Explore the personal stories and contributions of our editors, authors, customers and employees that have helped to grow the family business.
People are Emerald's greatest asset. We are focused on delivering a consistent, approachable and personal customer experience to all of our audiences, putting their needs at the centre of the products we create and the services we provide.
To achieve this vision, we rely on the expertise of our exceptional people who form our diverse and dynamic global team numbering almost 400.
Click on an image to read the personal stories from our employees, editors, authors and customers. Select a tab to view all stories from that section.
From our first full time employee in 1970 to over 350 global employees and 27 associates representing Emerald Publishing today, we’ve seen many changes in our first 50 years. Read our employees stories here…
Our authors play the starring role in the research – publishing – practice eco-system. Without our authors there is no research to publish. Some of our authors have shared their Emerald Story here…
Our editors have a crucial role to play, using their expertise to ensure the best possible research is selected and enhanced via the peer review process. Read some of their Emerald stories here…
Read stories from our Emerald, Research Media and Good Practice customers here…
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Dr Charles Leathers
The International Journal of Social Economics is a high quality journal, internationally known, and extremely well edited to assure relevant recent research of high quality and originality. As my academic career has now reached the end, I am proud to have had six articles published in the IJSE - at least two of which represent (in my judgment) the best work that I have done over a career of almost 50 years. Kudos for the Editors and Publisher of the IJSE! I have now been the co-author of 7 articles not 6 in this excellent journal as a forthcoming article has recently been accepted for publication.
Bev Foster
I joined Emerald on a temporary basis back in the 90s and became permanent on the 24th April 1991. My role was Administration Assistant…
Bev Foster
I joined Emerald on a temporary basis back in the 90s and became permanent on the 24th April 1991. My role was Administration Assistant and I was based at our warehouse in Eccleshill, Bradford. Emerald, known as MCB University Press back then, had its own warehouse that stored all of our journals and leaflets for promotional campaigns. Everything was distributed from the warehouse to all our customers worldwide; we also had a team of Distribution Executives who "stuffed" the envelopes with either promotional campaigns or the journals themselves. Back then we sent out hundreds of thousands of direct mail campaigns worldwide on an individual journal level.
My current role is Sales Development Manager working with the Asia Pacific remit within the Commercial Operations team. For the past 17 years I have worked with customers and colleagues across the Asia Pacific remit, so I do feel that I have strength in this region. My current role as Sales Development Manager allows me to work closely with colleagues to ensure that they are fully trained on all our products, services, processes and internal systems.
1991
When I joined Emerald, I kept logs of stock control for all our journals on small pieces of paper and dealt with the Royal Mail on a daily basis for all our postal requirements. I liaised with the Marketing team at HQ to ensure their campaigns were sent out on time, I was responsible for sending out individual sample copies of our journals to customers worldwide, and logged any returns. I also kept records of employees holidays, sickness and hours.
Now, as part of the small group of three Sales Development Managers, we are responsible for liaising with lots of areas of the business to help create training packs and toolkits for all of our products, services, processes and internal systems. We create presentations and cheat sheets for our systems and processes and these are all then used to train our sales teams and others team members worldwide. Part of our role is to travel to our designated locations and ensure that the teams are fully trained on the above which will allow the teams to make more sales.
When I joined, I think there were around 70 employees of which the majority were women; now the company has grown massively, and we have a huge worldwide presence.
A couple of memories that stand out for me are:
The leech – 2014 – team building in Malaysia: Wan decided that we would go into the forest in Malaysia as part of the team building activities. We had to swing through trees, jump into very small natural pools from a huge height and walk miles! When we got back to the dormers, I went for a shower, and saw a massive leech clung onto my side. I started screaming out and shouting for help as I thought it was going to drink all my blood. I started to feel a little faint; Sarjit came to my rescue and she managed to get the leech off using some special spray. It was tiny once it deflated…moral of the story: always tuck your ves
