PRODUCTION/OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT: AGENDA FOR THE '80s*

Abstract

It is customary at the beginning of a new decade to take stock, to assess the past, and to anticipate the future. Stock-taking discussions among production/ operations management (P/OM) specialists reveal the field to be at a critical point in its evolution. Just a few years ago many of us believed that P/OM had not gained the professional credibility accorded to other functionally related disciplines. Further efforts along the lines then being pursued seemed to hold small promise for improving the situation. If anything, the research directions and techniques in use throughout the field appeared to be widening the gap between what was perceived to be most important to operating managers and what P/OM had to offer.Evidence to support such a view was disturbingly plentiful. Many prominent graduate schools of business were eliminating production courses from their curricula because of the courses' unpopularity among students. Enrollments in remaining programs were small and declining. Nationwide, P/OM departments either disbanded or merged with other departments [2] [6] [25] [4] [28].However moribund its appearance a decade ago, P/OM has not outlasted its usefulness to management. Despite the stubborn efforts of senior managers to disregard operations, perhaps with the hope that they would eventually go away, this most central function of all business activities has recently become the focus of intense popular interest. America's much-discussed shortcomings in productivity and technological innovation, to name but two aspects of a complex problem, have been interpreted as signs of our declining competitive capability. After *Many of the ideas in this paper were drawn from the P/OM workshop at the 1980 AIDS meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada. Professors Miller and Graham took primary responsibility for organizing the workshop and for writing and editing the paper. Professors Freeland, Hottenstein, Maister, Meredith, and Schmenner developed panel statements and provided helpful overviews. The authors would like to express their appreciation to panelists and participants in the workshop for their important contributions and especially to Mr. John Young, President and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, for the very special part that he played. In any synthesis of the ideas of many there are likely to be disagreements and biases. Professors Miller and Graham take full responsibility for the views expressed in the paper without detracting from the significant contributions of the others involved.Subject Area: Production/Operations Management. 547

Operations management – from Taylor to Toyota – and Beyond?

“…Reviews of the content of operations management were conducted by a number of people including Buffa (1980) and Voss andnrds .,...,- Voss (1980) (1 984) and in the UK, the International Journal of Operations and Production Management. This strengthening of the identity of operations management in the 1980s led to a number of groups reviewing and developing the research agendas for the area (Chase 1980;Miller et al, 1981;Voss, 1984). Both Miller in the US and Voss in the UK developed very similar agendas; these are summarized in Table 2.…”

The evolution of the intellectual structure of operations management—1980–2006: A citation/co‐citation analysis

“…Over the decades, there have been many qualitative studies that attempted to identify the major knowledge groups in OM (Meredith, 1979;Buffa, 1980;Chase, 1980;Miller et al, 1981;Mabert, 1982;Hill et al, 1988Hill et al, -1989Amoako-Gyampah and Meredith, 1989;Meredith and Amoako-Gyampah, 1990;Neely, 1993;Voss, 1984;Scudder and Hill, 1998;Pannirselvan et al, 1999;Gupta et al, 2006). Most of them, however, were focused on a particular journal, setting (manufacturing, services, practice), research method, or type of outlet (e.g., dissertations).…”

Editorial: Empirical elephants—Why multiple methods are essential to quality research in operations and supply chain management

“…For example, Miller and Graham (1981) synthesized the thoughts of a number of OM faculty in setting an agenda that called for OM researchers to leave their offices more often to observe the world around them and to address broader issues. Observing that OM researchers had little experience with such an approach, the authors suggested collaboration with researchers from other areas, particularly organizational behavior and business policy (p. 568).…”