Towards an aspirational future: Cultivating ontological empathy within the ethos of Management Learning

As we write this editorial in January 2022, we look back on 2021 and we look ahead to another year of curating Management Learning together with a fantastic team of Associate Editors, a wonderful Editorial Assistant, a supportive publisher, and the community of International Editorial Board members, reviewers, and, of course, our readers. We have said ‘goodbye’ to 2021: another year replete with challenges and uncertainties, which, for this journal, has turned out to be very successful. Management Learning has continued to publish high quality, original, critical and reflexive scholarship on organisations and learning. Our 2-year impact factor has risen to 4.952. As a team, we have stuck together and grown closer. We were sad to see the term of Todd Bridgman as Co-Editor-inChief and Alexia Panayiotou as Associate Editor come to an end, and we thank them for the excellent and deeply committed work on leading and shaping this journal. At the same time, we are truly excited to welcome Ajnesh Prasad as the new Co-Editor-in-Chief of Management Learning. It is clear that 2022 has started for the journal on a high note and with a lot of enthusiasm, ambition and hope. We take this beginning of the new year — and the change in the composition of the team of Co-Editors-in-Chief – as an opportunity for reflection on our ethical commitments as Editors-inChief of Management Learning. What are we committed to as journal editors, especially while working under the current circumstances and given the institutional pressures of contemporary business schools? What does this mean to us? How do we put these commitments into practice?