PRODUCTION/OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

Michael J. Showalter, Feature Editor, Florida State University

OM Research in the 21st Century

by Soumen Ghosh, Georgia Institute of Technology

The area of operations management (OM) is abundant with rich and challenging issues for research. In fact, the worldwide competitive environment in the manufacturing and service sectors has increased the relevance and importance of OM research. The implications of our research, therefore, should have far-reaching effects on improving industry practice towards achieving global competitiveness. While most of us take pride in this fact and believe that OM is critically poised to play an ever-increasing role in improving our competitive ability, we also need to constantly remind ourselves of the cold fact that we have not succeeded in this endeavor as much as we would like to believe. A major reason for this has to either lie with our disagreement over what should be the important and relevant issues for research in OM, or the importance, relevance, and practical aspects of the results of our research.

I happen to think that it is the latter. In my opinion, as a profession we are fairly close in agreement over what most of us think should be the important issues worthy of research in OM so as to make a meaningful contribution in improving our competitive position (there is bound to be some healthy debate on this--it goes with the territory of being in academe). Since the competitive environment is dynamic, most of us have tried to keep pace with the changes taking place in the field in recent years. Most of the recent debate on relevance and importance of our research seems to be targeted to methodological issues rather than topical. There is a recognition now of the need for empirically driven methodologies in OM so as to make our research more relevant to practice. This has led to discussions on alternative research paradigms in OM (Meredith et al., 1989). While the history of research in OM has largely been normative using quantitative modeling techniques, there are now several people in the field that have the proper training and background to conduct meaningful research using empirical methodologies, as well as many others who have been either expanding or reorienting their methodological thrust to include empirical components in their research. The question that follows is: if this trend is indeed in the right direction to make OM research more relevant to the real world, have the editorial policies of our mainstream journals changed to reflect this fact?

In order to investigate this issue a little further, I looked at the publication trend for the last five years in three of our mainstream journals: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE (MS), DECISION SCIENCES (DS), and JOURNAL OF OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT (JOM). There are, of course, many other excellent outlets of research publications in OM, but I only looked at these three because of their stature in our field. For each of these journals, the proportion of articles dealing with OM issues during each year is shown in column three of Table 1, which is then further categorized into three broad methodological areas. The optimization category includes articles which mainly deal with the development of optimal or optimum seeking methods for OM problems. The analytical category includes any other approaches that use analytical techniques to study the problem but does not solely concentrate on the development of optimization methods (e.g., simulation, application of queueing methodology, etc.). These two categories fall under the "artificial reconstruction of object reality" paradigm of Meredith et al. (1989). The empirical categorization includes all field, case, survey, focus group, experimental, panel, and interviewing methodologies, and falls in the "direct observation" as well as "people's perceptions" of object reality paradigms of Meredith et al. (1989). One can, of course, think of other ways of methodological categorization, but this approach was used to keep it simple. Literature review articles, erratum, and replies to notes and articles are not included in Table 1. Note that JOM is included from 1989 (it had joint issues for 1987 and 1988), and only the first half of 1993 is included for all journals.

Without any rigorous statistical analysis of the data given in Table 1, the pattern of publications in the three journals is as expected. The proportion of OM articles is highest in JOM, followed by DS and MS. JOM, of course, is dedicated to OM issues, but DS and MS are interdisciplinary in nature. The five to five-and-half year average of OM publications is somewhat higher in DS compared to MS. From a methodological standpoint, MS has the highest proportion of publications in the optimization category, while JOM has the least. Conversely, JOM has the highest proportion of articles in the empirical category while MS has the lowest. In both counts, DS falls in the middle. The pattern of publications also seems consistent with the editorial philosophy of the journals. The emphasis in the normative modeling approach in MS is clearly evident, in fact, all the empirical OM articles in MS were accepted by divisions other than the Manufacturing, Distribution, and Service Operations division (most often by the Organization Performance, Strategy, and Design division). The current editorial emphasis for DS is "relevance to managerial significance," and this is perhaps evidenced by a large number of articles using analytical tools other than purely optimum seeking methods as well as empirically driven approaches. JOM, on the other hand, has championed the importance of empirical-based research in recent years, and this is evidenced not only by the large proportion of publications in this category during the last four to five years but also demonstrates an increasing trend in recent years.

Clearly, JOM and DS are the best bets for research publications outlets for empirically driven research. There are, of course, a host of other journals that are also an excellent source for such work. However, the critical issue that we need to resolve is what orientation of research in OM is best for us (or most of us). Disagreement over research methodologies seems to have polarized the thinking process in many of us, leading to the formation of factions with partisan views. One group seems to think that empirical-based research is the only approach, while many others are of the opinion that normative approaches are the only worthwhile ones. This has led to the use of terminologies such as "hard" versus "soft" OM research, "left-brained" versus "right-brained" research, "rigorous" versus "nonsensical" research, etc., and in many cases, research that clearly the outcome from the "hammer looking for a nail"syndrome. What we need, of course, are contributions from researchers that use both sides of the brain; research that uses the appropriate methodology for the problem and leads to logical conclusions. Apart from the need for doing more empirical and integrative research, perhaps the richest source of synergism within OM research is the use of empirically driven validation of normative research. There is very little room for polarized and partisan thinking regarding research in OM if we are to catapult ourselves into the 21st century.

Reference

Meredith, J.R., A. Raturi, K. Amoako-Gyampah, and B. Kaplan, "Alternative research paradigms in operations," JOURNAL OF OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT, Vol. 8(4), October 1989, pp. 297-326.