Editorial

Citation

Taylor, A. and Taylor, M. (2009), "Editorial", International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 29 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijopm.2009.02429gaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Volume 29, Issue 7

This editorial is written at a time of acknowledged global financial crisis, with intense debate about how to restore economic growth, stabilise financial markets and achieve a raft of other related economic and political objectives. Against such an economic backdrop, it is not uncommon to hear of job losses, downsizing and factory closures. While these phenomena are undoubtedly undesirable and painful experiences for many individuals, as operations management (OM) researchers we need to have an understanding of how we can contribute to the operational and managerial challenges posed in such circumstances.

One case in point is the closure of the Vauxhall Motors plant in Luton, England which employed over 3,000 people at the time of its closure announcement. Michael J.R. Butler, Mike Sweeney and David Crundwell start this issue with an account of the ending of operations at the plant. At first glance, the study of factory closure may seem to be something morbid and perverse, but being able to understand the practical and behavioural issues associated with closure can serve to minimise the negative consequences for the employees, their families and communities while at the same time avoiding unnecessary damage to the company’s reputation and performance.

Butler et al. use the case study method to produce a process model of five distinguishable sets of activities associated with factory closure management. They use interviews with key informants, triangulated with plant performance data, direct observation during site visits and analysis of archival documentation, to reveal the stressful nature of closure and the operational and human resource issues which arise. One of the most intriguing findings is that the company did not make effective use of its knowledge of previous plant closures; the authors suggest that tapping into this organisational knowledge could have reduced the costs of closure of the Luton plant which were higher than they needed to be.

Globalisation and macroeconomic forces are also the drivers of the second paper by Francisco Puig, Helena Marques and Pervez N. Ghauri who examine the effects of globalisation on the manufacturing operations of the textile industry in Spain. They look particularly at the industrial district, an entity which has rarely been considered from an OM perspective. They investigate the joint effects of facility location and product line choices and assess how their significance and magnitude change over time. Industrial districts represent an interesting phenomenon, frequently studied from an economics or international business (IB) perspective where there is considerable evidence that manufacturing firms located within a district are more competitive than those located outside. What is even more interesting about this paper, however, is that it integrates the IB standpoint with an OM perspective on the need for a fit between the production function and a firm’s strategy, and specifically how decisions about product specialisation and diversification to higher value-added markets can help to overcome the challenges of globalisation.

Both of these papers offer novel slants on established international phenomena, in the first case by combining OM and human resource management viewpoints and in the second through a combination of OM and IB. We highlight this to underscore our long-held policy of encouraging fresh approaches to conventional OM problems and contexts by engaging with other disciplines and by embracing alternative theories and lenses. The third paper by Sander de Leeuw and Jan Fransoo follows in the same vein, demonstrating how to harness successfully the strengths of operations research methods with the ethos of empiricism which is intrinsic to International Journal of Operations & Production Management (IJOPM) and the (perhaps predominately European) OM tradition.

de Leeuw and Fransoo produce a model of the antecedents of close supply chain collaboration from the literature and from a series of dyadic cases in the electronics, fashion and fast moving consumer goods industries, thought to be typical of industries with high clockspeeds, i.e. having fast evolving products, processes and structures. Their conceptual model may be used as a framework for determining the appropriateness of close supply chain collaboration, at least for make-to-stock companies, given that such close collaboration is not always necessary or desirable.

Finally, we are pleased to publish a paper by Claire Moxham on the applicability of extant performance measurement knowledge to nonprofit organisations. These organisations differ in some respects from those in the private and public sectors. For example, they tend to experience greater funding insecurity, and thus need to expend considerable time and effort on providing the evidence base to link their performance outcomes with future funding streams. Moxham’s premise is that the considerable body of knowledge about performance measurement that has emanated from research in the private and public sectors is equally appropriate for the nonprofit sector.

Her study of six UK nonprofits, together with their stakeholders, suggests that this premise may be true in general; however, one striking difference is that the criteria used to measure nonprofit performance were seldom linked to performance improvement. As a consequence, those nonprofits which did seek to improve their performance had to develop parallel measurement systems to serve their own improvement objectives. To ameliorate this situation, Moxham notes that the co-development of measurement criteria in collaboration with funders and regulators may be a more fruitful way forward.

This issue of IJOPM resonates with findings in previous studies which have examined the literature cited in the journal, and which have revealed OM’s unusually high degree of interaction with other subjects. We welcome this interaction since we believe it brings richness and multiple perspectives to many OM problems. We also believe that researchers publishing in IJOPM are at the forefront of engaging with other disciplines; we need more of this, to generate deeper theoretical and empirical insights and more meaningful findings for practitioners. Such inter-disciplinarity is healthy, especially when it brings our understanding of problems and their solutions into sharper focus.

What is equally valuable is OM research which takes established bodies of knowledge into new domains and contexts. Increasingly, we see OM research investigating the healthcare sector, and other public services, and in this issue we see an example of how we might contribute to an essential debate about performance measurement and improvement in the nonprofit/third sector. Wherever organisations need strategies to cope with increasingly complex and uncertain environments, they also need operations capabilities to enact their strategies. Operations is the new strategy.

Andrew Taylor, Margaret Taylor