تجزیه و تحلیل رفتار مبتنی بر کانال های انتشار دانش در مدیریت عملیات

One essential requirement for the development and vitality of a discipline is a network of channels for knowledge dissemination. These channels, such as scholarly journals, furnish not only a means for knowledge sharing, but also for knowledge generation by the discipline's community of researchers. In the field of operations management (OM), there have been several studies that have sought to rank journals relevant to OM research, using opinion surveys, citation analyses, and author affiliations. However, each of these methods has some limitations. This paper adopts a new approach for discerning journal publication patterns in the OM field. It is based on an examination of the actual publishing behaviors of all full-time, tenured OM researchers at a sizable set of leading research universities in the US. This behavior-based methodology provides three metrics that individually, and in tandem, give a basis for rating publication outlets for OM research in terms of their relative importance. The ratings can be used by scholars and administrators to assist in monitoring, disseminating, and evaluating OM research outlets.

A perennial topic of interest and importance for any academic discipline is the nature of knowledge dissemination by and to its stakeholders: principally researchers and educators, but also including practitioners, students, and administrators. This is evident from the volume of publications in OMEGA that have sought to define and evaluate channels of knowledge dissemination for various management disciplines in the past 15 years [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8] and [9]. Here, we focus on rating journals that publish operations management research, and do so by adopting a new methodology that is based on actual behaviors of operations management researchers. Knowledge dissemination is crucial for progress in a discipline. It allows ideas, perspectives, and findings to collide—often spawning new advances that would not otherwise exist. It also allows ideas, perspectives, and findings to coalesce—as part of the fulfilling discipline's mission of making sense out of phenomena of interest. This sense-making yields consensual foundations (i.e., instances of critical mass) that can underpin continued advances in the discipline's knowledge base. In considering the role of dissemination, several issues arise that can affect dissemination's value within a discipline. These include timing, concentration/dispersion patterns, target audiences, source options, content (e.g., its accuracy or utility), and channels for knowledge dissemination. Here, we focus on the issue of dissemination channels in the discipline of operations management (OM). Research in the knowledge management (KM) field suggests that there are two basic types of dissemination: one as an aspect of emitting knowledge outside of a community (e.g., of a discipline's researchers), and the other as an aspect of assimilating knowledge within the community [10]. KM research has also found that, in either case, dissemination activity can be performed in ways that result in the community being more productive (increasing the ratio of output to input), more agile (increasing alertness and response ability), more innovative (structuring resources and the processes that use them in new, value-increasing ways), and/or more reputable (increasing perceptions of trust and quality). This is known as the PAIR model, which links Productivity, Agility, Innovation, and Reputation to the performance and competitiveness of an organization [10].1 It follows that dissemination channels for researchers who comprise an academic community, such as OM, can influence whether the community is more or less productive, agile, innovative, and/or reputable—depending on the collective nature of those channels. Among the various channels for disseminating OM research, there are books, monographs, dissertations, Web postings, working papers, conference presentations and proceedings, video recordings, and journals. Here, we focus on peer-reviewed journals that OM researchers use as conduits for supplying knowledge to others. Secondarily, these journals tend also to be those sought by OM-knowledge consumers as knowledge sources. The central purpose of this paper is to identify important OM-publishing venues—those where experienced OM researchers, representative of high-stature research universities, collectively tend to concentrate their journal publications. Using actual behaviors of OM faculty members, we gauge the importance (and relative importance) of various journals as channels for knowledge dissemination. Resultant insights into the actual structure of OM dissemination channels offer several benefits for understanding the OM discipline. First, the pattern of dissemination behaviors gives individual OM scholars a sense of what have historically been the most important journals—as potential targets for placing their own research. Second, it gives OM researchers and teachers an indication of the most important journals to monitor as archives of progress in the OM field. Third, it gives administrators guidance in understanding the relative importance of alternative dissemination channels—as one possible basis for making decisions related to hiring, promotion, and merit review of OM faculty members. A fourth benefit is that the identification and rating of OM journal channels is grounded on actual dissemination behaviors, rather than the more conventional approach of aggregating subjective opinions. Finally, the resultant pattern of dissemination channels can shed some light on the substance of OM as a discipline. Section 2 furnishes a brief review and critique of prior efforts to understand dissemination channels for OM research. In Section 3, we describe the behavior-based methodology used here and how we apply it. Results appear in Section 4 along with a discussion of their implications. We conclude by pointing out limitations and possible variations of the study presented here.

Understanding the important channels for OM knowledge sharing and for fostering generation of new knowledge about OM is not an idle historical exercise. It contributes to the gravitas of OM as a discipline. It provides a map of the major channels available for scholarly participation in the OM field. This map shows key routes to travel in order to learn about OM advances of today and yesteryear. A well-grounded understanding of the most important sources, among the many possible sources, offers the prospect of more focused searches, a likelihood of more efficient traversal of the OM knowledge space, and some assurance that major avenues in that space will not be overlooked. This map helps budding researchers navigate the increasingly complex and diverse OM field, as they contemplate important venues for disseminating their work. One strategy is to aim for channels that are established as being the most important for the discipline. Such targeting provides feedback on what it takes to join in the knowledge flows that mark major progress in the field. Successes in these directions give the young researcher encouragement and confidence that his/her work is deemed by peers to be worthy of inclusion among the discipline's most important streams of research expression. Thus, a well-grounded understanding of the most important dissemination channels is vital for implementing such a strategy. This map guides administrators (and others such as funding agencies) who evaluate performance of individual, or departmental, contributions to the advance of OM. It does so by providing a picture of the most important, most visible, outlets for contributions. This picture is easily comprehended by persons who may well lack OM training and who may have never conducted OM research. When contributions must be evaluated in the short run (say, 1–4 years since acceptance or publication), meaningful citations to each individual contribution tend to be scarce. There has not yet been time for the contribution's eventual degree of impact to have become evident. In such evaluation situations, a well-grounded understanding of the most important journals in the OM field can guide an evaluator toward an assessment of the extent to which a researcher/department is in a position to make impacts via the major journals related to the field. Past efforts at rating or ranking OM research outlets give insights into certain aspects of journal importance—such as relevance, “quality,” or influence. In this paper, we directly examine the issue of journal importance in the context of OM, yielding a map that embodies a well-grounded understanding of OM knowledge dissemination channels. The adopted behavior-based methodology gives a multi-dimensional metric of journal importance in fostering progress in the OM discipline. This methodology sidesteps limitations inherent in prior rating studies. It identifies publication outlets where 90 full-time, tenured OM faculty members from (independently selected) leading research universities in the U.S. tend to collectively concentrate their journal publications. These persons are deemed to be representative of leading researchers in the OM field. We find that the greatest bulk of journal outlets used by the tenured OM researchers, over an extend time period, is comprised of journals wholly devoted to OM topics. This offers compelling confirmation that OM does not stand in the shadows of other disciplines, but is a strong discipline in its own right.