Paradigm
Paradigm: A Management Research Journal is the bi-annual peer-reviewed research journal of the Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad, published by SAGE Publications. One of India's long-running institute journals, it has completed twenty-five years of publication, and from its twenty-sixth volume it carries the fuller name Paradigm: A Management Research Journal, abbreviated PAR-MRJ. That renaming marked a sharpened mission: to provide a platform for scholarly papers and case studies related to emerging markets, approached from multifunctional and multidisciplinary perspectives. Its scope reaches across all branches of management science and into psychology, economics and sociology, and it welcomes both theoretical and empirical work. From its home at IMT Ghaziabad in Raj Nagar, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, Paradigm speaks to management researchers who study the economies where most of the world's growth now happens.
Twenty-five years at IMT Ghaziabad
A quarter-century of continuous publication is the journal's foundation. Institute journals live or die by the commitment of their home institutions, and Paradigm's survival to twenty-five years — and its relaunch under an expanded title from Volume 26 — records sustained backing from the Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad, one of India's established private business schools. The journal's earlier years are documented in the Directory of Indian Management Journals prepared by the National Information Centre on Management at IIM Ahmedabad's library, which listed Paradigm among the country's management periodicals with IMT Ghaziabad as its home. Under SAGE, that institute journal gained the production, distribution and digital platform of a major international academic publisher while keeping its editorial identity at the institute in Ghaziabad.
The emerging-markets turn
The journal's current aims and scope explain why it was renamed. In the last twenty years, its editors note, emerging markets have witnessed rapid economic development, and these countries have become a major forum for testing existing models developed in advanced economies — and for developing new models of their own. PAR-MRJ was repositioned to serve exactly that scholarly movement. Rather than treating emerging markets as a special case, the journal treats them as the main case: the place where management theory must now prove itself. Papers and case studies related to emerging markets, written from multifunctional and multidisciplinary perspectives, are its stated priority. For Indian researchers, whose own country is the archetypal large emerging market, that focus makes Paradigm a natural home for work rooted in local evidence with global relevance.
Scope across the social sciences
Paradigm's scope is deliberately wide. It encompasses all areas of multidisciplinary research in the social sciences, including all branches of management sciences, psychology, economics, sociology and related disciplines. It welcomes both theoretical and empirical academic articles from all disciplines of the social sciences. Two types of papers are named explicitly in its guidance: original research works, both theoretical and empirical, in management and related disciplines; and exhaustive surveys of literature, including bibliometric studies and meta-analyses. Scholarly papers and case studies are both within its remit. That combination — a management journal that also publishes literature surveys and meta-analyses, and that opens its pages to psychologists, economists and sociologists — gives Paradigm a broader intellectual catchment than a single-function title, and it reflects how management problems actually present themselves: entangled with behaviour, markets and society at once.
Published by SAGE
Publication by SAGE Publications places Paradigm within one of the world's largest social-science publishing programmes, alongside many other Indian institute journals that SAGE produces in partnership with their owning institutions. For authors, that means professional peer-review systems, international distribution, digital archiving and discoverability through the channels libraries and researchers actually use. For the journal, it means the production values and reach of a global publisher combined with an editorial board rooted in its home institute. Subscription listings for Indian management journals price Paradigm among the SAGE India institute titles, and its presence on the SAGE India journal platform — where its description, aims and scope, editorial board, abstracting and indexing information and submission guidelines are maintained — is the journal's public front door.
Peer review and standards
Paradigm is a peer-reviewed journal: submissions are assessed by referees before acceptance, the basic covenant of a research title. Its stated interest in both theoretical and empirical work, and in exhaustive reviews of literature, implies the standards reviewers apply — a clear contribution, a defensible method, and an honest engagement with what is already known. Bibliometric studies and meta-analyses, which the journal explicitly invites, are themselves quality instruments: they map what a field has established and where its gaps lie. By welcoming them, Paradigm positions itself not merely as a repository of individual studies but as a place where the management disciplines take stock of themselves, particularly as their evidence base shifts toward emerging-economy data.
Why emerging markets need their own journals
The intellectual case behind Paradigm deserves attention because it explains the journal's readership. Management models — of consumer behaviour, organisational structure, finance, human resources — were largely built on evidence from a small set of wealthy countries. Emerging markets test those models against different institutions, income levels, family structures and state capacities. Some models travel; others fail instructively. A journal dedicated to that testing, published from within a major emerging market by scholars who live in one, performs a service the big Western journals perform only intermittently. Paradigm's multidisciplinary scope strengthens the offer: an emerging-market firm's behaviour may be explained as well by sociology or psychology as by strategy, and this journal will consider the explanation on its merits, whatever department it comes from.
IMT Ghaziabad and its journal
The relationship between institute and journal runs both ways. For IMT Ghaziabad, Paradigm is a scholarly flagship: evidence of a research culture extending beyond teaching, and a channel through which the institute participates in national and international academic conversation. For the journal, the institute provides editors, reviewers, authors and a stable institutional home in Raj Nagar, Ghaziabad — part of the Delhi National Capital Region's dense cluster of management schools. Directories of Indian management journals recorded the journal at the institute with named editorial leadership, in a period when such journals were the primary infrastructure of Indian management research. That infrastructure has since professionalised — SAGE production, online submission, global distribution — but the institute-journal bond remains Paradigm's defining structure.
Readers and contributors
Paradigm addresses management academics, doctoral scholars and advanced practitioners across the social sciences. Its contributors are invited from every relevant discipline, and its case studies speak to teachers who use cases in the classroom as much as to researchers. The bi-annual rhythm — two issues a year — makes each issue a substantial collection rather than a trickle, suited to considered reading and to library shelves. For an Indian management scholar working on emerging-market questions, the journal offers a peer-reviewed venue whose editors actively want that work, whose publisher distributes it internationally, and whose twenty-five-year run signals that it will still be there when the citations accumulate. For readers abroad, it offers emerging-market scholarship curated from within an emerging market.
Its place in Indian management publishing
India's management journals divide broadly into association titles, commercial titles and institute titles, and Paradigm is a leading example of the third kind grown to maturity: born at a business school, sustained for twenty-five years, renamed and refocused for its next era, and published in partnership with SAGE. Its emerging-markets mission aligns it with the direction of global management research itself, as the centre of economic gravity shifts toward the countries Paradigm studies. From Ghaziabad, twice a year, it continues to ask the discipline's most productive question — what does management look like where most of the world's business is now done? — and to publish the answers in their theoretical, empirical, case and review forms.
