The Science of Operations and Supply Chain Management
The Journal of Operations Management has now published two interesting articles about the science of operations and supply chain management. These two articles are intertwined and they were written by Singhal and Singhal (2012). The first article is titled Imperatives of the science of operations and supply-chain management and discusses two opportunities for pursuing radical innovations. The first opportunity is the pursuit of all phases of science (including theory development and theory testing). The second opportunity is the pursuit of multiple perspectives (e.g., based on different methods and different parts of a system). The second article is titled Opportunities for developing the science of operations and supply-chain management and proposes and analyzes ways to seize these two opportunities. It is found that networks of research teams, outliers, and meta-analyses can help to obtain multiple perspectives and to discover radical innovation. In conclusion, both articles will help our community to further develop SCM research.
Handbook of Management Scales
In 2010, I launched the Handbook of Management Scales. It is a collection of previously used multi-item measurement scales in empirical management research literature and contains numerous scales related to SCM research. It contains scales from high-ranked journals that are developed in a systematic scale development process and that are tested to measure a construct in terms of specification, dimensionality, reliability, and validity. For each scale at least objective items, source, and, if available, reliability (e.g. Cronbach’s alpha) are listed. Particularly, structural equation modeling might benefit from the Handbook of Management Scales. It is a wikibook and can be edited by anyone. Feel free to expand the Handbook of Management Scales by adding good scales. This can help to further develop the Handbook as a useful resource for empirical management research. Related handbooks are the Handbook of Metrics for Research in Operations Management and the Handbook of Marketing Scales.
Wieland, A. et al. (2010 ff.). Handbook of Management Scales. Wikibooks. Online: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Handbook_of_Management_Scales
Why Theory is Relevant to Supply Chain Research
The Journal of Business Logistics has changed (I recently reported). In their first editorial, the new editors, Stanley E. Fawcett and Matthew A. Waller, share their vision and expectation that “articles published in the Journal of Business Logistics will be grounded in sound theory and make a clear contribution to theory development”. The authors help us to “make sense out of chaos” by clarifying a number of questions: What is theory and should research conversations describe, explain and/or prescribe? What constitutes a valuable theoretical contribution? The authors emphasize that good research must be both influential and interesting and they suggest a three-step action plan to assure that we produce and deliver good theory. The JBL’s editoral is already the second valuable essay about theory development published by an SCM journal within a very short time, the other one being a discussion about conceptual theory development in the Journal of Supply Chain Management. Theory development matters!
