Read all about it. The best articles from Cornell's Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) -- considered the premier scholarly journal in organizational studies -- have been published for the first time in Chinese. The publisher is Peking University's Guanghua School of Management. The edition is part of a "best of" series on managerial subjects.

"We've always had subscribers to ASQ in China," noted Linda Johanson, the journal's managing editor for the past 26 years. "By translating our most influential articles into Chinese, this special edition makes them available to a much broader audience."

The journal, which has been based at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management since the school's inception in 1956, also celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

"ASQ articles are the gold standard at every top institution I know," said Ranjav Gulati, professor of strategy and organizations at Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management and a member of ASQ's editorial board. For scholars in organizational studies, publishing in quality journals like ASQ "is the best path to tenure," he said. "And being an ASQ associate editor or editor certifies one as a wise elder of the field."

While its current scholarly editor, Professor Donald Palmer, is from the University of California-Davis, six of ASQ's previous eight editors were initially Johnson School faculty members, and another, Stephen Barley, was a faculty member at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Johanson has been the main constant, however, working with every editor since she joined the journal in 1980.

ASQ's much-coveted Award for Scholarly Contribution was established under Barley's editorship, said Johanson. The Chinese edition, "Best Papers in Administrative Science Quarterly," is composed of articles by recipients of that award. The winning ASQ articles, which are selected annually by a special editorial board committee, are chosen for having had the most influence on the field of organizational studies over the previous five years.

ASQ editorial board member Anne Tsui, a chaired professor at Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business who oversaw the translations of the articles into Chinese, said: "The book is selling well in China. Linda had the foresight to recognize the pressing need among non-English-speaking management scholars there for the vital research about administration and organizations that ASQ publishes." Tsui is editor in chief of Management and Organization Review, a new journal on Chinese management research, as well as editor of the Guanghua School's managerial books series.

Johanson has worked intensively with authors to help them improve their writing styles and make their scholarship more publishable, whether or not ASQ accepts it, said Gulati -- a commitment that has led to her being invited to give workshops on the subject at leading universities across the United States.

Her dedication to improving the quality of research and writing in organizational studies also occasioned her award for distinguished service to the field for a quarter of a century, presented to her at the Academy of Management's annual meeting in New Orleans in August 2004 to a standing ovation. Honoring a managing editor of an academic journal who is not a scholar in the field is rare, said Gulati.

The Johnson School's reputation among peer institutions clearly has been enhanced by the school's hosting of a first-rate scholarly journal. But in the 1980s when ASQ was in the red and the school's budget was stretched, some proposed selling the journal to another university. Johanson, who oversees the business as well as editorial and production aspects of ASQ, rescued it by tightening expenses and making the most of such income sources as ads, subscriptions and reprint permissions. "If it weren't for Linda, the journal wouldn't have run," said Thomas Dyckman, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Accounting and Quantitative Analysis and former associate dean for academic affairs at the Johnson School. "We're glad to have her."

This article contains quotations and information that were originally published in an article by Irene Kim in Cornell Enterprise, Vol. 19, No. 1. They are used with permission.