to a careful manuscript preparation.

I do not agree with establishing this policy, but I feel that it should largely be the implicit philosophy of journals. We still slip occasionally in failing to get reviews back quickly, and our slips partly reflect the lack of conventions among reviewers to respond rapidly. After all, they will be asked to see the article again, maybe twice, and they are probably also being asked by other journals to review their articles two or three times. Science journals have rapid reviews. I received an article last month from the journal Science that requested a 1 week turn-around. I said no, but the experience impressed me. Their articles are shorter, authors are competing in real-time against each other to publish, they demand rapid publication, and journals demand 'exclusivity', not even published working papers. Meanwhile, publishing has become 'open-sourced' server lists, with referral systems screening you qua author for capability (you must be recommended in order to become a member) and then you bear the full onus of public criticism if your publication is not up to standard.

I would like to see faster publication by the EMR. Tsang and Frey are right that authors should not be asked to compromise their voice. Yet, much of the problem happens through self-censorship. European scholars are frequently asking 'how do I publish in these top management journals?' The desired answer is, give me the template. Wedlin perhaps missed this particular point. The template is not forced onto us, we ask for the template, we reduce our voice.

At this mid-point in my editorship, I realize how hard it is to attract a steady flow of manuscripts and of the quality we require. I indicated some guidelines in my original Introduction to the journal , such as do not over cite, have one clear idea that you develop logically, invest in preparation of the manuscript, do not end the paper on suggestions for future research or on discussing limitations. I would probably now add, reduce your paper by 20% once you think you are satisfied with its length. I encourage you to reread the Introduction posted on our website because it represents at least our advice on how to publish in this journal.

At the end of the day, we want you to publish your article in your voice. But from my vantage point, the problem is very frequently that the author wants to be told what to do. If we are to shorten the review cycle and lower the reviewing queue in the global system, then the message of Tsang and Frey is very pertinent: the responsibility shifts to the author to submit the article in the first round 'as if' it will be the published version. The only way you can achieve this quality is to reduce the pages of citations and review and to focus narrowly on the question, the idea, and the analysis. I thus say to Tsang and Frey that the 'as is' policy for the journal requires an 'as if' discipline for the author. Does it surprise you that I think such a meeting of journal policy and author discipline is not only desirable but also foreseeable?