Aims & Scope

Human Relations is an international peer reviewed journal, which publishes the highest quality original research to advance our understanding of social relationships in and around work through theoretical development and empirical investigation.

Human Relations seeks high quality research papers that extend our knowledge of social relationships at work and organizational forms, practices, and processes that affect the nature, structure, and conditions of work and work organizations. The ‘in and around work’ part of the journal’s aim and, more generally, research that seeks to understand working lives for their betterment is an important part of the scope of Human Relations.

Human Relations welcomes manuscripts that seek to cross disciplinary boundaries to develop new perspectives and insights into social relationships and relationships between people and organizations.

Human Relations encourages strong empirical contributions that develop and extend theory as well as more conceptual papers that integrate, critique, and expand existing theory.

Human Relations welcomes critical reviews and essays:

– Critical reviews advance a field through new theory, new methods, a novel synthesis of extant evidence, or a combination of two or three of these elements. Reviews that identify new research questions and that make links between management and organizations and the wider social sciences are particularly welcome. Surveys or overviews of a field are unlikely to meet these criteria

– Critical essays address contemporary scholarly issues and debates within the journal’s scope. They are more controversial than conventional papers or reviews and can be shorter. They argue a point of view but must meet standards of academic rigour. For more detailed guidance please refer to Ogbonnaya, C., & Brown, A. D. (2023). Editorial: Crafting review and essay articles for Human Relations. Human Relations, 76(3), 365–394. https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267221148440.

Human Relations encourages research that relates social theory to social practice and translates knowledge about Human Relations into prospects for social action and policy-making that aims to improve working lives.

Human Relations encourages the uses of methods that are appropriate to both the research context and research questions and therefore welcomes both qualitative and quantitative methods and innovative methods of investigation and analysis. 

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