Editorial

In this issue, the first paper by Jiang, Frazier and Heiser examines the stream of China-related POM research over a 25-year period (1980-2005) to identify trends in its quantity, coverage, data sources and research contributions. The first China-related POM article appeared in Harvard Business Review in 1980 (Roby, 1980). Perhaps not surprisingly, this research stream has grown rapidly since then, as is demonstrated by Jiang et al.'s analysis of 144 articles from 31 journals. Given China's economic position as one of the world's fast growing economies with an average annual growth rate of almost 10 percent over the period, there is much to investigate about operations management research issues in this country. Today, China is cited as the fourth largest industrial producer behind the USA, Japan and Germany.

One of the interesting aspects of this paper is that it traces changes in the topics of research over the 25-year period. In the early years the research questions were concerned with issues such as quantifying the competitiveness of Chinese manufacturing industries, both internally and compared to the outside world (Young et al., 1992), and the scope and function of Chinese manufacturing managers' jobs (Wacker, 1987). Later, post-1992, in the expansionary period that followed the former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's“tour of the South,” in what is called the open door year, research questions reflected a recognition that foreign investors had to look carefully for qualified local partners and to deploy their production and operations management practices more extensively than before. Thus, research addressed issues such as how can state-of-the-art techniques be applied to improve productivity and quality (Bennett et al., 1999) and what are the key criteria in selecting local suppliers (Katayama, 1999)? In the final years from 2001 onwards, after China's accession to the World Trade Organisation, most research has focused on two main issues: integrating China into the global supply chain (Millington et al., 2006), and continuously improving production and operations management in China (Zhang and Chen, 2006).

Jiang et al.'s analysis is encouraging, by pointing to a broad range of research issues across the whole OM spectrum, including how to design service delivery operations to cater for Chinese cultural behaviours, how to deal with the outsourcing risks from poor labour conditions, the threats to R&D and technology transfer from China's long history of intellectual property infringement, the challenges of developing global value chains, and the persistent problem of environmental pollution where 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities are located in China.

The second paper by Stevenson and Spring adopts a similar approach in relation to the topic of flexibility. They argue that in the era of supply chain management it is essential to look beyond manufacturing flexibility and the flexible factory and to consider the flexible supply chain (Schmenner and Tatikonda, 2005; Slack, 2005). Their review builds upon much of the seminal work of Slack (1983, 1987), Gerwin (1987) and others, but focuses primarily on the inter-firm components of flexibility, and produces what they argue is a more complete definition of supply chain flexibility. In turn this leads them to consider how to measure the construct in an effective and meaningful way using a multi-dimensional and longitudinal approach across networks of companies, where the supply chain is the unit of analysis. They extend the discussion of supply chain network flexibility to supply chain design, relationships and information sharing systems (Duclos et al., 2003; Lummus et al., 2003),critiquing the normative view that SC flexibility is a solely positive characteristic. Finally, they observe that much extant research has described flexibility as a reactive means to cope with uncertainty (Bertrand, 2003; Sheffi and Rice, 2005); thus they discuss the impact of combining a flexible supply chain strategy with means of proactively reducing unwanted supply chain uncertainty.

Flexibility also emerges in the third paper by Martínez-Sánchez,Vela-Jiménez, de Luis-Carnicer and Péréz-Perez where the impact of workplace flexibility on managerial perceptions of firm performance is investigated. Specifically they concentrate on outsourcing as the means of achieving flexibility. They use data from a sample of 97 first-tier automotive suppliers and 59 service companies in Spain, justifying this selection on the basis that these companies are characterised by extensive outsourcing by OEMs in recent years because of shortening product cycles and time-to-market pressures(McIvor, 2000). They highlight the importance of using different theoretical perspectives to understand decisions to outsource, and produce a model of antecedents to outsourcing. Their results suggest that the impact of outsourcing on firm performance is mixed, i.e. it has a positive effect on what they call peripheral (or non-strategic) activities, but a negative effect on core(strategic) activities; overall they find no significant direct effect on performance. Their results contribute to a current debate in the literature where the influences of outsourcing on firm performance remain indeterminate. Recent studies have shown contradictory results; for example, Gilley and Rasheed(2000) and Fynes et al. (2005) found no significant direct effect of outsourcing on firm performance, yet Laugen et al. (2005) found a correlation between best practice in outsourcing and high performing companies. More recently Jiang et al. (2006) found evidence that outsourcing can improve a firm's cost efficiency but again they found no evidence that outsourcing will make a difference to a firm's productivity or profitability.

Performance is also a concern for Oke, Burke and Myers who investigate three things:

(1) the types of innovation that are predominant in UK SMEs;

(2) whether these innovations are radical or incremental; and

(3) what their impact is on firm performance.

As with the previous paper, they address an area of some contention in the literature, namely in this case, whether or not SMEs, particularly those in high technology sectors, are able to undertake radical innovation more easily than large firms as asserted by Kanter (1985) and Simon et al. (2002). There are arguments for both viewpoints but the issue has not previously been researched empirically to a great extent, aside from a few studies (Cagliano and Spina, 2002; De Toni and Nassimbeni, 2003; Mosey, 2005). Using a sample of 108 SMEs they find that there is a greater emphasis on incremental innovation in these firms, and that this has a significant relationship with growth in sales turnover. Their message is straightforward for policy makers and government initiatives which, in the UK, have tended to encourage and support radical innovation and new market penetration in SMEs – there ought to be a balance so that incremental innovations based on concentration, focus, deep understanding and rapid response to existing core markets are also supported.

The final paper by Howard, Lewis, Miemczyk and Brandon-Jones presents an interesting case of the failed implementation of a supplier park next to a UK engine assembly plant. Dedicated sites such as supplier parks, where component suppliers decentralise production to units located close to assembly plants(Millington et al., 1998), have rapidly established themselves as best practice (Hayes and Wheelwright, 1984; Schonberger, 1986) in the automotive sector. In this context, the supplier park concept is often described in the literature as a bundle of discrete practices which broadly include improving supply stability, supply coordination, re-defining the OEM/supplier boundary and enhancing interaction between co-located firms (Reichhart and Holweg, 2005).

This paper displays a strong empirical grasp of the issues confronting the engine plant, including, for example engineering/operational problems due to the increased complexity of co-ordinating supply, warehousing and manufacture resulting from an increase in the variety of engine models being manufactured. Another key insight is the novelty of applying an industrial supplier park to an engine plant, when in all other instances such parks had only been tried for vehicle assembly operations. The finding that the method used by Ford for sourcing and pricing components from suppliers actually inhibits the exploitation of scale economies in these components is important. This empirical detail is used to explain why the park appears to be a failure. The authors conclude that as firms continue to use best practice as a core ingredient of strategy, researchers must respond with robust theoretical concepts explaining adoption and implementation. They assert that three key conclusions can be drawn from their study: the contingent nature of “bundles of practice”implications of political ambiguity during implementation, and the effect of isomorphic or bandwagon responses by firms.

Further reading

Li, L.X. (2000), “An analysis of sources of competitiveness and performance of Chinese manufacturers”, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 20 No. 3, pp. 299-315.