British Journal Of Management Research Articles

Supply chain management: an analytical framework for critical literature review

There can be little dispute that supply chain management is an area of importance in the field of management research, yet there have been few literature reviews on this topic (Bechtel and Mulumudi, 1996, Proceedings of the 1996 NAPM Annual Academic Conference; Harland, 1996, British Journal of Management 7 (special issue), 63–80; Cooper et al., 1997). This paper sets out not to review the supply chain literature per se, but rather to contribute to a critical theory debate through the presentation and use of a framework for the categorisation of literature linked to supply chain management. The study is based on the analysis of a large number of publications on supply chain management (books, journal articles, and conference papers) using a Procite © database from which the literature has been classified according to two criteria: a content- and a methodology-oriented criterion.

Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning

Abstract : If organization theory finds it useful to draw upon some of the ideas that have emerged in cognitive psychology, it will be advantageous to borrow also the terminology used in discussing these ideas. Without working toward a higher level of consistency in terminology than prevails in organization theory today, it will be difficult or impossible to cumulate and assemble into a coherent structure the knowledge we are gaining from individual case studies and experiments. We will be continually reinventing wheels. That is a luxury we cannot afford. The happy band of researchers on organization theory is sufficiently small to be kept fully occupied discovering and verifying the theory just once. (Author) (kr)

Can Organization Studies Begin to Break Out of the Normal Science Straitjacket? An Editorial Essay

The popular and professional press is filled with discussions of major changes on the organizational landscape, including organizational design experiments at entrepreneurial firms as well as at major corporations, the slashing of corporate staffs, the downsizing, delayering and revitalization of firms, the emerging electronic organization, mergers and acquisitions, failures of high reliability organizations, and time-based competition. Each of these issues has been associated with the redesign of organizations, yet these redesigns seem far removed from academic research, and they do not typically utilize the academic body of knowledge. Although the field has progressed enormously in new methods and insights during a century of research, it seems to us that organization studies have been a source of recurrent disappointment for practitioners and academics alike (Bedian 1989; Cummings 1983; Luthans 1986; Slocum 1984). For example, Miner (1984) analyzed 32 established organizational science theories and concluded that with the exception of theories of motivation there is no relationship between usefulness and validity. Is the field of organization studies irrelevant? Organizations have become the dominant institution on the social landscape. Yet the body of knowledge published in academic journals has practically no audience in business or government. Unlike a field such as economics, research on organizations has not typically focused on problems relevant to business and government organizations, and the real world of organizations has not drawn on the work undertaken by organizational scientists. From colleagues within our field and in allied disciplines, we hear complaints that manuscripts espousing radical ideas, or topics outside the mainstream, are difficult to publish. Reviewers for established journals seem to value papers whose theses are anchored in established theories or that use "legitimate" methods, thus implicitly creating a publication barrier for research that falls outside mainstream topics or methods. Moreover, we observe that scholars with interests in organizations span many disciplines and fields of inquiry such as anthropology, economics, history, information science, communication theory, artificial intelligence, systems theory, psychology, sociology, political science, policy sciences, as well as organization behavior, strategic management and organization theory. We sense that a new discipline of organization science is evolving and we envision that a new journal can become a forum for a discipline defined more broadly. The purpose of this essay is to discuss these issues and the need for reorienting research away from incremental, footnote-on-footnote research as the norm for the field. Although current research approches have made solid contributions, they do not

Some Implications of Property Rights in Hospital Management

THIS paper derives and tests some implications about differences in behavior resulting from differences in property right arrangements, and in particular, between proprietary for-profit and nonproprietary not-for-profit hospitals (hereafter referred to as proprietary and nonproprietary hospitals respectively) . The arrangements in nonproprietary nonprofit enterprises are different from those in proprietary profit-seeking organizations because (1) certain rights or claims to benefits in nonproprietary organizations are not transferable by sale as they are in proprietary organizations, and (2) managers or workers in nonprofit organizations do not have exclusive claim on residual products (the current flows of money and nonmoney benefits) that is characteristic of for-profit enterprises.