Scholarly Achievement versus Editorial Board Membership. The Case of the Top Ten Polish Pedagogical Journals

An invitation to become an editorial board member (EBM) of an academic journal should be regarded as evidence of recognition of a scholar’s research achievement and impact on his discipline. This is a requirement of Merton’s norm of universalism in science, which proposes that awards and prestige ought to be held to objective and pre-established impersonal criteria that depend exclusively on the quality of scholarly output. This principle is particularly important in the context of editorial teams of academic journals. The aim of this paper is to present an empirical case study of the academic achievements of the EBMs of the top ten Polish pedagogical journals, in 2020. For research purposes, the author assumed that the criterion for nomination to the editorial board was the scholars’ output, as evidenced by their publications indexed in the WoS and Scopus databases and also the number of corresponding citations. The results put into question the idea that the editorial nominations examined were indeed grounded in the publications indexed in the WoS and Scopus databases. Based on the record of EBMs output indexed in these databases, most EBMs analysed were not proven to be the most productive or cited scholars.

Corporate Governance and Firm Performance in State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in Zambia: A Systematic Review

The research systematically documented and described the corporate governance practices and financial performance in State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in Zambia from 2006 to 2017. The research design that was adopted was the descriptive research design to systematically describe the corporate governance practices and financial performance of SOEs in Zambia. The corporate governance attributes for SOEs such as board size, board appointing authorities and board membership have been found to be prescribed by a diversity of Acts of Parliament for different SOEs. This finding suggests that the governance of these entities could be a challenge insofar as the uniformity of the legal framework for the governance of the entities was concerned. In addition to this, board membership which are designated by specific government positions rather than merit based, compromises board effectiveness. The study has further shown that failure to produce and publish, for public scrutiny, audited financial statements on a timely basis leads to lack of transparency and accountability. The financial performance has been found to have been poor as the SOEs on average produced negative returns on total assets and the SOEs were highly geared based on operating gearing and financing gearing. Lastly, financial performance of SOEs and the corporate governance practices differed significantly across different industries under which the SOEs operated.

Gender and Professional Networks on Bank Boards

Women are underrepresented on bank boards. Using a newly compiled dataset of bank board membership over the 1999-2018 period, we find that within-board professional networks are extensive, but female board members are significantly less connected than male directors, both in number and length of connections. We also find that professional networks play an important role in determining the appointment of bank board directors. Connections also positively impact compensation for female directors, especially connections to other women. These results suggest that there are differences in the breadth, depth, and value of the professional networks of male and female board members and that these differences could be a contributing channel through which women's underrepresentation on boards prevails.

The Core of the Global Corporate Network

We investigate the network topology of a comprehensive data set of the world-wide population of corporate entities. In particular, we have extracted information on the boards of all companies listed in Bloomberg’s archive of company profiles in October, 2015, a total of almost 100,000 firms. We provide information on board membership overlaps at various levels, and, in particular, show that there exists a core of directors who accumulate a large number of seats and are highly connected among themselves both at the level of national networks and at the worldwide aggregated level.

Directory of Scientific-Periodicals of Georgia

The directory contains the bibliographies of 149 international scientific periodicals that have been assigned ISSN by the ISSN International Centre and the Georgian National Centre and which reflect to a certain extent their preparedness for entering international scientific literature databases. The publication details are taken from official journal websites, are publisher-checked and certified. The directory data served as a basis for the Georgian scholarly journals’ monitoring and identifying the international scientific literature database entry criteria: publications’ peer-review, periodicity, independent website, international editorial board membership, DOI (Digital Object Identifier) assignment, the state of indexing in academic databases, etc.

The pressures for the remuneration of volunteer governors of UK educational institutions and the potential consequences

The members of the governing boards of schools, colleges which provide vocational education and training, and universities in the UK have traditionally been volunteers. In some contexts, however, for example, colleges in Northern Ireland, governors are now paid. Whether volunteer governors in other or all settings should be remunerated is the subject of debate. This article analyses the various aspects of that debate. It considers the nature of volunteering; the socio-political context of volunteering; and the growing momentum for the remuneration of governors of all UK educational institutions. The article also considers the arguments for and against governor remuneration, which include remuneration and: the way governors and the governing of educational institutions are valued; the visibility of governing; governor recruitment; the diversity of governing board membership; the quality of governing; the remuneration of other publicly funded agencies and organisations; the accountability governors experience in their role; the market for school governors; and whether a policy which implemented governor remuneration could be reversed. The article also considers aspects that would need to be resolved in practice: who would be paid and for what; the level of remuneration; the funding of governor remuneration; and the organisation of remuneration.