Call for Papers
Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management
Special issue on
Transferring Best Practices between the Manufacturing and Service Sectors
Guest Editors:
Michel Leseure (Isle of Man International Business School)
Melanie Hudson-Smith (Plymouth Business School)
Any manufacturing researcher will have heard of the oncoming demise of manufacturing management as an academic discipline and of the rise of service operations management and service science as new disciplines. There is nothing surprising in these predictions, as they simply follow (and actually lag behind) a demographic trend which has been taking place in industry. Universities and researchers simply have to adapt to the economic contexts in which their students will find employment.
What is surprising, though, is the pervasive but undocumented trend to reject manufacturing management knowledge and expertise as non relevant or inadequate. Business schools often frown on the employment of lecturers with engineering and manufacturing backgrounds, book publishers want to eradicate any mention of manufacturing from textbooks, and research about manufacturing is increasingly seen as marginal or outdated. Yet most recent breakthroughs in service management, such as lean services for example, will sound very familiar to manufacturing researchers.
Moreover, as a customer, one can be confronted on a regular basis with instances of surprisingly poor quality service provision. The frustrated customer having to explain facts for the fifth time in a call centre or the customer being charged by a back office a fee which was waived by the sales call centre may find it odd that traceability is so elusive in services when it has been achievable in manufacturing systems for years. Similarly, customers whose luggage has been lost, or customers who can “choose” a delivery date of Wednesday only, may remember an epoch of manufacturing that predates a genuine concern for customer satisfaction and the subsequent emergence of quality management. Some customers may even wonder, for example when they are charged for amounts that they have not approved, whether poor service may sometimes be a smoke screen for astute, perhaps even fraudulent, corporate cash management.
In the light of these considerations, it is worth wondering if the slow development of service operations management as an academic discipline and the apparently poor performance of the service sector can be explained by a current unproductive intellectual trend of dissociating service operations management from known, sound operations management practices, historically developed in the manufacturing sector. If this were the case, there would be a strong rationale for encouraging technology transfer between the manufacturing and the service sectors, and a case for spending more time customising what we know rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Conversely, the growth of service operations management can enrich manufacturing management theories and practices by reinforcing the service dimension of manufacturing.
The call for papers of this special issue of the International Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management welcomes papers addressing the issues discussed above.
Examples of relevant papers include, but are not limited to:
- Papers presenting examples of successful technology transfers from the manufacturing to the service sector, or from the service to the manufacturing sector
- Papers linking performance issues in the service sector to well-known past issues and controversies in the manufacturing sector
- Papers examining comparative performance issues between the service and manufacturing sectors
- Papers examining comparative quality issues between the service and manufacturing sectors
- Papers comparatively discussing the legal and liability aspects of faulty product and service provision
- Papers comparatively documenting questionable corporate practices in the service and manufacturing sectors
- Papers developing or applying diagonal benchmarking frameworks, so that service firms can benchmark some of their function against manufacturing firms, or so that manufacturing firms can benchmark themselves against service firms
- Papers documenting practices in “exotic” manufacturing sectors, which demonstrate that service dimensions have always existed in the manufacturing sector
- Papers about servitisation
- Papers critically reviewing the development, and the strategy for development, of service management teaching and research capabilities in educational institutions
- Papers reviewing the development of service science or service operations management as academic discipline
Conceptual, discussion, empirical, viewpoints, or analytical papers from practitioners and academics are all welcomed for this special issue. Papers should comply with the Author Guidelines of Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, which are available online at: