UGBS launches business journal

A BUSINESS journal, Management and Organisation: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Business, developed by the University of Ghana Business School (UGBS) has been launched in Accra.
The journal which will be published in two volumes, January and June, will be circulated worldwide.
It is international and multidisciplinary in character, and seeks to promote the interplay and nexus between organisational functionality, management practice and economic/national development.
The journal also aims at facilitating greater understanding of organisational and managerial processes and functions and critical firm level challenges facing developing and emerging areas.
It also seeks to publish works that test, advance and develop models, frameworks and concepts in the broad areas of management, organisation, finance, public sector management and decision systems.
Giving a background to the journal, its Editor, Dr Bill Puplampu, who is also a lecturer at the UGBS, said the journal was not entirely new, since the UGBS had a similar publication in the late 1970’s.
He said the school had a journal called The Journal of Management Studies, which died sometime in 2003 and was revised under an entirely new editorial board.
Dr Puplumpu said the journal would periodically accept prescriptive, theoretical and conceptual papers, which present sufficient ground-breaking discourse of theory, models and methodological paradigms, reviews of the literature or practice which lead to new understandings.
The Editor pointed out that the journal sought to pursue a policy of double-blind peer-review, while papaers will vary in length from 5,000 to 7,500 words, but explained that papers outside this range may be considered under special circumstances.
He promised that the editorial team would make sure that the publication was available to the business community and also see to it that a column was reserved for practitioners to also contribute.
Launching the journal, the Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Professor Kwesi Yankah, said the publication had come at a time when there was a resurgence of research and publishing at the university and commended the editorial board and the UGBS for adding to the stock of journals founded and nurtured by the university.
He said the university considered publications, seminars and conferences as key outlets for knowledge dissemination since they offered opportunities for peer review, assessment and commentary in order to determine one’s standing within a discipline.
To promote that cause, Prof. Yankah disclosed that the university had boosted the budget for research and conferences, and put in place measures to facilitate access to funds by students and expressed the hope that the journal would trigger the delivery of several other journals in the university and beyond.
“This year, the Research Committee has received a record number of applications for research funding, and the university administration having been thus encouraged, has further boosted funding for research for the next academic year”, he stated.
Prof. Yankah said the university would institute an initiative through which students would be able to assess lecturers as part of efforts to improve knowledge construction and its dissemination at the university, saying that the move formed part of measures aimed at improving academic standards as well as the quality of scholars that graduate from the university.
He was optimistic that the measure would additionally encourage research and scholarship and publications within the university so that graduates did not end up as half-baked impostors.
The assessment of lecturers by students, Prof. Yankah said, was a practice that had been standardised in several universities across the world and their decision to formally introduce it at the university was informed by recommendations from a report put together by a Visitation Panel instituted by the University Council.
"To us as a university, knowledge construction and dissemination have been our mainstay", he noted and emphasised that since the establishment of the university in 1948, these have been our major preoccupation,” he stated.
“We disseminate knowledge through teaching and publication, but what is the value of teaching if this is not informed by quality research and inquiry into various aspects of discipline”, he stated and pointed out that the quality of teaching at the university had often been founded on quality research”.
That, he said was the reason why the university ensured that the teaching departments spent 70 per cent of their time teaching, and 30 per cent on research, while the Research Departments spent 30 per cent of their time teaching and 70 per cent on research.
The Managing Director of Cal Bank, Mr Frank Adu, who spoke on the topic “Academic Thinking and Management Issues,” drew the attention of the audience which comprised mainly scholars from the academia, to the fact that graduates from universities often failed to observe certain critical details relevant to the stability of an organisation.
He said his experience with products from the universities revealed that they lacked critical and analytical thinking as well as self motivation, and the application of ethics.
Mr Adu nonetheless agreed that academic thinking and management issues would continue to be relevant because the business community depended on academic thinking for decision making.
The acting Dean of the UGBS, Mr S. Takyi-Asiedu, gave the assurance that the journal would serve as a medium to disseminate research findings from lecturers in the country’s maiden universities and other parts of the world.
He expressed confidence that the journal absolutely met international standards, considering the membership of its editorial board.

Caption: Pix-1 The Pro-Vice Chancellor of the UG, Professor Kwesi Yankah, displaying a copy of the journal, “Management and Organisation: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Business” by the University of Ghana Business School (UGBS).

Pix-2- from left to right, The Editor of the publication, Dr Bill Puplampu, the Acting Dean of UGBS, Mr S. Takyi-Asiedu, the Managing Director of Cal Bank, Mr Frank Adu and the Pro-Vice Chancellor of the UG, Professor Kwesi Yankah after the launch of the journal.