Editorial

Citation

(2008), "Editorial", International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 28 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijopm.2008.02428aaa.001

Editorial

Editorial

The lead times in the publishing industry mean that we are putting together this first issue of Volume 28 of the International Journal of Operations and Production Management at the end of the summer of 2007. For the Operations Management community, and particularly those associated with IJOPM, this has seen the 14th Conference of the European Operations Management Association held in Ankara, Turkey and the annual meeting of the Academy of Management held in Philadelphia, USA. We are encouraged by the vigour and enthusiasm of the international OM research community that we see demonstrated at events such as these.

We start volume 28 with an issue of four papers. The factors that affect the research productivity of individuals in the field of operations is a subject that is dear to all our hearts, so it seems fitting to start the new volume with the manuscript by Smith, Fox, Park and Lee that examines this very issue. In earlier work that considered the international operations field, Babbar et al. (2000) studied research output from both individuals and institutions. By contrast, in this paper, Smith et al. focus solely on the individual, and examine the institutional factors that influence their research productivity. They collected the publication histories in ten core Operations journals over a 14-year period, of individuals with a terminal degree in operations and currently working as a faculty member in a US-university operations department. Their findings are thought-provoking. Indeed, the final stages of the review process for this paper involved some fascinating, editor-mediated, dialogue between authors and reviewers about the research findings. These suggest that individual productivity is most strongly impacted by the prestige (reputation and productivity) of the researcher's affiliation. Further findings relate to the prestige of the origin school (where the terminal degree was awarded) and to the productivity of the academic advisor. Differences between researchers in OM and OR were also investigated. Slack et al. (2004), famously identify the different objectives, motivations and timescales that exist between research and practice in OM, and at first sight it is not easy to see the implications for management practice that emerge from research such as this. However, the authors highlight the practical and professional benefits of being able to predict highly productive researchers, based on examination of relevant institutional factors.

High quality OM research is very often based on the successful application of an established theoretical framework. Following the recommendation by Bourne et al. (2003) for the wider application of the resource-based view (RBV) in OM research, in our next paper, Ordanini and Rubera use this to investigate the links between procurement capabilities, internet resources and firm performance. Having viewed previous studies on the goals of procurement, using the RBV, they identified two key procurement capabilities – one relating to process efficiency and the other to process integration. Still using the RBV approach, they conceptualized the internet as a set of resources; specifically as technological assets, skills and enabling intangibles. The empirical research that they used to test their theoretically derived hypotheses involved the computer-aided telephone enquiry (CATI) technique to survey firms in the Italian textile and clothing industry. Their findings shed light on the interactions between procurement capabilities, the internet and firm performance. A further point of interest for OM academics is the use of CATI to collect primary data. It is a survey approach that, in our experience, has not often been adopted in our field, and certainly it is a technique that appears only rarely in IJOPM. For the practitioner community, the findings of this paper provide guidance on how to exploit the potential of the internet in procurement.

Staying within manufacturing industry, and linking to previous work on the ever-changing global supply landscape (Lamming et al., 2000; Ettlie and Sethuraman, 2002), Reichhart and Holweg discuss the results of their investigation into co-located supplier clusters such as logistics centres or supplier parks. Using primary data from a series of semi-structured interviews within the automotive industry in Europe, triangulated with secondary data, they present a typology of co-located supplier clusters. Resonant of the previous paper in the issue, they go on to consider the relevance and use of various theoretical perspectives for examining these increasingly prevalent supply chain entities. In this respect, they build on the work of Sako (2003) and argue that aside from the development of modular supply, established theories, such as transaction cost economics and the knowledge exchange framework, are ill-equipped to explain co-located supplier clusters. This leads them to argue for a new theoretical lens through which such entities can be viewed. Whilst the focus of Reichhart and Holwegs' work is in the automotive industry, it seems clear that the research is of relevance to other manufacturing supply systems.

Moving away from manufacturing per se, our final paper by Johnston and Michel considers the consequences of an organisation's recovery procedures following service failure. They suggest that there are three distinct outcomes of recovery, with possibly the most obvious, and seemingly the most frequently discussed, being the impact of recovery on the customer. Thereafter, however, there are the often-overlooked impacts of recovery on the process itself and on the employee. Using empirical data from part of a wider survey of organisations in the UK on complaint management, the authors investigated the impact of the way service recovery is managed and executed on these three outcomes, and their relative impact on an organisation's financial performance. Whilst customer recovery is arguably the most prominent aspect of recovering from service failure, they find that the impact is actually greater on employees and process improvement than on customers. This challenges the widespread practice of focusing service recovery on pleasing the customer, as this ignores potentially more significant benefits to the organisation of a wider recovery focus. Thought provoking for OM scholars, the findings from this paper would suggest that there is a need for further research to extend our understanding of the impacts of service failure on organisations and to examine a wider range of options for recovery.

Editors' footnote

It is with great sadness that we have just learned of the recent death of Bob Lowson, Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management at Norwich Business School, University of East Anglia, UK. Bob was a supportive and enthusiastic member of the journal's editorial advisory board for a number of years, and an established academic authority in the Operations Management field. We would like to acknowledge his significant contribution to the journal over the years, as an author, a reviewer and, more recently as an EAB member. He will be sadly missed by the OM community.