Editorial

Citation

Radnor, Z. and Heap, J. (2007), "Editorial", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 56 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2007.07956haa.001

Editorial

This issue brings the editorial team back together with Zoe having returned from maternity leave (a healthy baby boy!). However, while on leave Zoe was reminded how performance measurement and management is part of not just our working but also our home and personal lives. She noticed that as individuals we set ourselves goals and targets in our hobbies and interests (number of times to the gym or distance to be run etc.). Our children are subjected at school to tests, examinations and reports as well as at home with, perhaps, reward charts and, pocket money incentive schemes. We need to remember that, in the workplace or the home, performance measurement and management is just a tool which helps us to support effort and drive improvement in performance … . It is not an end in itself.

In this issue we cover a lot of ground – in terms of industry sectors and in terms of productivity and performance factors – in order to look at productivity and performance from a variety of perspectives.

(Every time we undergo an experience where organisations seem to be trying very hard to be inefficient, we hope to find a research paper that might help us determine whether our anecdotal evidence of a particular sector is borne out in a wider reality.)

We start with a paper by Lindholm and Suomala which takes a look at the information that can be gained by looking at life-cycle costing to support product management and the paper shows that looking at things different, using a new technique, often throws up surprises and insights.

This paper is particularly timely as issues such as life-cycle costing are coming to greater prominence as the world starts (finally!) to come to terms with sustainability issues and the impact of business on the environment.

We then move onto Research and development – in the construction industry. R&D can be regarded as an infrastructure factor in terms of its effects on organisational performance and productivity but this paper, from Kulatunga, Amaratunga and Haigh “turns the tables” by examining the performance of the R&D activities themselves.

Next up is the logistics function – often outsourced these days. This paper from Qureshi, Kumar and Kumar uses interpretive structural modelling (a group learning process) to examine and understand the inter-dependencies and interactions between the various factors and variables in the logistics outsourcing process.

Wu and Ho explore the efficiency of Taiwan’s integrated circuit industry using DEA analysis and an examination of the Malmquist index to explore the relationship between the size of companies and their relative efficiency – with some surprising results.

The final research paper, from Al-Muharrami, looks at the banking sector in the area covered by the Gulf Co-operation Council. Banks in this sector are emerging from very tight control and protection to become competitive organisations. Al-Muharrami again uses the Malmquist index/DEA approach as a consistent measurement/analysis technique.

To complete this issue, in the Reflective Practice section, Aghazadeh investigates the role of training in improving the performance and productivity of service sector organisations.

So we have a range of sectors, a range of techniques, and a range of viewpoints – with the authors representing a varied set of geographic areas and cultures. You, the reader, may sometimes have to think quite hard to interpret the effects of this geography and these cultures on the nature of the research undertaken and the interpretation of the results … . but this is why you read this journal… for its international, varied, stimulating – and, of course, high quality, content.

Zoe Radnor, John Heap