Abhigyan

Abhigyan is the flagship refereed quarterly journal of the FORE School of Management, New Delhi, published in partnership with SAGE. It has been published regularly since 1983 — a track record of forty years that places it among the longest-lived management journals in India. Its name is a Sanskrit word synonymous with identity, and the journal states its ambition in those terms: to create its distinct identity by achieving excellence through creating and disseminating knowledge related to business and management practices. Its current focus is organisational sustainability and transformation, and the impact both have on society. Carrying the ISSN 0970-2385, operating as a double-blind peer-reviewed title and a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, Abhigyan remains a platform where academicians, practitioners and researchers communicate new ideas about how organisations work and change.

Published since 1983

Four decades of regular publication is a rare achievement for an institute journal, and it is the first thing any profile of Abhigyan must record. The journal began in 1983, before Indian management education expanded into its present vast system, and it has appeared quarterly through every phase of that expansion. Its publisher of record is the Foundation for Organisational Research and Education — FORE — the non-profit institution behind the FORE School of Management in New Delhi. Directories of Indian management journals documented Abhigyan at FORE with its 1983 start and its ISSN in their listings of the country's research periodicals. A journal that began when Indian business publishing was small now reaches readers through SAGE's international platform, accessible to institutions covered under the Government of India's One Nation One Subscription scheme.

A name that means identity

Few journals explain their own names; Abhigyan does, and the explanation doubles as its mission statement. Abhigyan is a Sanskrit word synonymous with identity, and the journal aims to create its distinct identity by achieving excellence through creating and disseminating knowledge related to business and management practices. That self-definition has guided its editorial choices: it is devoted to disseminating findings from research and empirical work, and to exploring original ideas concerning the various functional areas of management. The emphasis on original ideas matters — this is not a journal content to summarise the field, but one that presents itself as a place where new thinking about organisations is first communicated among academicians, practitioners and researchers, in India and beyond.

Focus: sustainability and transformation

The journal's current stated focus is organisational sustainability and transformation, which directly impact society. That pairing gives Abhigyan a contemporary edge within the general management category. Sustainability brings questions of environment, governance and long-term value into its pages; transformation brings digital change, restructuring and the reinvention of business models. Both are lenses on the functional areas — marketing, finance, human resources, operations, strategy — that the journal has always covered. Its special issues, brought out from time to time, focus on themes reflecting contemporary aspects and emerging issues of business and management practice, allowing the editors to concentrate attention where the field is moving fastest and to contribute, in the journal's words, to existing knowledge in business and management.

One documented example shows the mechanism at work. In 2021 the journal announced a special thematic issue on the impact of the pandemic on organisations, inviting original research articles and review studies on the challenges and opportunities organisations faced, organisational performance management, the impact on international students, government policies to help MSMEs, and the unforeseen consequences of the pandemic for organisational development. The issue was intended to record the effect of COVID-19 on the functions and activities of organisations and to help readers respond to the challenges effectively. A quarterly journal that can pivot a whole issue toward a world event demonstrates the format's flexibility — and Abhigyan's editors used it to make the journal part of the scholarly record of a crisis.

Anthologies: the best of Abhigyan

Periodically, the best of Abhigyan has been published as anthologies, which its publishers describe as significant contributions to the world of knowledge. That practice distinguishes the journal's afterlife from most periodicals. Instead of leaving its strongest papers scattered across back issues, FORE has gathered them into volumes that can be taught from, cited and shelved as books. Anthologising also signals editorial confidence: a journal that republishes its best work in book form is asserting that the work endures beyond its issue date. For contributors, the possibility of anthology selection is an added incentive; for readers, the anthologies offer a curated path into four decades of Indian organisational research, filtered by the editors who know it best.

Peer review, ethics and the SAGE platform

Abhigyan is a refereed, double-blind peer-reviewed journal: manuscripts are judged without author or reviewer knowing the other's identity, the standard its descriptions emphasise. It is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, the international body whose guidelines govern how journals handle authorship disputes, plagiarism and review integrity. Manuscripts are now submitted through SAGE's peer-review system, and the journal's page on the SAGE India platform sets out its description, submission route and access arrangements, including access for institutions under the One Nation One Subscription initiative. Older indexing records listed the journal in services including PsycINFO — a reflection of its organisational-research roots — while its present identity is that of a SAGE-published quarterly in the mainstream of Indian management academia.

The FORE School of Management

The journal's home institution shapes it. The FORE School of Management is the management school of the Foundation for Organisational Research and Education in New Delhi, and Abhigyan is described as the foundation's flagship journal, focusing on management and organisational research. An institute's flagship journal carries its intellectual reputation into the wider academy: it is read as evidence of the school's research culture, and it connects the school's faculty to a national and global community of contributors. Abhigyan invites contributions from academicians, researchers and practitioners from across the globe, so the conversation it hosts is not confined to its own campus — but its editorial centre of gravity, like its publisher, remains in New Delhi, where FORE has published it since 1983.

Readers and contributors

Abhigyan's platform serves three audiences at once, by its own account: academicians, practitioners and researchers. Academics find a forty-year archive and a refereed venue with a recognised name. Doctoral scholars find a journal whose special issues map the live questions of the field. Practitioners find research and empirical work translated into ideas about the functional areas they manage. The quarterly rhythm — four issues a year — suits that mixed readership: frequent enough to carry contemporary themes, spaced enough for each issue, and especially each special issue, to be assembled with care. Subscription services list Abhigyan among India's principal management journals, priced alongside the other SAGE institute titles that form the working library of Indian business schools.

From print quarterly to global platform

The journal's route to readers has changed more than its mission has. For most of its life Abhigyan reached subscribers as a printed quarterly from New Delhi, listed in the directories Indian librarians used to build their periodical collections, with indexing in services that included PsycINFO reflecting its organisational-research heritage. Its present life is digital as well as print: the SAGE platform carries the journal to subscribing institutions worldwide, the Government of India's One Nation One Subscription scheme extends that access across Indian institutions, and manuscripts arrive through SAGE's online peer-review system rather than by post. That migration mirrors Indian academia's own — a journal founded in 1983 for a small, print-reading community now operates inside the global infrastructure of scholarly publishing, without surrendering the name, the quarterly rhythm or the Delhi editorship that have defined it for forty years.

Its place in Indian management journals

Among Indian management periodicals, Abhigyan's claim is endurance with renewal. It began in 1983 as the journal of a young New Delhi foundation devoted to organisational research and education; it kept its quarterly schedule for forty years; it distilled its best work into anthologies; and it moved onto an international publisher's platform while keeping its name, its identity and its focus. Its current themes — sustainability and transformation — place a journal founded in a different economic era squarely inside the concerns of the present one. For anyone surveying India's magazine and journal landscape, Abhigyan is a landmark: a Sanskrit-named, Delhi-published quarterly that has spent four decades helping Indian management scholarship know itself.