Abstract
The inaugural issue of the European Journal of Industrial Relations (EJIR) was published in March 1995. One objective, as I wrote in my opening Editorial, was ‘to contribute to cross-European information and understanding which may provide a rational basis for a socially enlightened (re)definition of labour relations in an integrating Europe’. Another was to provide a forum for cross-national comparative research, reflecting a belief that for a Journal such as ours most single-country studies are of limited value.
Both aims, as well as the many others set out in that introductory issue, have remained central to our mission. Serious comparative research is a difficult exercise, often beyond the resources of single scholars, and at the time, the amount of genuine comparative analysis – meaning not only parallel national accounts, or games with cross-national databases, but efforts to compare, contrast and explain similarities and differences across countries – was relatively meagre. In the first few years, it was an effort to fill each issue with high-quality studies. Now the situation has changed radically, I trust in part because of the efforts of the EJIR.
2019 is our 25th year of publication. A quarter century is a long time for a major journal to possess a single editor, and I have decided to step down at the end of this year. This will provide an opportunity – while preserving the central aims that have guided the EJIR from the beginning – for my successor to bring new ideas and a fresh vision. And since no editor can continue forever, it will enable an orderly transition.
I am delighted that from 2020, the new editor will be Guglielmo Meardi, a scholar with exceptional knowledge of industrial relations across Europe, east and west, and with the linguistic skills to match. I first met him in that year 1995, when he visited me in Milan to ask whether the EJIR would be interested in a paper he had written on the basis of his doctoral research. Indeed we were, and the article appeared in 1996, the first of many of his which we have published. I was also on the panel which appointed him to a lectureship at Warwick, shortly before I myself moved to the LSE. It is fitting, therefore, that the editorship will return to Warwick, where the EJIR was launched.
In this transition year, Guglielmo will become Associate Editor, and we will share much of the editorial work. We envisage that when I hand over the reins, I will retain some role with the Journal.