Continuity and Change at ESR: A Letter from the Editor

Dear reader, As you are reading these lines, chances are that you are also involved in the operation of the European Sociological Review (ESR) in other roles, whether as one of our reviewers, one of our authors, as a past or present member of the ESR Editorial Board, or as someone who has supported the journal in some other capacity or context. Or maybe you are taking an interest because you may have developed a certain regard for research published in ESR that you were reading for your own training and research, and now aspire to join the ESR community of scholars in any of these various roles in the future. But whatever your background and current relation to ESR, I am grateful for your interest in and your support of the journal. Assuming the Editorin-Chief position at ESR first and foremost is a humbling experience because it makes one realize the incredible amount of both expertise and goodwill on which the running of the journal is resting. ESR truly does represent an active community of sociologists, in part through the good research that we visibly publish, but in at least equal part also through the much less visible activities of reviewing, developing, and editing submissions up to the point of them becoming genuine ESR articles. So in one sense, this letter merely is a long way of saying ‘thank you’ to the many people who make ESR possible as creative authors, constructive reviewers, interested readers, and careful fellow editors. The occasion to write this letter of thanks is of course provided by the transition at the ESR’s Editor-in-Chief position from Melinda Mills to myself. Following up on Melinda’s successful 6-year tenure at the helm of ESR, I am grateful to the Board of the European Consortium for Sociological Research as well as to Oxford University Press for now entrusting the journal to my care for the next couple of years. Over the years, ESR has developed into one of the major journals of the discipline, known for publishing innovative research that seeks to contribute to a cumulative, analytical, and rigorous social science, and for serving an intellectual community of European social scientists and their allied colleagues elsewhere around the world. And thanks to Melinda’s creativity in re-organizing the journal’s operations during her term, I also firmly believe that ESR is now well equipped to meet the challenges of highquality journal publishing, whether in terms of handling the substantial volume of submissions to the journal efficiently or in terms of soliciting insightful and constructive reviews on the manuscripts that we receive to single out and to further develop the most promising work for eventual publication.