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Aim

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


Scope

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.

Human Relations welcomes manuscripts that seek to cross disciplinary boundaries in order 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 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.



Guidance for contributors

1. Papers must advance knowledge, and make a strong theoretical and empirical contribution to the literature on work relationships and organisational work processes.
2. Authors should use clear English comprehensible to readers outside of their area of specialism.
3. Authors should ensure that their methodology is not too long, avoiding overly long explanations of why particular norms and standards have been chosen.
4. Papers must be original research and must not have already been published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere. All quotations from published work, including any author's own previous work, must be acknowledged as such and fully cited. (Authors may only repeat the method from their own previous published works without citation.)
5. Papers that merely offer scores along, or describe relationships between, chosen empirical measures, with commentary on the efficaciousness of techniques adopted in measurement, are not suitable for Human Relations. An exception might be made if you present a technical or methodological critique of a particular tool of analysis, thus carrying forward an important debate which engages more than one area of scientific interest.
6. We do not publish studies based on laboratory experiments unless there is confirmatory field data. Studies referring to simulation exercises involving students or others without experiential knowledge of the simulated context are discouraged.
7. Field-study results are more likely to be accepted if they use more than a single technique of data collection and analysis. You should strengthen the validity of, for example, questionnaire scales or constructs by considering multiple influences in the context of the field study.
8. We encourage papers with strong research methodologies, and particularly those that use longitudinal design.
9. Papers containing a poor standard of English language are less likely to be considered for review.

PRE-ACCEPTANCE ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDITING: Authors who would like to refine the use of English in their manuscripts might consider using professional editing services—details of companies offering professional editing services can be found using an Internet search engine. One such company, for example, is SPi (www.prof-editing.com), which offers professional editing services to authors of journal articles in the areas of science, technology, medicine or the social sciences and it specializes in editing and correcting English-language manuscripts written by authors with a primary language other than English.

Please be aware that Human Relations and the Tavistock Institute have no affiliation with any of these companies offering professional editing services, and make no endorsement of any particular company, including SPi. An author's use of a professional editing service in no way guarantees that his or her submission will ultimately be accepted. Any arrangement an author enters into will be exclusively between the author and the professional editing service company, and any costs incurred are the sole responsibility of the author.

Preparation and submission guidelines

Please do read the guidance on how to prepare and submit a paper and do not hesitate to contact the Editorial Office if you have any queries or problems with the submission process - we would be only too pleased to help!