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0272-6963/02/$ see front matter 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
thanks to Tom and Art, my duties were mainly limited to editorial direction, with occasional promotion.
I largely continued the associate editors and advisors
I inherited from Tom and Art, making minor changes
over the years as circumstances dictated. Also, Art
continued his involvement with JOM for a few more
years as our Tutorials Editor. The first issue of Vol.
13 appeared in July 1995 and my contract with Elsevier was originally scheduled to terminate in January
2000. However, I was asked by Elsevier to continue
for two more years, and agreed, so now my final issue
(of papers I processed) will be Vol. 20, No. 6 at the
end of 2002. However, Rob Handfield will start taking
all new submissions starting this January, so 2002 is
a transition year for both of us. Adopting Robs new
policy of requiring that paper revisions be completed
within a year, I will continue to handle the revisions
of papers I processed until the end of 2002.
We start with the past, our first editor, Lee Krajewski, and finish with Rob Handfield, our future editor
for a prospective on what is in store for JOM.
J. Meredith
Babcock Graduate School of Management
Wake Forest University, P.O. Box 7659,
3109 Worrell Professional Center, Winston-Salem
NC 27109, USA
Tel.: +1-336-758-4467; fax: +1-336-758-4514
PII:S0272-6963(01)00082-1
1. The beginning
In the 1950s, our profession was highly descriptive in nature, building upon the early works of Adam
Smith, Charles Babbage, and Frederick Taylor (Buffa,
1980). The field of operations management as defined
by the early textbooks was also broad. Text titles often used the words industrial management and the
contents included chapters on personnel management,
finance, marketing, organization, and general management. Research was limited to time and motion studies, plant layout, simple EOQ models, and descriptive
reports of how production systems actually worked.
In the 1960s, a major change took place in our
profession. As Buffa (1980) puts it, the savior that
rescued the field from extinction was the development of Management Science/Operations Research
(MS/OR). It provided the scientific methodology that
opened the door to a more rigorous attack on research issues, and it provided us with researchable
topics for many years to come. The tools were powerful but the models often exceeded our capability to
solve them. Nonetheless, we found ingenious ways to
solve complicated problems by devising heuristics or
by boiling down a non-linear equation into a set of
simple-to-calculate linear rules. We were enamored
by the potential for these tools and sought to solve all
of production managements problems with them.
2. A revelation
In the 1970s, we received a wake-up call. Armed
with the MS/OR tools, we sought tractable problems that the tools could solve. We shied away from
problems with messy behavioral implications: our solutions were exact and our objective functions were
clearoften to minimize costs. We built upon other
models reported in the literature, often providing minor advantages in problem scope or solution speed.
In our drive to conduct academically respectable research we lost touch with reality. The wake-up call
came when state legislatures and other constituents
of business schools demanded relevancy in what we
taught in our classes and what we were giving back to
the practicing community by way of useful research
findings. We found ourselves in a position where our
research experiences and what we taught in the classroom (except perhaps in Ph.D. programs) were on divergent paths. We did not have a good idea of what
was happening in the real world, and many of us did
not care. In fact, Management Science had two series:
theory and applications. In the minds of many, publishing a paper in the Theory series was better than publishing one in the Applications series. The image of
doing academic research became one of donning a lab
coat and performing research in a sterile environment,
using high-powered mathematics to uncover truth in
well-defined solution spaces. In this time frame, many
solutions were generated for trivial problems (in a
mangers mind).
It was in the decade of the 1970s that the field had
an identity crisis. Some might argue that it still does.
Nonetheless, operations research was getting some
bad press because of the issue of relevancy, even
though major contributions to society were made in
several areas, including military logistics and airline
scheduling. We tried to distinguish between operations management, which addresses the operating
problems of managers who are responsible for the
direction and control of the processes that transform
inputs into products and services (Krajewski and
Ritzman, 2001), and operations research, which provides rational bases for decision-making by seeking to
understand and structure complex situations and to use
this understanding (often through the use of analytical
and numerical techniques) to predict system behavior
and improve system performance (Informs Online, 21
September 2001). Many of the problems addressed by
operations researchers are in the same domain as those
addressed by operation management researchers. The
distinction between the two areas of interest is often
blurry in the eyes of managers and academics in other
areas of interest. I must confess that sometimes I need
to rub my eyes a little, too. When it comes to research,
the two interest areas are inextricably entwined, as
they should be. Operations management needs an arsenal of tools to analyze significant operating problems.
2.1. Another beginning
The pressures from constituents to be relevant in
our teachings and the pressures to publish academically respectable research studies forced the field
to take a hard look at what it was doing. Our roots
came from the rigorous discipline of MS/OR and a
decision-making orientation, but our future was in
expanding our knowledge of real operations issues
and embracing new methodologies. We needed a respectable publication outlet for research that was not
only academically sound, but focused on real operations issues. We were fortunate that APICS stepped
up to the plate and provided the resources and support for introducing a new journal in the field at a
time when a number of respectable outlets were already well established. None of them were addressing
the needs in my inaugural editorial that I alluded to
earlier. Bill Lee, then at the University of Houston
and a member of the Academic Liaison Committee
of APICS, and Gary Landis, then president-elect of
APICS, were instrumental in establishing the financial
foundations for the new journal. Along with Bill and
Gary, Elwood Buffa, Jeff Miller, and Gerry Strickland
were members of the Editorial Policy Board. After I
was appointed the editor, I invited Vince Mabert, Jack
Meredith (the same one who is now retiring as editor), Ken Ramsing, Larry Ritzman, Randall Schuler,
and Earle Steinberg (who became editor after my
term ended) to join the first team of associate editors. Together we marched forward, and Journal of
Operations Management (JOM) was born in August
1980.
The 1980s saw the field of operations management
develop into an exciting area in which to do research,
with JOM at the forefront. In the first issue, Buffa
(1980) reminded us that we did not know very much
about the way subsystems in operations, such as inventory, scheduling, aggregate planning, quality, and
planning and control, relate to each other. He encouraged us to focus more on strategic planning, positioning strategy, location choice, and subsystem linkages
in detailed planning areas, in both manufacturing and
service environments. Dick Chase (1980) noted that
our research to date had been micro oriented and
3. Many opportunities
During the latter part of the 1980s and all through
the 1990s the field of operations management was exposed to a host of research opportunities. The growth
of the Internet and the speed of modern computers
enabled expanded access to information and the implementation of methodologies that heretofore were
considered impractical because of lengthy execution times. Beyond the opportunities made available
by the surge in technology, researchers began to attack non-traditional OM problems. For example, a
greater concern for the environment spawned research
efforts into green planning and control systems that
monitor and control industrial waste as well as remanufacturing issues that impact manufacturing processes
and inventories. In addition, the advent of enterprise
resource planning (ERP) systems drove home the need
for operations support systems that recognize information flows from various functional areas; it also created
an interest in discovering the characteristics of firms
that found such systems beneficial and how they were
implemented.
Perhaps the greatest impact on the operations management research stream in this time frame was supply chain management. We realized that what we had
before studied for single firms should now be examined from the perspective of a chain of firms. Material
and information dependencies between firms brought
on a great number of interesting issues ranging from
the strategic level to the operating level. Empirical researchers as well as modelers have worked on issues
in supply chain management and generated many papers on the topic. For example, we have seen studies
relating to flexibility in supply chains, buyersupplier
power, inventory replenishment, and the bull whip effect, just to name a few. Toward the end of the 1990s,
the demand for faculty with research expertise in supply chains and modeling increased significantly. This
decade saw an increase in the appreciation of MS/OR
4. The future
The decade of the 1990s fostered a resurgence of the
importance of operations management in the eyes of
the practitioner. The popular press was full of instances
where Cinderella dot-com companies were failing because they did not match the importance of operations
with that of marketing. As I reflect on the inaugural
editorial and the three needs I mentioned, I do believe
we have made progress. As a field of researchers, we
are indeed more relevant by virtue of the problems we
address. Our thrust into empirical research has helped
in this regard. Further, we have done a better job of
putting the word management back into operations
management.
As for truly interdisciplinary research, I think we
still have a long way to go. We have placed more
effort on expanding the boundaries of our problems
to include other functional areas, but that is not really
interdisciplinary research. My suspicion is that we
could revisit this discussion 10 years from now and
similar conclusions would be drawn. Part of this problem is the way academics tend to align themselves
and publish in the journals their institutions consider
important for tenure and promotion. These journals
are traditionally aligned by functional area and tend
to have difficulty evaluating research that cuts across
those traditional lines. JOM is in a position to foster
this research as a journal, but the hurdles are big.
As a field, operations management should not focus on empirical research only, or MS/OR modeling
only. Neither avenue of research by itself provides
what we need to do. Empirical research is appropriate for understanding what is currently happening in
our field. However, by virtue of the fact that it bases
its findings on current field data, it is limited to what
the practicing community is already doing, which may
not be the best that can be done. We will always be
behind the practicing communitys learning curve if
we stop there. On the other hand, MS/OR modeling
is useful for providing the means for making rational
decisions, however, its findings are often limited to
very stringent conditions that make general applications difficult. Too often the focus is narrow, and the
References
Buffa, E.S., 1980. Research in operations management. Journal of
Operations Management 1 (1), 17.
Dick Chase, R.B., 1980. A classification and evaluation of research
in operations management. Journal of Operations Management
1 (1), 914.
Krajewski, L.J., Ritzman, L.P, 2001. Operations Management:
Strategy and Analysis, 6th Edition. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle
River, NJ.
Lee Krajewski
College of Business Administration
University of Notre Dame, P.O. Box 0399
Notre Dame, IN 46556-0399, USA
Tel.: +1-219-631-9062
E-mail address: krajewski.2@nd.edu
(L. Krajewski)
PII:S0272-6963(01)00083-3
1. Introduction
When Jack Meredith invited me to write this short
piece on research in operations management, I took the
opportunity to reflect on what I have seen in my nearly
25 years as a professor of operations management and
as the co-editor of Journal of Operations Management (JOM) from 1993 to 1995. My goal in writing
this is to be provocative without being offensive, and
hopefully add some value to our profession. I came
up with five principles that I hope will challenge the
new editorial board and the community of researchers
in operations management as a whole to continue to
pursue excellence in our research. I, thereby, nail my
five principles to the door of this journal.
ity circles, OPT, and Advanced Planning and Scheduling systems, for the most part, the operations management research community (and JOM in particular) has
avoided this snake oil sales syndrome. Do we have the
right precautions in place for us to avoid selling snake
oil (or St. Johns Wort) in our journals? Do we have
the right review process?
1.2. Principle 2: do not miss the penicillin
In contrast to the above point, some might suggest
that we have been too cautious. It took medical researchers a long time to figure out that penicillin mold
could fight infection. Would operations management
researchers find the operations penicillinor would
we reject it because it is outside of our narrow research
methods and paradigms? Where are the tiny spores of
ideas that need to be cultured and allowed to grow into
full-fledged theories?
An acquaintance of mine works with a pyramidselling organization to sell high-priced vitamins and
natural food supplements with outrageous claims.
One of the food supplements is St. Johns Wort, which
is claimed to have health benefits such as relief from
anxiety and mild-depression. One website listed the
following internal uses for St. Johns Wort: AIDS,
anxiety, cough, depression, diarrhea, dysmenorrhea,
fatigue, flu, gout, grief, herpes, HIV, hydrocephalus,
insomnia, irritability, jaundice, menopause, neuralgia,
rheumatism, ulcers, viral infections, arthritis, backache, bruises, burns, electric shock, hemorrhoids, hysteria, nerve pain, neuralgia, paralysis, rheumatism, sciatica, sunburn, tumors, varicose veins, and wounds.
However, recent research suggests that St. Johns Wort
has potentially serious interactions with other drugs
and is not considered effective (Health Central, 2001;
Featured Herb Review on St. Johns Wort, 2001). Evidently, some people promoting St. Johns Wort were
motivated by financial incentives, which led them to
hyperbole, self-deception, and deceptive advertising.
They did not examine their assumptions and were
uncritical of the facts. Borrowing a term from the
Federal Reserve Chair, they were guilty of irrational
exuberance. While some might question the hyperbole surrounding some operations topics such as qual-
Arthur V. Hill
Operations & Management Science Department
Curtis L. Carlson School of Management
University of Minnesota, 321 19th Avenue South
Room 3-140, Minneapolis
MN 55455-0413, USA
Tel.: +1-612-624-4015; fax: +1-612-624-8804
E-mail address: ahill@csom.umn.edu (A.V. Hill)
PII:S0272-6963(01)00084-5
2. The bad
On the other hand, one of my top goals when taking
over the journal has not seen much progress. It was
to encourage professors to get out of their office and
go into the real world to develop relevant, managerial
theory instead of solving hypothetical problems with
sophisticated mathematical models. What I had hoped
for was more case and field studies, action research,
qualitative studies, ethnographies, grounded theory.
What I see instead are more survey studies: sending
out scores of questionnaires to managers and developing managerial theory based on the responses. I
have not been able to get very many professors out of
3. The successful
Submit only appropriate papers: ones that are empirical (clearly based on the real world, even if no
numerical data are used) and develop management
theory. Even after 7 years, I still reject 30% of the
papers that come in because they do not seem to
know what JOM publishes. I see papers full of mathematical theorems, consulting assignments, plant
tours, essays, novels, and all else.
Expect to go through the full editorial process. In
7 years, and more than 700 papers, I have only
accepted a paper on first review twice. That means
your chances of getting your paper accepted in
the first round are less than a third of 1%. Expect
to have to revise the paper at least twice, once
for the reviewers and once for the associate edi-
10
1. Introduction
As I assume the role of the new editor-in-chief of
the Journal of Operations Management (JOM), I look
forward to continuing the standards of excellence set
by the previous editors of the journal. I also believe
it is worthwhile to reflect on where the field of operations management (OM) has come from, where we
are today, and the challenges that lie ahead of us as a
discipline. We find ourselves as a field in an interesting predicament: OM is faced with some of the most
interesting research questions in global business, yet
we have the least developed empirical knowledge base
of any of the academic business disciplines. This represents a challenge, but also a significant opportunity.
As we teach our doctoral students, the fundamental goal of any researcher is to create knowledge. By
knowledge, what we mean is structured information
that is readily accessible and, ideally, of lasting value.
Furthermore, this knowledge should be simple, concise and useful. This knowledge should enable the researcher to either explain the complex or to demonstrate the counter-intuitive. Ultimately, the challenge
of knowledge generation can be best described as a
search to find something new.
When the knowledge base of a field such as OM is
relatively immature, then researchers have an opportunity to significantly impact the direction of the field.
This is the position we find ourselves in today.
Knowledge generation is highly dynamic for a number of reasons. Some of these reasons are well known
to the reader and include changes in technology (both
hardware and software) and the emergence of new
problems. The changes occurring in the field of OM in
the last 5 years have probably been more dramatic than
any other field in business, largely due to the forces of
globalization, information technology, and increased
recognition of the contribution of new product development, manufacturing and service operations to the
competitiveness of organizations. Equally important is
the combination of the increasing maturity of OM as
a field of study combined with the need to satisfy the
central mission of scholars and educators in our field.
In my mind, the most important contribution to knowl-
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exclusively; however, relatively few publish OM empirical articles exclusively. As such, my editorial policy is to publish research that is based on solid empirical methodologies based on the scientific method.
I will also select a group of well-trained associate
editors experienced in scientific methods of empirical research. The process for reviewing and accepting
manuscripts will also be modified somewhat, to ensure
that papers which are not methodologically rigorous
are caught earlier in the review process, as opposed to
later (I will review the relevant changes at a later time).
It should be noted that empirical research in
OM spans a broad diversity of methods, including qualitative approaches (structured and unstructured interviews, coding and matrix analysis),
meta-analysis, critical event techniques, simulation,
quasi-experiments, lab studies, and data collection using the World Wide Web. In each case, the nature of
the problem should drive the research method chosen.
I believe that a diversity of research approaches is not
only appropriate, but absolutely necessary for a journal such as JOM to contribute to the academic field.
The research question and the underlying body of
theory in the area should drive the research approach.
Many empirical methods are dismissed as soft by
some OM researchers, (in that they do not fall into the
traditional rubric of operations research and quantitative methods). In some respects, based on some of the
less rigorous work published up to now, I might have
to agree. However, my position is that a solid set of
precedents exists for empirical methods which must
be utilized to drive methodological rigor into OM empirical research. If there is any weakness to the recent
set of OM empirical research publications, it is that
they suffer from poor research and sampling designs,
or worse yet, poor underlying theory development.
The first problem has been identified by a number of
researchers (e.g. Malhotra and Grover, 1998), but remains a consistent problem in the field. One of my
editorial goals will be to raise the bar on methodological rigor for publications in JOM. The second
problem, lack of poor theory development, is due in
my opinion to the inexperience of the first generation
of OM empirical researchers. While early attempts focused more on descriptive approaches to OM, the next
generation of published research must build a solid
theoretical foundation for hypothesis creation, testing,
and validation.
into a field of scientific investigation. Researchers often discuss the fact that OM is a field that is action
oriented but lacks a unifying theory. The researcher
would be very pressed to identify a true theory
in OM (Dubin, 1969). Often, this lack of theories
has forced researchers in our field to borrow theories from other fields such as organizational behavior,
marketing and strategy. By focusing on theory, more
specifically good theory, I believe OM researchers
can confront many of the problems faced by managers
and help them to solve their problems, thus, rediscovering the dictum of Lewin (1945) and re-iterated by
Van De Ven (1989) that nothing is so practical as a
good theory.
In the remainder of this introduction, I will briefly
describe my personal views on how I believe OM research should be conducted and effectively communicated to other scholars. Specifically, I will provide
some guidelines for producing a high quality piece of
research, as well as criteria for effective communication of the results to the OM community. In doing so I
do not mean to imply that articles which do not meet
these criteria are not relevant or worthwhile; however,
they are not likely to end up being published in the
JOM under my editorship over the next 5 years!
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Robert Handfield
College of Management
North Carolina State University, CB 7229
Raleigh, NC 27695-7229, USA
Tel.: +1-919-515-4674; fax: +1-919-515-6943
E-mail address: robert handfield@ncsu.edu
(R. Handfield)
PII:S0272-6963(01)00086-9