Operations management writ large

• Date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1094
• Author: Tyson R. Browning
• Published date: 01 July 2020

EDITORIAL

Operations management writ large

1|INTRODUCTION

Since the beginning, humans have worked, and many have

sought to do so more productively. Although one can point

to many earlier innovations in management, scientific man-

agement has its roots in mechanical engineering in the

1880s from the techniques of Frederick Taylor (Crainer,

2003; Drucker, 1993; Kanigel, 1997; Taylor, 1903, 1911). In a

natural progression from Adam Smith (1776) and his prede-

cessors, who observed the benefits of labor specialization,

Taylor advocated for the separation of managers (not just

supervisors, but planners and schedulers) from other

workers, making management a technical discipline. He

also sought to increase the productivity of workers and

machinery by observing, measuring, and developing theories

about the best ways of doing work. Although many of

Taylor's specific recommendations have not endured, his sci-

entific approach underlies much of the research output in

the management academy, which established a scholarly

perspective by the 1920s (the first business journal appeared

in 1928) and began to flourish post-World War II.

In a development that would not surprise Adam

Smith, the management academy subsequently divided

into specialized disciplines—such as strategy, leadership,

entrepreneurship, marketing, human resources,and infor-

mation systems—and drew in other relevant ones such as

finance and accounting. Along the way, operations man-

agement (OM) research occurred under various monikers,

including factory management, production management,

industrial management, management science, operations

research, and decision sciences.

1

To this day, and more so

than other management disciplines, OM scholars work in

academic departments with highly varied names and par-

ticipate in a wide variety of professional societies and con-

ferences with diverse emphases and perspectives.

Meanwhile, relevant research on managing work has con-

tinued in the fields of industrial and mechanical engineer-

ing, as well as in engineering management. Over time,

conceptions of the scopes and boundaries of these disci-

plines and nearby fields have evolved.

So, what is the scope of the OM discipline now, at the

40th anniversary of the Journal of Operations Management

(JOM)? This question is important to consider when deter-

mining what topics should fit into JOM, but it is also

essential to the community of OM scholars. I suspect that

some contemporary conceptions of the scope and extent

of OM are too narrow. Herein, I advance a more generous

view of OM, one that acknowledges the management of

all of the work required to operate an enterprise

2

(and

across supply chains)—awork-based view.

2|SOME CONVENTIONAL VIEWS

OF OM

In his famous book, Taylor (1911) stated that its ambi-

tious purpose was “to show that the fundamental princi-

ples of scientific management are applicable to all kinds

of human activities, from our simplest individual acts to

the work of our great corporations.”Ironically, this per-

vasive view may have impeded the emergence of OM as a

field, because, until the mid-1950s, many still equated

OM with “virtually the entire field of industrial

management,”and many OM textbooks included chap-

ters on “personnel management, finance, marketing,

organization and general management”(Buffa, 1980,

p. 1). By 1980, on the first page of the inaugural issue of

JOM, Buffa regarded OM as having finally emerged as “a

functional field of management.”Ten years later, how-

ever, Meredith and Amoako-Gyampah (1990) noticed

that many academicians affiliated with OM still had trou-

ble defining its boundaries. As Hayes (2000, p. 105) later

remarked, the discipline of OM does not have clear

limits, because operations occur everywhere; they

“encompass most of the resource-consuming and value-

creating activities within a company.”

Over the past 40 years, OM has taken on a wider view

with respect to areas such as services, behavioral opera-

tions, sustainability, and supply chain management

(SCM). Many in OM have embraced SCM especially—

even though it is not just “within a company”—

incorporating it into OM curricula or even rebranding

their departments as SCM. Operations and supply chain

management (OSCM) has become a common term. While

this embrace represents a welcome increase in scope and

level of analysis, it has also transferred some momentum

and attention away from managing internal operations.

How do our teaching materials define the discipline? Let

us consider some examples. According to Jacobs and

Chase (2017, p. 3), OSCM is “the design, operation, and

DOI: 10.1002/joom.1094

494 © 2020 Association for Supply Chain Management, Inc. J Oper Manag. 2020;66:494–500.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/joom