A new team and vision of the international social science journal

Bibliographic Data

ID4388325
AuthorsMichael Briguglio (0000-0003-2419-5319, University of Lincoln Lincoln UK), B Cayli (0000-0002-8677-4626, University of Lincoln Lincoln UK, corresponding author), Rowan Gard (University of Lincoln Lincoln UK), Andrea Gatto (0000-0003-1005-3571, University of Lincoln Lincoln UK), Julie Aitken Schermer (0000-0002-3469-7710, University of Lincoln Lincoln UK), Umer Shahzad (0000-0002-0579-1791, University of Lincoln Lincoln UK), Luke Webster (0000-0001-5721-8236, University of Lincoln Lincoln UK), Lexi Webster (University of Lincoln), Jianzhi Zhao (0000-0003-4962-7819, University of Lincoln Lincoln UK)
Year2023
Volume73
Issue248
Pages255-259
Publication date2023-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Social Science Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-8701 • E-ISSN: 1468-2451
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/issj.12443
OpenAlexW4381893468
LanguageEN
References cited19

Since its inception in 1949 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Social Science Journal (ISSJ) has sought to strengthen the ties between social science communities globally. Aiming to reach the widest possible audience for over 70 years, the ISSJ uses inter-disciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to uncover new knowledge, offering an open door for theoretical and applied research. In January 2023, an editorial team composed of scholars from various regions and with backgrounds in different areas of the social sciences was assembled to cooperatively strive for excellence in publishing outstanding works and advance our scholarly and inter-disciplinary knowledge. Baris Cayli Messina, appointed Editor-in-Chief, was accompanied by eight other leading editors: Julie Aitken Schermer, Michael Briguglio, Rowan Gard, Andrea Gatto, Liang Ma, Umer Shahzad, Lexi Webster and Jianzhi Zhao, all established academics in their respective fields who have joined forces to preserve and enhance the International Social Sciences Journal's authoritative stature. As an ambitious new editorial team, we are determined to broaden the scope of the ISSJ and create a promising portfolio of research that addresses the most urgent social, political and cultural issues. With a new editorial agenda, our principal mission is to uphold the highest level of scholarly excellence across all disciplines while also making space for research that presents novel questions and methods for tackling both classic social issues and emerging problems, ultimately having a wider impact on both inside and outside academia. The ISSJ is dedicated to the advancement of social sciences, focusing especially on sociology, criminology, political sciences, economic issues, financial disruptions, environmental studies, media and communication studies, public policy and psychology. We are committed to leveraging our editorial experience to address pressing societal challenges, stimulate new intellectual debates in these areas and shape scholarly discussions in neighbouring disciplines. In the fields of sociology, criminology and political science, there are urgent issues that require closer examination and consideration. These issues range from global-scale concerns, such as climate change, pandemics, armed conflict, different forms of violence, law enforcement, state-sponsored crime, gender inequality and warfare, to different geographical scales, including national, regional and local levels. Sociology is a key discipline for comprehending our everyday lives by analysing social connections that constitute individuals’ lived experiences and form collective behaviours. Additionally, it enables us to identify dissenting voices and unrecognized communities that are often marginalized or excluded in public discourse. Likewise, criminology has become increasingly significant given the expansive use of social control strategies by governments and law enforcement amid the process of globalization. Lastly, politics has always been a field of paramount relevance in response to emerging societal collapses, government forms and widespread questioning of political systems’ legitimacy, which in a decisive manner affect our lives. Recently, the ISSJ has published several critically acclaimed articles on a wide range of subjects and themes, such as prisons and terrorism, group identity (Marone, 2023), political regimes (Vercesi, 2022), democracy and the health and social outcomes of human rights violations (Musabaeva et al., 2022; Sandra, 2022). The research conducted by Selvasundaram et al. (2022) and Diop et al. (2021) revealed the dire consequences of financial development and demonstrated convincingly how economic vulnerability influences the resilience of communities. The ISSJ seeks to persistently publish exceptional articles in the fields of socio-economic issues and finance. Economics, a multifaceted discipline, retains its critical role in driving our economic behaviour and decision-making processes. In addition, wider socio-economic issues and financial disruptions are intricately interlaced with other branches of knowledge, including social history and human geography. From the gender pay gap to global economic crises and poverty, researching these topical matters alongside shocks and crises in many regional markets, applying business cycle analyses and various datasets as well as exploring the health, geopolitical and socioecological origins of economic and financial issues are of great interest to our readers. The scope of the ISSJ encompasses explorations of topics related to environmental studies. Environmental sustainability has become an increasingly important area of concern in the global social science community as the effects of climate change have become more urgent and apparent in recent years, forcing people to take action (Badruzzaman et al., 2023; Saryal, 2022). Although traditional approaches to sustainability often focus on technological and policy developments, emerging research has seen a growing recognition of the importance of incorporating spiritual and artistic dimensions into sustainability efforts to promote a more holistic and effective approach to addressing sustainability challenges and promoting behaviour change. In particular, there has been a growing recognition of the potential benefits of creating a convergence between science and spirituality in promoting sustainable development. The arts can also play an important role in promoting environmental sustainability by engaging communities and inspiring action towards sustainability. Artistic expression can communicate complex ideas and emotions in a way that is accessible and engaging to a wide range of audiences. By creating a consilience between science and spirituality, it is possible to develop more effective and sustainable solutions to environmental problems while also promoting a deeper understanding of the ethical and moral dimensions of sustainability. This can be particularly important when engaging with sustainability issues, which can be complex and abstract. Therefore, we anticipate contributions that present novel visions of potential futures to incite action on environmental and sustainability issues, in the form of literary works, music and visual art. There are urgent scholarly issues that also shape sustainability, such as energy, food security, agricultural production, aquaculture, fisheries, water infrastructures, land and natural resources inequalities, vulnerability, resilience building strategies, challenges posed in poverty alleviation and adaptation processes as well as the definition and measurement of complex associated concepts, such as transition, ecological security and social innovation. Recent publications by the ISSJ (Das, 2022; Mohammed, 2022; Udemba & Yalçıntaş, 2023) have sought to draw attention to the critical challenges of sustainability and food insecurity. These thought-provoking works illuminated the need for long-term perspectives on these issues as well as the worrisome lack of access to basic necessities such as food in many societies around the world. Scholars are invited to reflect on the mounting concerns raised by anthropogenic climate change and global warming. Moreover, new criteria and metrics for environmental evaluation should be sought at both local and international levels, with particular attention given to corporate social responsibility models, environmental management certifications and ESG performance evaluations. In addition, structural changes in rural and urban areas, along with a variety of organizational dynamics across multiple economies, should be examined within the context of human-centric sustainable development initiatives. Our editorial objective also aims to promote the publication of cutting-edge psychological research, both applied and theoretical, that is grounded in its contextual environment, inclusive of diverse perspectives and takes into consideration the international scholarly community. The domain of research actively encourages submissions exploring individual differences and their repercussions on an array of contexts, such as work environments, public welfare, living conditions, emotions, personality, intelligence as well as cross-cultural variations in attitudes and behaviours. The inter-disciplinary exploration of the relationship between media and communication technologies and their embedded contexts is a longstanding focus in both humanities and social sciences research (Pierson, 2022). With ongoing advancements in technology, numerous possibilities exist for future media and communication studies. The ISSJ aims to advance such research endeavours through inclusive publication plans that intend to cover various aspects of technological advancement. These developments raise a number of provocative questions regarding their consequences. For example, public attention surrounding openly accessible large language models has sparked concern regarding social implications, such as datafication, labour market effects and the reinforcement of oppressive societal norms. Furthermore, exploring users’ engagement with emerging media communication technologies offers substantial research prospects, regardless of whether they were intended uses or not. The existence of communicative in/authenticity problems in traditional and new media – like misinformation, disinformation and ‘fake news’ – remains a significant area of development. The emergence of deepfakes and other distortions of reality is a major concern for media and communication scholars. The ISSJ is committed to publishing research on such advances in technology, their effects on users and their implications for the human condition and our existence. However, engaging with these technological advancements is not a requirement for publication; rather, we are open to any media and communications research that advances our methodological or theoretical knowledge. Two recent pioneering articles on the effects of social media and machine learning and the relationship between Internet usage and economic uncertainty were published in the ISSJ (Joshi & Patwardhan, 2023; Nguyen et al., 2023). This exemplary research outputs highlight ISSJ's commitment to furthering inter-disciplinary theory and methods in these fields. We welcome experimentation with and implementation of new analytical approaches and (inter-)disciplinary contextualizations of each traditional, new and future media research. In essence, we intend to publish works at the forefront of our inter-disciplinary field that pushes the boundaries of current to (co-)constructing knowledges. The exploration of data related to public policy in developing countries has recently emerged as a focal point for scholarly discourse. In order to expand the extant knowledge base concerning public policy in such countries and democratize this field beyond a Western perspective, new research using novel data is heavily encouraged. Moreover, the ISSJ pays special attention to studies on global public policy-making processes within international organizations and international non-governmental organizations. The ISSJ regularly publishes research articles on public policy. Recent articles by Ha (2022), Hanif et al. (2022), Mogotsi et al. (2022) and Shkurko (2022) have filled an important void in public policy literature and offered innovative solutions to development issues in the Global South, illustrating our focus on this matter. These articles serve as shining examples of our scholarly priority to mitigate the challenges faced by our global community. This is due to both the historical origins of the journal itself, as well as the pivotal roles that such entities play within developing states’ social policies, public bureaucracies and decision-making procedures. Additionally, although political science, economics and public policy often neglect this area, it is essential to leverage limited publication resources by promoting scholarly works focused on these topics. Finally, authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts proposing and developing new theories of public policy that are applicable in developing countries; such research may offer fresh paradigms for comparison with existing theories designed mainly for developed countries. One of the most important directions of travel for the ISSJ is towards the decolonization of media and communication studies. That is, although we are particularly interested in providing a venue for discussing, exploring and critiquing these advances in media and communication technologies, we are most keen to further the interests of media and communication studies. We contend that decolonization is in the best interest of media and communication research, as it is in research more generally. Magallanes-Blanco (2022: 271) made the case that ‘decolonization of the field implies revisiting the colonial power relations embedded in forms of representation... [being] critical of those representations and [incorporating] those coming from Indigenous thought’. Highlighting underrepresented knowledges – including explicitly challenging cis-heteropatriarchal, white and Western-centric knowledges – in the research we platform is therefore a critical impetus for the ISSJ going forward. In accordance with the inter-disciplinary perspective of the ISSJ, we solicit prospective authors to submit research articles embodying both qualitative and quantitative studies informed by positivistic, interpretative, realist, constructionist, critical or alternative theoretical approaches. This dialogic process should catalyse innovation and novel applications in pursuit of the intellectual aim of the ISSJ, which is to foster inter-disciplinary knowledge on a range of topics while constructing scholarly conversations across multiple disciplines. The ISSJ has an acceptance rate of 13.9% in the last 12 months, rendering it a highly competitive scholarly venue for publication. Though our editorial board is regrettably required to reject numerous admirable papers, we thus seek to supply authors with constructive feedback so that they may revise their articles and submit them to other journals. Through this process, we aspire to propagate research in social science by providing authors with potential pathways to further refine their manuscripts, whether for resubmission to our journal or some alternative outlet. Thus, our endeavour as editors is to provide a platform through the dissemination of high-calibre research from all geographical regions, in order to generate evidence-based knowledge and advance theoretical and methodological perspectives on social phenomena associated with human conditions, organizational structures and collective behaviour. Henceforth, the ISSJ has an inclusive and multifaceted research approach and encourages intellectual contributions from varied perspectives and traditions in social science research. We look forward to receiving rigorous scholarly submissions that foreground pluralistic, holistic and polycentric orientations. We are also devoted to amplifying the perspectives of marginalized groups and those from underrepresented scholarly backgrounds. The ISSJ will continue facilitating research that questions existing power dynamics while aiming to explore social, political and cultural transformation in our ever-evolving world. Ultimately, we strive to publish papers of high scholastic calibre that further our social science knowledge both theoretically and methodologically

Discipline · Excellence · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Publishing · Social science · Sociology · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies · Law · Social and Cultural Dynamics · Social Capital and Networks