Exploring inter-departmental barriers between production and quality

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the value of adopting an organizational ecological perspective to explore behavioural barriers in a UK operations & production management (OPM) setting. Design/methodology/approach – An ethnographic case study approach was adopted with a narrative ecological stance to deconstruct the perceived realities and the origins of the inter‐departmental barriers applying Scott‐Morgan's unwritten rules methodology. Findings – Despite an improvement in the physical proximity of the production and quality control departments, the qualitative approach revealed that latent, socially constructed drivers around management, interaction and communication reinforced inter‐departmental barriers. Conflicting enablers were ultimately responsible derived from the organizational structure, which impacted the firm's production resources. Research limitations/implications – As a case study approach, the specificity of the findings to this OPM setting should be explored further. Practical implications – The paper demonstrates the use of theoretical frameworks in a production and manufacturing organization to provide insights for maximising process effectiveness. Using the organizational ecological perspective to uncover the socially constructed unwritten rules of the OPM setting beneficially impacted on operational effectiveness. Originality/value – The paper contributes to organization ethnography literature by providing a detailed empirical analysis of manufacturing and services behaviour using an organizational ecology perspective. The example demonstrates that “qualitative” research can have real world impact in an advanced operational context. It also contributes to an ecological or complex adaptive systems view of organizations and, inter alia, their supply chains

Evolution of Supply Chain Collaboration: Implications for the Role of Knowledge

Increasingly, research across many disciplines has recognized the shortcomings of the traditional “integration prescription” for inter-organizational knowledge management. This research conducts several simulation experiments to study the effects of different rates of product change, different demand environments, and different economies of scale on the level of integration between firms at different levels in the supply chain. The underlying paradigm shifts from a static, steady state view to a dynamic, complex adaptive systems and knowledge-based view of supply chain networks. Several research propositions are presented that use the role of knowledge in the supply chain to provide predictive power for how supply chain collaborations or integration should evolve. Suggestions and implications are suggested for managerial and research purposes

A survey of simulation techniques in commerce and defence

Despite the developments in Modelling and Simulation (M&S) tools and techniques over the past years, there has been a gap in the M&S research and practice in healthcare on developing a toolkit to assist the modellers and simulation practitioners with selecting an appropriate set of techniques. This study is a preliminary step towards this goal. This paper presents some results from a systematic literature survey on applications of M&S in the commerce and defence domains that could inspire some improvements in the healthcare. Interim results show that in the commercial sector Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has been the most widely used technique with System Dynamics (SD) in second place. However in the defence sector, SD has gained relatively more attention. SD has been found quite useful for qualitative and soft factors analysis. From both the surveys it becomes clear that there is a growing trend towards using hybrid M&S approaches

Modeling resilience and sustainability in ancient agricultural systems

The reasons why people adopt unsustainable agricultural practices, and the ultimate environmental implications of those practices, remain incompletely understood in the present world. Archaeology, however, offers unique datasets on coincident cultural and ecological change, and their social and environmental effects. This article applies concepts derived from ecological resilience thinking to assess the sustainability of agricultural practices as a result of long-term interactions between political, economic, and environmental systems. Using the urban center of Gordion, in central Turkey, as a case study, it is possible to identify mismatched social and ecological processes on temporal, spatial, and organizational scales, which help to resolve thresholds of resilience. Results of this analysis implicate temporal and spatial mismatches as a cause for local environmental degradation, and increasing extralocal economic pressures as an ultimate cause for the adoption of unsustainable land-use practices. This analysis suggests that a research approach that integrates environmental archaeology with a resilience perspective has considerable potential for explicating regional patterns of agricultural change and environmental degradation in the past

Research Agenda for Studying Open Source II: View Through the Lens of Referent Discipline Theories

In a companion paper [Niederman et al., 2006] we presented a multi-level research agenda for studying information systems using open source software. This paper examines open source in terms of MIS and referent discipline theories that are the base needed for rigorous study of the research agenda

Safety management theory and the military expeditionary organization: A critical theoretical reflection

Management of safety within organizations has become a key topic within safety science. Theorizing on this subject covers a diverse pallet of concepts such as “resilience” and “safety management systems”. Recent studies indicate that safety management theory has deficiencies. Our interpretation of these deficiencies is that much confusion originates from the issue that crucial meta-theoretical assumptions are mostly implicit or applied inconsistently. In particular, we argue that these meta-theoretical assumptions are of a systems theoretical nature. Therefore, we provide a framework that will be able to explicate and reflect on systems theoretical assumptions. With this framework, we analyze the ability of two frequently used safety management theories to tackle the problem of managing safety of Dutch military expeditionary organizations. This paper will show that inconsistent and implicit application of systems theoretical assumptions in these safety management theories results in problems to tackle such a practical problem adequately. We conclude with a reflection on the pros and cons of our framework. Also, we suggest particular meta-theoretical aspects that seem to be essential for applying safety management theory to organizations

The evolutionary origins of volition

It appears to be a straightforward implication of distributed cognition principles that there is no integrated executive control system (e.g. Brooks 1991, Clark 1997). If distributed cognition is taken as a credible paradigm for cognitive science this in turn presents a challenge to volition because the concept of volition assumes integrated information processing and action control. For instance the process of forming a goal should integrate information about the available action options. If the goal is acted upon these processes should control motor behavior. If there were no executive system then it would seem that processes of action selection and performance couldn’t be functionally integrated in the right way. The apparently centralized decision and action control processes of volition would be an illusion arising from the competitive and cooperative interaction of many relatively simple cognitive systems. Here I will make a case that this conclusion is not well-founded. Prima facie it is not clear that distributed organization can achieve coherent functional activity when there are many complex interacting systems, there is high potential for interference between systems, and there is a need for focus. Resolving conflict and providing focus are key reasons why executive systems have been proposed (Baddeley 1986, Norman and Shallice 1986, Posner and Raichle 1994). This chapter develops an extended theoretical argument based on this idea, according to which selective pressures operating in the evolution of cognition favor high order control organization with a ‘highest-order’ control system that performs executive functions

Managing in conflict: How actors distribute conflict in an industrial network

IMP researchers have examined conflict as a threat to established business relationships and commercial exchanges, drawing on theories and concepts developed in organization studies. We examine cases of conflict in relationships from the oil and gas industry's service sector, focusing on conflicts of interest and resources, and conflict as experienced by actors. Through a comparative case study design, we propose an explanation of how actors manage conflict and manage in conflict given that they tend to value and maintain relationships beyond episodes of exchange. We consider conflicts in relationships from a network perspective, showing that actors experienced these while adapting to changes in their business setting, modifying their roles in that network. By identifying conflict with the organizing forms of relationship and network, we show how actors formulate conflict through pursuing and combining a number of strategies, distributing the conflict across an enlarged network