The operations management research agenda: An update

An agenda for operations management (OM) research was first proposed by Miller et al. in 1981. However, until Hill et al. examined recent Ph.D. dissertations in 1987, no other work on the agenda had been done. The authors take another look at the status of the OM research agenda from a slightly different perspective. The state of OM research in the United States is examined through a survey of published journal articles by OM researches in the period 1982-1987. Overall, 362 journal articles are reviewed and classified into 17 categories. The topical areas of technology and innovation, service operations, productivity, and manufacturing strategy suggested in the OM agenda for future research are now receiving some attention from OM researchers. The authors also compared findings to the results of Chase’s 1980 study and notice that, though statistically, OM research has changed since the time of Chase’s study, the overall emphasis and orientation still appear to be the same. To account for the publication time lag suffered by most journal articles, they also examined papers from the Decision Sciences Institute (DSI) proceedings for 1986 and 1987. The DSI proceedings were used as a surrogate measure of pipeline research. Statistically, the DSI proceedings appear to be different from contemporary OM research as published in the journals; the directions of the pipeline papers are more in agreement with the directions suggested in the OM agenda. The final part of this study examined the types of research approaches used in the journal publications and compared them to those used in the DSI proceedings. There was no statistically significant difference between the research approaches used in the published and pipeline research. The authors’ conclusion is that, though the OM agenda had suggested broadening the research strategies used in studying OM issues, the dominant strategies continue to be model and laboratory (primarily simulation) based.