تکامل ساختار فکری و عقلانی عملیات مدیریت-1980-2006: تحلیل گفته ها / هم استنادی

Citation analysis combined with a network analysis of co-citation data from three major operations management (OM) journals is used to reveal the evolution of the intellectual structure of the OM field between 1980 and 2006. This spans the entire time since the beginning of research journals specific to the field. Employing a bibliometric citation/co-citation analysis to investigate the foundations of the discipline enables a robust, quantitative approach to uncovering the evolution of research in OM. The study finds that the intellectual structure of the field made statistically significant changes between the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s and evolved from a pre-occupation with narrow, tactical topics toward more strategic, macrotopics, including new research methods and techniques. A factor analysis identifies the 12 top knowledge groups in the field and how they change over the decades. Illustrations of the structure of the co-citations representing the field are generated from a spring-embedded algorithm that is an improvement over the standard multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) approach to illustrating the knowledge groups

On the opening page of the first issue of the Journal of Operations Management (JOM), Buffa (1980, p. 1) declared that “The field of Operations Management has evolved from a purely descriptive origin through the Management Science/Operations Research phase, and is now in the process of finding itself as a functional field of management.” Later in the article, Buffa estimated the death of the descriptive phase as being 1961, and the end of the MS/OR phase as 20 years later, saying (1980, p. 2) “MS/OR methodology does not define the OM field nor point the way of the future.” and that now “we are emerging from the MS/OR phase into a clear recognition of OM as a functional field of management.” OM finally appears to be gaining momentum as a respected academic discipline (Ketokivi and Schroeder, 2004 and Pagell and Krause, 2004), largely through the availability of strong and respected OM-specific publication outlets. Thus, this may be a good time to re-evaluate the evolution of the field and its intellectual structure since Buffa’s (1980) evaluation almost three decades ago. To achieve this, we set three goals for our research: 1. To identify the major publications/citations in our field and their evolving research utility over the decades. As other fields have found, we expect the citations to include books as well as articles from journals outside the field. 2. To identify and illustrate the major knowledge groups in the field and the general relationships between them. 3. To determine and illustrate the evolution of these knowledge groups over the decades in terms of their research popularity and the general relationships between them. The data source for the study is the set of approximately 75,000 citations listed in the three oldest primary journals in operations management: JOM, the International Journal of Operations and Production Management (IJOPM), and Production and Operations Management (POM). To determine the underlying intellectual structure of OM and its evolution, we apply quantitative citation and network co-citation analysis to this data set. The paper starts with a brief review of the bibliometric methodology employed here, using earlier bibliometric studies, primarily in other fields, to exemplify the approach and its results. We then describe and justify our data source for the study. Next, we present the results of our analysis and describe the evolution of the intellectual structure of the field. Last, we offer our conclusions, discuss the limitations of the study, identify implications for research and practice, and recommend avenues for future research.