Entries categorized as ‘Research & Methodology’
Authors are well advised to check out editorial policies on review processes. While you may assume sending a paper to a international “peer reviewed” journal assures you of a blind review process, some even “better” journals (such as the International Journal of Production Economics) only subscribe to a single-blind review – i.e. authors do not know who their reviewers are but reviewers certainly do know who the authors are. This is not to say there wouldn’t be good arguments to present for single-blind or even open reviews, the question is just why this is not openly stated in the journal’s editorial policy… So this is not blind, it’s just candid. More room for ring-a-ring-o’-roses. Nobody said it was easy to be a scientist 
Gyöngyi
Categories: Academic journals · Journal ranking · Operations management · Research & Methodology
Oddly enough, most Britons have lied about the books they’ve read in order to impress others; with a study revealing the “top ten list” of books people have lied about. The authors should be happy, even though they are not read, they are regarded as socially worth while reading. A lovely case of social desirability bias – sthg ethics scholars and corporate social responsibility researchers are quite familiar with. Apart from indirect questioning etc., one way to check for social desirability bias in a business setting is to see what a company does in an economic downturn – now it’s a good time for social desirability bias research, I reckon
Gyöngyi
Categories: Corporate Social Responsibility · Research & Methodology · Sustainability
Ring a ring o’ roses… This is actually the title of a fascinating article on how to play the game of getting published, getting cited, publishing in “quality” journals etc. It is enlightening how little the quality of an article actually matters, and how we prefer where an article has been published over what it actually contains.
As for journal rankings, it’s a vicious circle of them being based on “quality” people publishing in a journal who submit their paper to the journal only because its a “quality” journal. And another vicious circle of journal ranking being based on (self?)-citations and on the inclusion of both the cited and citing journal article in the SSCI (otherwise your citation is just not counted). Then there is also the self-fulfilling prophecy of higher journal rankings leading to more submissions leading to higher rejection rates and an even higher journal ranking…
Just when is this academic bubble going to burst? The authors (Stuart Macdonald and Jacqueline Kam) suggest a game of tinkerbell to deal with it… and have been quite successful in the gamesmanship they criticise – this very article got them high publication points.
Gyöngyi
Categories: Academic journals · Journal ranking · Research & Methodology
Not sure whether it was Cooper, Lambert and Pagh’s first article on the supply chain management framework that debated the problem of “functional silos” first, but at least ever since, SCM researchers have been criticising companies for their organisation in these functional silos. Having said so, we researchers excel at maintaining these when it comes to teaching and even to doing research. It’s the good old “don’t step on my toes” mentality.
At the same time, we are reminded – not the least by funds – that we should break down our own functional silos and conduct interdisciplinary research. Easier said than done. First of all, what counts as “interdisciplinary“? Does marketing + SCM constitute interdisciplinary research? Or finance + SCM? Or, say, industrial management and SCM? Probably the funniest way of conducting “interdisciplinary” SCM research is to get a researcher from a technical university and one from a business school; both from their SCM faculty, of course
Crossing the boundaries of other disciplines / research areas is not at all straightforward. Where does your theoretical frame then come from, and which literature do you include/exclude, on what basis? It is nice to have the tradition in SCM research to “borrow” theories from other disciplines, but the question can be disputed whether sthg then still qualifies at SCM research at all. So where are the boundaries of our “discipline”? (This is in fact a question we need to debate in conference committees over and over again.)
Yet another question arises from interdisciplinary research: does your study have to contribute to both disciplines, or is it enough to have a contribution to one? Or, as Magnus Lindskog once asked me, where do you want to leave your mark?
Gyöngyi
Categories: Research & Methodology · Supply Chain Management
December 22, 2008 · 1 Comment
No, this is not about women and leadership, but yes about links between skills, gender, and logistics performance – a comparative survey of logisticians and their managers in three fields: business logistics, humanitarian logistics, and military logistics. Click here to fill in the survey – and send the link to your colleagues in the field!
Gyöngyi
PS. Here’s the link to be sent out: http://www.webropol.com/P.aspx?id=276853&cid=55080033
Categories: Humanitarian supply chains · Logistics · Operations management · Research & Methodology · Supply Chain Management · humanitarian · supply chain
The latest issue of IJPDLM contains a paper by Jesper Aastrup, Copenhagen Business School, and Arni Halldorsson, University of Southampton. This is a Special Issue from the Nofoma 2008 conference, edited by Gyöngyi Kovács and Karen Spens, Hanken, Finland.
We presented this paper at the 2008 Nofoma conference in Helsinki Finland (and received the Schenker Best Paper award). We have been struggling with some issues of justification of our research approaches and types of scientific explanations, and decided to mix our thoughts about this. Although the paper is written in the context of logistics, the implications may also apply for other disciplines such as marketing, purchasing and operations management. We will hopefully come back to this context later.
From the abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to develop the paradigmatic justification for the use of case studies in logistics research. The argument is based on a critical realist (CR) ontology and epistemology. The current logistics paradigm’s flat ontology – based on regularity – is replaced by an ontology emphasising structures and mechanisms underlying actual events in the form of logistics practice and performance.
…Based on this CR view of the logistics domain it is argued that the justifications for conducting case studies lie in their ability: to reach the causal depth required for revealing the real domain of logistics activities and performance: to reveal the working of mechanisms in loosely coupled structures showing open systems characteristics through a constant alternation between abstract and concrete reasoning and; to include the causal powers and effects of agents’ ascribed meanings. Also, it is argued, in contrast with Yin’s work which refers to the possibility of generalising case studies, that the justification of case studies not only must refer to their complementary role in research but also must build on groundings that allow this form of research to take a primary role in knowledge creation.
…The arguments have direct implications primarily for the scientific justification for case studies in logistics.
Árni
Full reference:
Aastrup, Jepser and Halldorsson, Arni (2008): “Epistemological role of case studies in logistics: A critical realist perspective”, International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, Volume 38, Issue 10, pp. 746-763.
Categories: Logistics · Research & Methodology · Scientific explanation · Supply Chain Management · Theory · critical realism · philosophy of science
Few thoughts about the dominant position of causal explanations in logistics (and supply chain management) research.
Do causal explanations have their origin in the chain metaphor?
What is the origin of the supply chain metaphor? We probably don’t know.
Ramsay and Caldwell (2004:81)* suggest that the origins of the supply chain as metaphor is by no means clear and that “…any appearance of clarity and stability is imaginary”. The origins are lost, but conceptually, it may refer to human bucket chain (buckets of water moving along from hand to hand to put out fire) becoming a literal reference to a process.
To this observation I want to add Henry Ford’s assembly line – it has been a key reference in textbooks and journals. What is of interest for me is to consider how the ideas of sequence and the quest for regularity and stability as basis for efficient and effective flow (of materials…). Have these traits, that can be associated with the assembly line, had influence on the methodologies of research within logistics (and perhaps also related disciplines such as operations management)?
Is the quest for stability of the assembly line informing the quest for law like regularity as explanation in logistics research?
If that is the case, will we ever be able to address other types of scientific explanation but the causal one in logistics without disregarding (or perhaps rejecting) the “supply chain” as metaphor?
Árni
*Ramsay, John and Caldwell, Nigel (2004): If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail: the risks of casual trope usage in purchasing discourse, Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management 10 (2004) 79–87.
Categories: Research & Methodology · Supply Chain Management · Theory
