Empirical research in OM : three paradigms

Over the past 20 years, several articles have appeared in the operations management literature that have suggested that the link between operations management academics and operations management practitioners has been weakened. It has been suggested that to improve this link, more empirical research is required. However, there are different methods for conducting empirical research. In this paper we discuss three different paradigms for empirical research in operations management: the positivist & postpositivist paradigm, mostly aligned with surveys; the interpretivist paradigm, mostly aligned with in-depth case studies; and the design paradigm, mostly aligned with solving practical problems. We discuss the different objectives and the different evaluation criteria for studies in each paradigm. We conclude that although the (post)positivist paradigm is probably the most interesting for the development of science due to the ability to generalize, the design paradigm is likely the most relevant for making the connecting with practitioners. 1. INTRODUCTION Andrew and Johnson (1982: 144) describe how Operations Research, and its quantitative and modeling oriented approach, became important on the academic side of Operations Management but they note that " The models offered by academics did little to provide pragmatic answers ". Meredith et al. (1989) make similar observations about the disconnect between Operations Management academics and practitioners. They note (Meredith et al., 1989: 299) " Our point is not that OR/MS methodology is inappropriate for research in operations […] but that is should not be the only methodology. " Several authors have made a call for more empirical research, see They explain how operations management has been aligned more with operations research and modeling approaches and how the operations management community has tended to view empirical research as less esteemed than research based on mathematical modeling. There are different types of empirical research. For example, Meredith (1998) argued for case and field research whereas Meredith, Raturi, Amoako-Gyampah and Kaplan (1989) distinguish the direct observational methodologies such as case studies, from methodologies that rely on determining people's perceptions. In this paper, we will look at empirical research for Operations Management from an overview perspective, with two purposes. 1) To describe different scientific paradigms in order to create awareness about different methods of conducting empirical research. 2) To describe the objectives and the appropriate methods for evaluating the research results within these paradigms. This issue is particularly important since although the number of OM empirical research articles has been rising over …