Editorial

Citation

Bennett, D. (2010), "Editorial", Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, Vol. 21 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmtm.2010.06821gaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, Volume 21, Issue 7

When writing an Editorial for Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management (JMTM), I usually try to identify a topical subject relating to manufacturing that I think would be of interest and relevance to the journal’s readers. In this issue, two of the six papers relate to lean operations in manufacturing, which raises the question of whether this is significant since they are in a regular issue of the journal and there is no special selection of the papers it contains. Is the subject of lean operations simply one that has become popular among academic researchers? Is it something that currently is of real importance to industry? Is there a trend emerging that is linked to some other factor? Or is the fact that there are two papers on lean operations in this issue just a coincidence?

Looking back at the database of papers in JMTM, there have in fact only been 17 previous articles with “lean” in the title and they have all been published since 2000, although the journal was first published more than ten years previously. And this is also despite the term “lean production” having been originally coined by John Krafcik of MIT in 1988.

It would be tempting to think that the subject matter of papers published in JMTM reflects the real problems or issues of industry and that the papers on lean operations are a direct response to the increasingly competitive industrial environment. It could also be that the ten plus years before 2000 without any papers on lean operations just reflected the time lag while research was undertaken and submissions went through the JMTM editorial review process. Perhaps, this explanation is partly true, but the time lag is still very long and conceptual papers would normally be published much sooner than ones based on the empirical research.

My own supposition is that the popularity of subjects in the papers submitted to JMTM, and in other similar journals, is more of an indication that these subjects are self-generating rather than necessarily directly reflecting the reality of industrial problems. The established view among academics in this area says that there is a requirement to extensively cite past literature on the subject of the paper and relate the research investigation to existing work. This is justified to ensure that the work is scientifically rigorous but it creates the danger of leading to a vicious circle of producing papers that make an incremental academic contribution rather than having a significant practical impact on industrial practice. This “rigour versus relevance” debate is one that is regularly aired without much common agreement so I will not attempt to defend either side here. The most important thing is that neither must be completely forgotten for a paper to be of any real value.

David Bennett