About the Journal

Focus and Scope 

The purpose of the Organization and Human Capital Development (ORCADEV) is to publish research aimed at helping us understand and predict effective leadership – leadership of people, groups, and organizations. Organization and Human Capital Development (ORCADEV) continuously renews and reinvigorates leadership scholarship, practice and policy by promoting forward thinking scholarship. While leadership in organizations can be informal, it occurs in the context of people holding and acting within the scope of formal positions of management. Thus we seek to advance research that has clear functional value to managers and leaders across organizations and cultures. Organization and Human Capital Development (ORCADEV) serves to promote scholarship that asks and/or seeks answers to grand questions, embraces paradox, addresses key fissures in scholarly and practical knowledge, and that challenges traditions, paradigms, and the status quo to create jolts and discontinuous growth in the learning curve of the field of leadership and management.

As described elsewhere, Organization and Human Capital Development (ORCADEV) is a theory development journal for scholars of human resource development and related disciplines. Organization and Human Capital Development (ORCADEV) publishes articles that make theoretical contributions on theory development, foundations of HRD, theory building methods, and integrative reviews of the relevant literature. Papers whose central focus is empirical findings, including empirical method and design also considered for publication in Human Resource Development Review.

This journal encourages submissions that provide new theoretical insights to advance our understanding of human resource development and related disciplines. Such papers may include syntheses of existing bodies of theory, new substantive theories, exploratory conceptual models, taxonomies and typology developed as foundations for theory, treatises in formal theory construction, papers on the history of theory, critique of theory that includes alternative research propositions, metatheory, and integrative literature reviews with strong theoretical implications. Papers addressing foundations of HRD might address philosophies of HRD, historical foundations, definitions of the field, conceptual organization of the field, and ethical foundations. Organization and Human Capital Development (ORCADEV) takes a multi-paradigm view of theory building so submissions from different paradigms are encouraged.