'Publishing From the Editor's Side' Leadership, Organisations, Behaviour and Reputation Expert Session

Professor Laker's research examines how organisational order is constructed, strained and reconstituted under conditions of institutional precarity and socionormative contestation. His findings have been published in several FT50 journals, including the Journal of Management Studies, Human Resource Management, the Journal of Consumer Research and Human Relations, with practitioner work appearing in Harvard Business Review. He has also authored several books with the Financial Times and MIT Press, including Closing the Service Gap and Job Crafting.

Editorial roles that Professor Laker holds include Consulting Editor at the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Associate Editor at the International Journal of Human Resource Management and Journal of Business Research and serves on the Editorial Board of Long Range Planning. He is also Executive Guest Editor of concurrent Special Issues in Technovation, the International Journal of Human Resource Management and the Journal of Business Research, examining identity tensions in innovation, the fragility of workplace inclusion and strategic decision-making in non-homogeneous teams. In 2025, he was appointed as a Research Excellence Framework 2029 sub-panel member.

The topic of this presentation is 'Publishing From the Editor's Side'. This expert session will explore academic publishing from the inside of the editorial process, drawing on Professor Laker's experience as an editor to offer practical insight into the parts of publishing that are often invisible to authors.

Professor Laker focuses on what editors actually look for when a paper is submitted, how they make desk-reject decisions, how they interpret reviewer reports and how they judge whether a revision is moving toward publication or drifting away from it. In the session, he will also examine why technically competent papers can still fail, why reviewer comments are not always equal in weight and how editors balance contribution, theory, method, journal fit and audience relevance when making decisions.

Rather than offering generic publishing advice, the session will explain the editorial logic behind publication outcomes. Particular attention will be given to the judgements authors rarely see: what makes an editor confident in a paper, what raises concern, what signals that a manuscript is underdeveloped and what separates a promising revise-and-resubmit from one that is unlikely to survive the next round.

This expert session will be especially useful for PhD students and early career researchers who want to understand publishing decisions from the other side of the process. There will be opportunities to discuss reviewer comments, rejection decisions, manuscript positioning or publication strategy.

The expert session is for an internal audience and will be held on 11 June 2026, 1:00pm, in room G03 of the Henley Business School building, Whiteknights campus. For those unable to attend in person there is also the option to dial in remotely via Microsoft Teams. If you are interested in joining, please contact Alex Baker on a.j.baker@henley.ac.uk

Members of LOBR faculty may also request to book a one to one meeting with Professor Laker. Each appointment will last 20 minutes, between 10:30am to 12:30pm. Slots are limited and will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. To arrange an appointment, please contact Alex Baker on a.j.baker@henley.ac.uk

This expert session is part of the LOBR research seminar series, co-ordinated by Professor Bernd Vogel and Dr Anastasiya Saraeva.