Guest editorial

Citation

Demeter, K. and Boer, H. (2011), "Guest editorial", International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 31 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijopm.2011.02431eaa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Volume 31, Issue 5

About the Guest EditorsKrisztina Demeter, MSc (Economics), PhD (Business Administration), has been Associate Professor since 2002 at Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary. She has around 120 publications, 20 of which in English journals or books. She has responsibilities in the European Operations Management Association (EurOMA), the International Society for Inventory Research and the Hungarian Association for Logistics, Purchasing and Inventory Management. Her research focuses on manufacturing strategy and supply chain management. She takes part in international (International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS) and Global Manufacturing Research Group (GMRG)) and Hungarian research programs (e.g. research on competitiveness, supplier capabilities in the automotive industry). She has received the Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences twice.

Harry Boer is a Professor of Strategy and Organization at Aalborg University, Denmark. He holds an MSc and PhD, both in Management Engineering. Harry Boer has a long record of publications in the field of the management and organization of production management strategy, innovation and management, and has won several best paper awards. He has actively been involved in the development and management of the IMSS since 1992. In 1988, he was a Research Fellow at the University of Loughborough Business School, a Visiting Professor at the same University in 1995, and a Visiting Professor at Stavanger University from 2005 to 2008. He has been a Board Member of the Continuous Innovation Network from 2000 (chair 2000-2004) and the EurOMA from 1994 to 2007, and has chaired the annual EurOMA Doctoral Seminar since its inception in 2002.

Operations strategy is an important area of practice and research. Since the seminal manufacturing strategy articles of Skinner (1969, 1974) and the books by Hayes and Wheelwright (1984) and Hill (1989), the number of papers, articles and books on the topic has grown exponentially and led to significant theoretical progress. In the process, manufacturing was taken out of its isolation. Recently, we rather use the term operations to include supply chain management, quasi-manufacturing services, e-business, service operations and the links between manufacturing and other functions, such as new product development, purchasing, marketing/sales and logistics.

At the same time, the empirical field has gone through a range of changes, including internationalization of operations and development of global operations networks, which has led to unprecedented levels of complexity, variety and dynamics operations managers have to deal with in their strategic considerations and decisions (Ferdows, 1997; Shi and Gregory, 1998).

In addition, the variety of theoretical lenses used to study operations strategy content and process has increased considerably (St Johns et al., 2001) and currently includes the resource-based view of the firm (Schroeder et al., 2002), transaction cost economics (Grover and Malhotra, 2003) and information processing theory (Barnes et al., 2003), in addition to established operations and strategic management approaches and contingency theories of organization (Souza and Voss, 2008). Emerging topics related to the implementation of operations strategy include the role of social capital and networks (Bendoly et al., 2006), sustainability (Sarkis, 2001) and corporate social responsibility (Angel and Klassen, 1999; Slack et al., 2010).

One of the major weaknesses in the field is that, in spite of the increasing variety of ways of organizing operations, operations strategy theory is relatively a contextual and largely fails to take into account the influence of factors such as company size, industry type, company structure (plant, network), internationalization and globalization, culture and cultural differences (especially in global manufacturing networks) and differences in investment potential between established and emerging economies (Souza and Voss, 2008). Furthermore, in spite of recent efforts, the process of operations strategy development and implementation, which is also highly context dependent, is still relatively under-researched.

These deficiencies led us to call for papers with the theme “operations strategy and context”. We received 40 submissions in September 2009. About 20 of them were desk rejected; the rest went through the ordinary double-blind review process. Finally, five reached the level to be published in this special issue.

About the papers in this issue

There are three major international surveys in the field of operations. The GMRG, with a somewhat higher American participation, is the oldest one, collecting data since the late 1980s (Whybark, 1997). The IMSS was born in the early 1990s (Lindberg et al., 1998). A relatively large proportion of the IMSS data are usually from Europe. Finally, the High Performance Manufacturing (HPM) Group started a bit later, in the middle of the 1990s with a very concentrated dataset from five countries: the USA, Japan, the UK, Germany and Italy (Schroeder and Flynn, 2001), which was gradually enlarged during the various rounds of the survey. Although not by design, each group is represented in this special issue, altogether with four papers, thus it is truly an international arena we have here. Two of these papers analyze the connections between competitive priorities, manufacturing capabilities and operations performances, while the other two explore relations between operations strategy and national cultures.

David (Xiaosong) Peng, Roger G. Schroeder and Rachna Shah explored the improvement and innovation capabilities of companies, two crucial capabilities in the fast-changing world we live in today. Using the HPM dataset, they tested the relationship between these capabilities and competitive priorities with the idea that there can be different kinds of fit among priorities and capabilities and that the level of these fits will determine the level of operational performance. Fit 1, improvement and innovation practices mediate the relationships between competitive priorities and operational performance. Fit 2, competitive priorities moderate the impact of improvement and innovation capabilities on the operational performance. The authors found support for the mediation hypothesis but had to reject the moderation hypothesis on the basis of their data.

Mattias Hallgren, Jan Olhager and Roger G. Schroeder revisited the “evergreen” issue of cumulative capabilities. Applying the HPM dataset, they focused their attention on the relationships between and among quality, delivery, cost efficiency and flexibility capabilities. They formulated three different models of capability development and tested which model fits their data best. The results provide empirical support for the cumulative relationship between quality and delivery capabilities. Furthermore, confirming Größler and Grübner (2006), cost efficiency and flexibility capabilities do not build upon one another but are developed in parallel.

Alessandra Vecchi and Louis Brennan visited the boundaries of operations strategy by analyzing the impact of national culture on quality management borrowing the Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness framework as the source of national culture information and the IMSS data for quality management-related information including quality priorities, practices and performances layers. They found clear links between culture and quality management.

Frank Wiengarten, Brian Fynes, Mark Pagell and Seán de Búrca investigated if, and how, national culture affects the efficacy of investments in manufacturing practices. They took the national characteristics identified by Hofstede (1980) and, using GMRG data, analyzed how, and to what extent, culture moderates the relationships between investments in manufacturing practices, in particular plant and equipment as well as quality management practices, on the one hand, and operational performance, on the other. As with the previous study, these authors also found some important relationships.

The fifth paper, written by Partha Priya Datta and Rajkumar Roy is based on two exploratory case studies from the defence industry, which were focused on integrated product-service bundles. The paper presents a conceptual framework for operations strategy in performance-based industrial product-service systems that will help manufacturing companies configure their operations to support the effective delivery of integrated product/service offerings.

We are very grateful to more than 40 reviewers who took the effort to carefully go through the papers and gave sometimes tough but always useful feedback to the authors which increased the quality of the papers significantly. We also thank the journal editors (both the old and the new team) for letting us guest edit this issue. We hope this strategy special issue presents interesting reading.