Journal Guide

© Nicolas Brodu. 2003 The astrolabe is an ancient astronomical computer for solving problemsrelating to time and the position of the sun and stars in the sky.Historians credit the invention of the astrolabe to classical Greece.Brass astrolabes were highly developed in the Islamic world of the 8thcentury and later. chiefly as an aid to navigation and as a way offinding the direction of Mecca. In the Middle Ages it found its wayback to Europe and became the chief navigational instrument until theinvention of the sextant in the 18th century.

Society and Natural Resources publishes a broad range of social science research and thinking on the interaction of social and bio-physical processes, policies and practices occurring around the world and at multiple scales. These involve attention to cultural, psychological, economic and political perspectives relating to forests, oceans, fisheries, soils, and water; and address a variety of topics such as people and protected areas/biodiversity conservation, globalization and capitalism, environmental justice, place/community-based conservation, community resilience, adaptive and collaborative management, sustainability, climate change, environmental attitudes and concerns, environmental hazards and risks, and human-nature relationships. Papers published in Society & Natural Resources go through a double-blind, peer review process and meet standards of contributing significantly to theory and/or transformative policies and practices, offering scholarly depth but broad appeal to our diverse readership.

The Society and Business Review (SBR) aims to cultivate and share knowledge and ideas in order to assist businesses and organizations to enhance their commitment to society and the planet.

Socio-Economic Planning Sciences is an international journal devoted exclusively to research in this important, but under-represented area. It provides a medium for research that might not appear in more specialized journals, either because of the interdisciplinary or applied character of the study, or the mathematical/quantitative nature of the research. The journal thus serves as a focus for investigations that have hitherto appeared in widely-scattered sources and/or less-than-appropriate sources.

Socio-Economic Planning Sciences strongly encourages contributions dealing with applications of quantitative models and techniques to important decision problems in the service and public sectors. Of particular interest are accounts of such studies carried out in developing countries and economically emerging regions of the world. Review articles in important methodological and substantive areas are also of interest.

The principal criterion used in evaluating a manuscript submitted to the journal is: uniqueness or innovation of the work in terms of the methodology being developed, and/or its application to a problem of particular importance in the public or service sector and/or the setting within which the effort is being made, e.g. an emerging region of the world. That is to say, of the model/methodology itself, the application, and the problem context, at least one of these must be unique and important.

Additional criteria considered in reviewing a submitted paper are its accuracy, the organization/presentation (i.e. logical flow), and writing quality.

Representative of the topic areas included in the journal are the following:

Studies directed toward the more effective utilization of existing resources, e.g. mathematical programming models of health care delivery systems with relevance to more effective program design; systems analysis of fire outbreaks and its relevance to the location of fire stations; statistical analysis of the efficiency of a developing country economy or industry.

Studies relating to the interaction of various segments of society and technology, e.g. the effects of government health policies on the utilization and design of hospital facilities; the relationship between housing density and the demands on public transportation or other service facilities: patterns and implications of urban development and air or water pollution.

Studies devoted to the anticipations of and response to future needs for social, health and other human services, e.g. the relationship between industrial growth and the development of educational resources in affected areas; investigation of future demands for material and child health resources in a developing country; design of effective recycling in an urban setting.

Originating in the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), Socio-Economic Review (SER) is part of a broader movement in the social sciences for the rediscovery of the socio-political foundations of the economy. Devoted to the advancement of socio-economics, it deals with the analytical, political and moral questions arising at the intersection between economy and society. Articles in SER explore how the economy is or should be governed by social relations, institutional rules, political decisions, and cultural values. They also consider how the economy in turn affects the society of which it is part, for example by breaking up old institutional forms and giving rise to new ones. The domain of the journal is deliberately broadly conceived, so new variations to its general theme may be discovered and editors can learn from the papers that readers submit. To enhance international dialogue, Socio-Economic Review accepts the submission of translated articles that are simultaneously published in a language other than English.In pursuit of its program, SER is eager to promote interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, economics, political science and moral philosophy, through both empirical and theoretical work. Empirical papers may be qualitative as well as quantitative, and theoretical papers will not be confined to deductive model-building. Papers suggestive of more generalizable insights into the economy as a domain of social action will be preferred over narrowly specialized work. While firmly committed to the highest standards of scholarly excellence, Socio-Economic Review encourages discussion of the practical and ethical dimensions of economic action, with the intention to contribute to both the advancement of social science and the building of a good economy in a good society.Socio-Economic Review aspires to develop into a seedbed for a new attempt, more than overdue, at a sociologically informed and politically perceptive institutional economics – one that takes history seriously, does justice to the complexity of social systems and its profound consequences for theory-building, recognizes the distinctive dignity of the human lifeworld and the importance of political mobilization and collective action in the interest of social progress and social stability, and engages in informed dialogue with political and moral philosophy to avoid the fallacies of technocracy. Such a theory can form and grow in confrontation with a wide range of subjects employing a wide variety of methods: by looking at consumption and investment, corporate governance, the regulation of capital markets, at labor markets and labor market policy, the organization of work and the changing division of labor, international trade and regional development, technological innovation, welfare state regimes and production regimes, the governance of the international economy, the provision of social order in industrial districts etc. etc. On all of these, SER hopes to offer its readers first-rate empirical and theoretical work that is of interest beyond the narrow circles of disciplinary specialists.Wolfgang StreeckBruno AmableNina BandeljLane KenworthyMarc SchneibergJürgen FeickAward Winner:Lane Kenworthy is the winner of the Aldi J.M. Hagenaars LIS Memorial Award for his paper Varieties of Welfare Capitalism (Socio-Economic Review Volume 1 Issue 1), co-authored by Alex Hicks. .