Editorial
Models for compassionate operations

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2012.06.018Get rights and content

Abstract

Social issues such as sustainability, poverty alleviation, health care management, philanthropic activities, humanitarian aid, and education can all benefit from modeling efforts from operations management and production economics researchers. This focus, for which we term compassionate operations, has seen increased attention in recent years. With the culmination of major natural and man-made crises, increased environmental concerns, and increased globalization and knowledge, comes a wider awareness of social problems that need to be addressed. We, as a community of scholars can further investigation into this topic. Thus, in this paper we identify some characteristics and dimensions of compassionate operations, what research has been completed in the International Journal of Production Economics on compassionate operations, directions for potential research and an overview of papers in this special issue. Significant findings and directions for additional research are introduced.

Introduction

The theme of this special issue is compassion and caring, compassionate operations. The special issue's origins were from the 2010 Academy of Management conference held in Montreal. The theme of this conference was ‘Passion for Compassion’ and ‘Dare to Care’. Much of the general management literature can and does have these thematic underpinnings. Operations management and production economics has traditionally shied away from more compassionate themes. General management and the Academy of Management had much of its theory and research evolve from the psychological and sociological fields. These social science fields are very much people and socially driven. Thus, compassion and caring, very human and emotional perspectives are naturally embraced within the management literature.

The field of operations management can be traced to operations research, scientific management and industrial engineering fields (Stevenson, 2012). Production economics arguably evolved from general economics and engineering. Thus, traditionally, as operations and production economists, issues such as financial strength and efficiencies became overriding concerns for organizations and their management. Tools, theories and models developed over the past few decades quite effectively aided organizations in managing these financial and economic dimensions. Parlaying this mindset to creatively reflect on how we, as modelers and researchers, can support broader management and social communities in which we live, is important. As operations researchers we tend to decouple morality and ethics from many of our modeling and investigatory efforts. This decoupling is not necessarily from a research and development perspective of the tools and models themselves, we still live by research and scientific ethics in their development. The decoupling is from the explicit consideration, application, and integration of these values and ethical dimensions into our modeling research and development efforts. Many of the qualitative aspects of compassion and caring rely on significant subjectivity, a difficult dimension to integrate into our objective, quantitative research streams.

Sometimes this decoupling is necessary to make academic, theoretical, and technological progress, e.g., mathematical algorithmic optimization based on cost and time, which are easily quantifiable. But given various financial, social, and health crises occurring at all levels of society, and which are seemingly inexhaustible, using our tools and expertise as an academic community to aid in managing, if not preventing, these crises requires that we reengage ourselves and our work with ethical concerns and compassion issues.

We can complete this reengagement through our various research efforts and techniques. Developing literature on the modeling and theoretical application to certain situations through reviews of state-of-the art can be one approach to identify investigatory directions. Applying techniques and approaches, e.g., system dynamics and game theory, to particular situations facing organizations is another research approach for investigating this area. Developing new decision modeling approaches and integrating factors not explicitly considered in these business mindset environments is a third approach for research into the broader social good.

Compassion and caring can also be construed as portions of broader corporate social responsibility themes that have started to permeate thought in the management and engineering disciplines. Focusing on operations and production as tools for social change and management has not garnered as much emphasis as other topics in production economics such as technological and inter-organizational focus developments. Some social caring and compassionate topics have been covered in very recent research publications within the International Journal of Production Economics (IJPE). As such, in this special issue, we seek to sow additional seeds of knowledge and further raise awareness and expand upon these initial concepts with the introduction of models and methodologies for compassionate operations.

Section snippets

The compassionate operations perspective

What do we mean by compassionate operations? It does not necessarily signify a soft and emotional perspective only, but that we can use existing and emergent knowledge related to production and operations to aid others, and not necessarily for profitability. Many potential topics could be investigated from the compassionate operations perspective, sustainability, humanitarian aid, non-profit and health care management, to name a few themes. We allowed some flexibility and creativity in the

A brief history of IJPE scholarship in compassionate operations

There are many journals in operations management and research (management science), and production economics that have compassionate operations topics. We can view the IJPE literature and publications as a microcosm of these broader fields. Thus, a quick evaluation within IJPE can provide us with a notion of the type research completed in operations management as well as gaps in this research.

Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) is utilized to complete an exploratory analysis of IJPE

Future scholarship needs and developments in compassionate operations

There were a number of other potential topics that could fit within the broad subject matter of compassionate operations. The topics in the call for papers included, in addition to the three subjects we reviewed above, the following items:

  • Social learning (education) and enterprise networking models

  • Non-profit services planning and management

  • Poverty relief operations models

  • Models to aid in production and industry development in underrepresented regions

  • Models to aid public policy development for

The special issue papers

The special issue had over 35 submissions, after a rigorous review and revision process we remain with eight high quality manuscripts. What is left is an overview of the variety of issues that could be rigorously covered for a number of compassionate operations topics. We begin with one of the emergent issues of great interest to many operations scholars, that of humanitarian, a synonym of compassionate, aid and logistics. Three of these first four papers is one that relate to emergency

Conclusion

This special issue sought to bring attention to the research that can be completed by operations and production economics researchers for socially beneficial and compassionate reasons. In recent years there has been greater acknowledgement and focus on how academics in management, economics, and engineering can further the social development of corporations and other organizations. In fact, our profession's social contract mandates that we seek betterment for our society.

We have described

References (34)

  • C.S. Tang

    Perspectives in supply chain risk management

    International Journal of Production Economics

    (2006)
  • R. Tarjanne

    Low costs and carbon dioxide emissions through efficient power production methods in Finland

    International Journal of Production Economics

    (1995)
  • L. White et al.

    OR in developing countries: a review

    European Journal of Operational Research

    (2011)
  • Q. Zhu et al.

    Relationships between operational practices and performance among early adopters of green supply chain management practices in Chinese manufacturing enterprises

    Journal of Operations Management

    (2004)
  • S.K. Annim

    Microfinance efficiency: trade-offs and complementarities between the objectives of microfinance institutions and their performance perspectives

    European Journal of Development Research

    (2012)
  • T.K. Dasaklis et al.

    Epidemics control and logistics operations: a review

    International Journal of Production Economics

    (2012)
  • C. de Blok et al.

    The human dimension of modular care provision: opportunities for personalization and customization

    International Journal of Production Economics

    (2012)
  • Cited by (38)

    • Social enterprise factory location and allocation model: Small scale manufacturing for East Africa

      2019, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
      Citation Excerpt :

      From related industries we know that such decisions in developing nations are often influenced by government officers and that decisions are mainly the result of political or pragmatic consideration [19]. But to our knowledge, rarely are such decisions based on detailed quantitative analyses or optimization algorithms [8]. The literature review above suggests a lack of mathematical decision-making applications in sustainable development [20], specifically for the location and allocation problem of small manufacturing companies.

    • Effective multi-tier supply chain management for sustainability

      2019, International Journal of Production Economics
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text