الزامات دانش مدیریت عملیات و مدیریت زنجیره تأمین

Although knowledge in operations and supply-chain management (O&SCM) has advanced substantially during the last six decades, our community has not fully utilized the potential for radical innovations. We identify two sets of opportunities for pursuing radical innovations. First, there is an opportunity to pursue all phases of science, including exploratory and qualitative research, developing theories, causation and internal validity, and testing models and theories for external validity (the ability to generalize knowledge to other situations). This would broaden the domain covered by each research effort, minimize the bias resulting from the choice of research paradigm and research domain, to enhance external validity, and to minimize the gap between our research efforts and the real world our community seeks to reshape. Second, there is an opportunity to pursue multiple perspectives because a scientific conclusion valid for a narrow domain may prove to be partially true or even false if one obtains multiple perspectives. Multiple perspectives can be obtained by investigating different parts of the system, by employing different methods of analysis, by using different sources of data, or by using different subsets of the same data. Developing scientific knowledge requires pursuit of all phases of science and of multiple perspectives. In a separate paper, we propose and analyze ways to accomplish it.

We know that management, like engineering and medicine, is to some extent an art and that its effectiveness depends on advances in the science of management just as the effectiveness of engineering depends on advances in physical and chemical sciences and the effectiveness of medicine depends on advances in biological sciences. We also know that any scientific knowledge must be based on the right questions and must have internal validity (assignment of causes to effects) as well as external validity (the ability to generalize knowledge to other situations). The phases for pursuing science include conducting exploratory and qualitative research, developing theories, determining causation and ensuring internal validity, and ensuring external validity by testing models and obtaining multiple perspectives. Langley et al. (1987, p. 5) emphasized that the processes of discovery and the processes of verification are intimately connected and added (p. 3), “What distinguishes science from other works of human imagination is precisely the insistence on testing, on subjecting hypotheses to the most intense scrutiny with the help of empirical evidence.” Scientific analysis in the social sciences and the science of management differs from the scientific analysis in natural sciences like physics in two aspects. First, in natural sciences, the underlying laws do not change over time though our understanding of them evolves continuously. In the social sciences and the science of management, the concerned domain itself changes over time. Second, natural sciences deal with homogeneous entities and follow “the law of uniformity of nature,” while many parameters in the science of management differ from firm to firm and from one individual's mindset to another's.

We have two sets of opportunities for radical innovations in operations and supply-chain management (O&SCM): pursuing all phases of science and multiple perspectives. Multiple perspectives have the potential for obtaining new insights and for finding a new paradigm (a new punctuated equilibrium) in research, in the system being investigated, or in both. The potential for obtaining new insights from multiple perspectives is high when the domain of the system being studied is wide, the system has a high level of complexity (interdependence of elements), the rate of endogenous or exogenous change in the system or its environment is high, or the economic presence and impact across multiple organizations of the system or phenomenon being studied is substantial. In a separate paper (Singhal and Singhal, 2011), we propose and analyze specific steps for pursuing all phases of science, including multiple perspectives. These steps include organization of networks of research teams, the roles of outliers in radical innovation and risk management, analyses of industries with unusual characteristics, and the roles of meta-analysis and synthesis of published works.