Assessing the exchange of knowledge between operations management and other fields: Some challenges and opportunities

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2018.05.004
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Author: Jack R. Meredith,Alan Pilkington
• Date: 01 May 2018

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Operations Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jom

Assessing the exchange of knowledge between operations management and

other fields: Some challenges and opportunities

Jack R. Meredith

a,b,∗

, Alan Pilkington

a,b

a

Wake Forest University, 515 Robert Ct., Hillsborough, NC 27278, United States

b

Westminster Business School, University of Westminster, United Kingdom

ARTICLE INFO

Accepted by: S. de Treville.

Keywords:

Research

Knowledge exchange

Citations

Networks

Source journals

ABSTRACT

Addressing a suspicion that the field of Operations Management (OM) draws substantially more knowledge from

non-OM journals than those journals draw from OM journals in return, we studied the citations of the top 30

research journals of interest to our field. We conducted citation analyses of the three oldest OM journals over

three decades in comparison to the 27 other journals representing the fields of Management, Operations

Research/Management Science (OR/MS), Marketing, Practice, and Engineering. We examined both the entire

30-year period and then each decade separately. Our suspicions were confirmed—although citations from these

27 journals to these three OM journals have increased by a factor of 7 over the three decades, we in OM still cite

these journals about twenty-five times more often than they cite our journals, giving an indication of the

knowledge development and flows among these fields. We then describe some challenges for the field of OM in

providing more research knowledge to other fields but also some opportunities that OM should be able to

capitalize on, such as our historic ties to practice and our escalating research in strategic and organizational

issues.

1. Introduction

The field of Operations Management (OM) has substantially devel-

oped its research strength over the last four decades: At least five re-

search journals include “operations management”in their title, and

three of those are included in the FT50 list of premier journals. Other

OM journals include some specific element of the field in their title such

as supply chain, production, logistics, manufacturing, quality, dis-

tribution, scheduling, purchasing, materials, inventory, and so on.

Although the OM field's history dates back to Fred Taylor's “factory

management”in the late 1800s, the founding of peer-reviewed aca-

demic journals in OM only began in 1980.

More than a quarter century later, the OM field now can be con-

sidered as “mature,”according to the guidelines suggested by Nerur

et al. (2016, p. 1068) in presenting their citation study of the Strategic

Management Journal covering a similar period of time: “As an academic

field reaches maturity, it is common for scholars to undertake detailed

analyses of the field itself in order to delineate its domain, explain its

evolutionary patterns, identify significant intellectual influences, assess

its contributions, and plan its future.”Here we hope to analyze the

flows of knowledge between OM and its sister fields in both academia

and practice, since it informs our reflection on how the field has been

developing.

The OM field has historically been strongly focused on practice,

which in early years yielded research that aimed to solve practical

problems. Recently, however, we have joined our sister business dis-

ciplines in seeking to develop generalizable theories by borrowing

theory from other disciplines—management, management science/op-

erations research, marketing, engineering, practice—and using it for

developing insights and knowledge specific to OM. As Abbott (2001)

suggested, the process by which disciplines become established is a

social one where groups stake claims for tools, solutions, and concerns

as “experts.”

We begin by exploring how the knowledge transfer process between

OM and its sister fields has evolved over recent decades. Specifically,

we identify which fields, as represented by their journals, OM has

borrowed knowledge from over the last three decades and given

knowledge back to. As we observe these flows of knowledge, it informs

our reflection on how the field has been developing. This then gives

insight into the threats and opportunities that lie before us.

In contrast to Linderman's and Chandrasekaran's (2010) analysis of

the exchange of knowledge during the period 1998–2007 between OM

journals and our sister fields of management, marketing, and finance,

we examine all the references made in three base OM journals from the

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2018.05.004

Received 20 February 2018; Received in revised form 26 April 2018; Accepted 20 May 2018

∗

Corresponding author. Wake Forest University, 515 Robert Ct., Hillsborough, NC 27278, United States.

E-mail addresses: meredijr@wfu.edu (J.R. Meredith), a.pilkington@westminster.ac.uk (A. Pilkington).

Journal of Operations Management 60 (2018) 47–53

Available online 18 June 2018

0272-6963/ © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

T