Business history and operations management

Abstract

Operations management is a key function in the modern organisation and an important area of study in the business school. Like many subjects it remains separated from the business history community. The practice of operations management can gain meaningful and significant lessons from proper consideration of the historical antecedents of current practices. Unfortunately, more than any other business area, operations management has a habit of forgetting the lessons of the past and ‘reinventing the wheel’. The purpose of this paper is to emphasise the value of historical analysis in operations management, assess the level of historical coverage of the development of operations within that subject area (taking a review of OM textbooks as a proxy), and highlight the valuable opportunities for the business history community to engage with their operations colleagues to better guide the next generation of operations management education and practice.

Keywords:

• operations management
• business history

Notes

1. ‘The traditional society’ (an agricultural society); ‘the preconditions for take-off’ (the emergence of innovators, financiers, trade, exporting and social structures that support post-traditional production); ‘the take-off’ in Britain (the combination of preconditions and technological innovation to expand production into industrial scale and scope); ‘the drive to maturity’ (the expansion of modern technology into all areas of the economy, beyond those original drivers of expansion); and the age of high mass consumption (the development of a consumer-driven society).