In a recent Sloan Management Review article, "A New Manifesto For Management," authors Sumantra Ghoshal, Christopher A. Bartlett, and Peter Moran, state:

This admonition is almost certainly a metaphor for the issues and controversies which apply to the study, research, and pedagogy of the discipline of contemporary Operations Management. The fractious currents and eddies evident in contemporary Operations Management make both the understanding and teaching of Operations Management, especially in the context of an executive masters of business administration program, a difficult proposition. On the one hand, there are the "traditionalists," who frame the study and teaching of Operations Management within the boundaries of operations research, the statistical modeling of manufacturing processes, an extension of industrial process engineering, or the product of linear programming and statistical inventory management. On the other hand, there are those who view Operations Management from a strategic business enterprise perspective. (SKINNER, 1969; DRUCKER, 1990; DRUCKER, 1991 and GARVIN, 1998). These scholars see the many activities within the realm of Operations Management from a holistic perspective, and endeavor to blend the many issues of "how work is done" into the larger context of business strategy. This is not a new debate. In the United States, the foundations of traditional Operations Management (OM) are firmly rooted in the rise of manufacturing (HOPP and SPEARMAN, 1996; CLARK and HAYES, 1988 and HAYES, WHEELWRIGHT and CLARK, 1988). A large part of its early focus stems from an underlying faith in the Scientific Method, with its embrace of the rational, reductionist, analytical approach of science. As a system of management, this focus became known as Scientific Management -- in spite of the fact that its developer, Frederick W. Taylor, himself preferred the terms Task Management or the Taylor System (KANIGEL, 1997). Though there were many who attempted to apply scientific principles to production before him, Taylor's concepts remain central to an understanding of the thinking about manufacturing that took place in America around the turn of the century. In the popular mind, Taylor is associated with the extreme division of labor, and with the use of time and motion studies to increase the efficiency of worker output. There are four basic principles of Scientific Management that reflect Taylor's beliefs about the nature of work, the nature of production knowledge and its creation, and the motivation of workers (CLARK and HAYES, 1988). These principles are an essential ingredient which offers an understanding of the foundation of traditional Operations Management. The four basic tenets of Scientific management are: Find the One best Way; Match People to Tasks, Supervise, Reward, Punish, and Use Staff to Plan and Control (CLARK and HAYES, 1988).

Find the "One Best Way." For Taylor, work was governed by scientific laws. Discovery of these laws (using scientific methods) allowed one to find the best -- most efficient -- way to do a job. Finding this "one best way" was thus the first step to efficient production.

Match People to Tasks. Taylor believed that people were different; each one was suited for some things and not for others. Thus, the second principle: pick the right people (using scientific methods), train them (scientifically). In Taylor's scheme, specialization applied to every phase of the enterprise. Workers could make suggestions, but the ideas of the workers were just that -- suggestions. Managers -- those best suited for making decisions -- would be the judge of their fitness for use.

Supervise, Reward, Punish. Taylor offered the following justification for this third principle: (CLARK and HAYES, 1988):

Use Staff to Plan and Control. Taylor advocated the creation of staff groups to develop production processes, to establish procedures and routines, and in general, to control the work. Workers were to focus on the work itself and receive their instruction, procedures, and assignments from people who specialized in these support activities. Managers and staff were responsible for planning and control, and workers for carrying out their direction.

The reductionist bias of Scientific Management may be found in the approach of the study of industrial engineering and operations research. The influence of Scientific Management thus can be seen in much of the structure and philosophy of early curricula of Operations Management, and further bound its emphasis upon engineering and production. Many of the traditional Operations Management texts still retain this focus.

For much of the period immediately after World War II, Operations Management was termed industrial management or factory management. Studies were characterized by their descriptive approach (FILIPPINI, 1997). Numerous techniques were studied and put forward, in addition to the earlier emphasis on time and motion studies, plant layout, production control, statistical inventory management, and comparative studies of production processes in various industries. Examination of queuing theory, Monte Carlo simulations, linear programming and production batch size algorithms were advanced. (HOPP and SPEARMAN, 1996). During this phase, a majority of Operations Management studies assumed that (FILIPPINI, 1997):

• The production system is both cut off from the environment and is strategically neutral;
• It is prevalently characterized by technical features; and
• The final aim is that of maximizing the productivity of labor.

Accordingly, the period of the 1960's and 1970's saw the emergence of Management Science/Operations Research (MS/OR), which "provided the scientific methodology that allowed us to develop something akin to the natural science or physics operating systems. " (BUFFA, 1980).

During the 1970's, Operations Management research was dominated by abstract application of techniques and rarely involved empirical studies (CHASE, AQUILANO and JACOBS, 1996). Such studies were often deemed of little use to the practitioner community. An analysis of the Operations Management literature of that period revealed that "88 percent of the articles were micro type and 76 percent emphasized equipment and were focused on questions of schedule optimization, aggregate capacity planning, layout, quality control, and statistical inventory control. (CHASE, 1980). As early as 1969, Wickham Skinner suggested that manufacturing in general, and the discipline of Operations Management in particular were largely absent as a critical element of many firm's business strategy. Skinner attributed this to the simple fact that Operations Management was never a mandatory component of the majority of business curricula in the United States. (SKINNER, 1969).

Later, Wild suggested that a systematic approach to the study of Operations Management was most relevant. At the beginning of the 1980's, Operations Management was more appropriately seen as a part of the study of management, and not merely a province of engineering (ANDREW and JOHNSON, 1982; FILIPPINI, 1997). In the 1980's, three major areas of emphasis were evident in the Operations Management literature (JAMES and JORDAN, 1993; LESCHKE, 1997; FILIPPINI, 1997; HAYES and UPTON, 1998):

• Operations Policy, which includes manufacturing strategy;
• Operations Control, which introduced Just-in-Time and Total Quality Management, in addition to more traditional treatment of Material Requirements Planning (MRP), Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II);
• Productivity and Technology, with a particular emphasis on the effect of information technology on process design and new product introduction.

By the 1990's the Operations Management literature reflected an noticeable trend toward strategically-focused inquiry. (FILIPPINI, 1997; GARVIN, 1998; HAYES and UPTON, 1998). This departure from the past was due in large part to the debate which grew from the Japanese approaches to production, compared with that in North America (FILIPPINI, 1997).

As satisfying as this counterbalancing trend toward strategic research was in the Operations Management learned journals, the situation with the balance of subject matter in Operations Management textbooks was not as clear. Until recently, the writing, production, and distribution of Operations Management texts (I define a text here as a core topical collection of topical matter with a long and costly cycle time evolution of writing, editing, proofreading, production and distribution). Leading scholars in the field (such as Chase, Aquilano and Jacobs, Slack, Wild, Krajewski and Ritzman, to name a few) would typically co-author a textbook under the banner of a leading publisher (such as McGraw-Hill, Pitman, or Addison-Wesley). The characteristic joint authorship of Operations Management texts was as much a product of the demands of writing coverage for all of the topics included within Operations Management as any other reason. New editions were published on the average of every four to five years. Often, these were not complete re-writes, but merely involved the "wordsmithing" of a few additional chapters as a "tip of the hat" to the evolving subject matters streaming from the research-oriented journals. Only reluctantly, would "marginal" topics ease their way toward a text's appendix, and ultimately, their non-appearance in a subsequent edition. The writing and production lead times, as well as the costs of publishing textbooks, has resulted in a noticeable reluctance to the include timely subject matter. These realities of the publishing world have led some practitioners to lament that the subject matter of Operations Management (at least that encountered in Operations Management textbooks) is woefully out of date (JAMES And JORDAN, 1993; KWON and CONBOY, 1999; MELNYK, 1999) Further, there is no lack of competition between the numerous publishing houses, which has led to ever-increasing pressure to release new materials. In the 1990's, in order to deal with problematic issues such as the marginal topics in the core texts, the textbook publishers released a plethora of ancillary study and instructor resource materials. For instance, more recent editions of Chase, Aquilano and Jacobs have prominently featured instructor solutions manuals, presentation materials, student study guides, problem-solving software, and more recently, media-rich CD-ROMs included with the text. Such supplementary resources have gone a long way to address topical shortcomings of the core text itself -- at least until a follow-on edition could be released.

Another implication for the instruction of Operations Management with its traditional focus on a core textbook has been an apparent lack of integration of the topical material within any one text. The battle between the reductionists and those who share a holistic view of Operations Management has not been easily solved in many of the major texts in the field.

For example, an examination of the content three currently in-print Operations Management texts (GAITHER and FRAZIER, 1999; MORTON, 1999 and KRAJEWSKI and RITZMAN, 1996) suggests that there is still an inordinate bias toward the influence of the Scientific Management perspective and reductionist thinking in the selection of Operations Management subject matter content. Indeed, each of the titles assume a focus on "production" Operations Management, with scant attention to the challenges of Operations Management in the service sector. The implication is that for those graduate-level Operations Management instructors in American colleges and universities, there is no lack of reductionist-oriented text materials from which to choose. Table 1. Below lists topics as they appear in the texts' table of contents of three recently released Operations Management textbooks. Approximately seventy-five (75%) of the topics presented are qualified as tactical-level, "stand-alone" topics with an industrial engineering perspective. Roughly twenty-five (25%) of the topical areas of these texts deal with strategic, or business enterprise oriented issues. Morton's Production Operations Management is noteworthy in its particular bias toward the decision-science approach to Operations Management -- a focus which characterized the many of the earlier Operations Management texts. In particular, the decision science focus deals heavily with the issues of statistical inventory management (economic order quantity and economic production batch size determination; item-level forecasting, and linear programming (HOPP and SPEARMAN, 1996; FILIPPINI, 1997; LEVENBURG, 1996; MEREDITH, 1996; and UPTON, 1997).

David M. Upton's text, Designing, Managing, and Improving Operations, is a departure from the Traditional textbook format. Rather, Upton relies upon the Harvard Business School's emphasis on the case study method of research and instruction. Upton provides a collection of cases focused on improving the operations of a business unit. There is a treatment of both manufacturing and services. Further, the cases address the design, management and improvement of the fundamental building blocks of operations–operations processes. Upton examines the systems used to coordinate processes, focusing on the use and management of information technology as part of such systems. (UPTON, 1998).

Recent observations have suggested that there are a few reasons for this lack of pedagogical cohesion. One view offers that Operations Management researchers prefer to publish their best work in more established academic journals, such as Management Science, Operations Research, Decision Sciences and the Academy of Management Journal -- rather than Operations Management-specific journals (such as the Journal of Operations Management, the International Journal of Production and Operations Management , The Production and Inventory Management Journal, and the Journal of Supply Chain Management (PILKINGTON and LISTON-HEYES, 1999).

Another view submits that the absence of an integrated Operations Management body of knowledge owes from the subject's unusually high degree of interaction with other disciplines (SOWER et al., 1997). Yet another view offers that substantial differences in Operations Management research streams in Europe and North America result in an absence a "recognition of what the discipline stands for." In other words, the Operations Management field has failed to create its own literature and that it is this condition which has undermined the reputation of Operations Management as a legitimate academic field. (PILKINGTON and LISTON-HEYES, 1999).

A focus on the submissions to the Journal of Operations Management over the past few years also suggest that the topical makeup of Operations Management is undergoing rapid change, from a traditional emphasis on manufacturing and production, to a wider embrace of such subjects as supply chain management, service Operations Management, and global Operations Management (MEREDITH and ROTH, 1998).

There is an ever-expanding inclusion of a supply chain management studies and research in the literature. "Much of the Operations Management research in supply chain management is analytically-based. However, there is a growing body of empirical research in at least three distinguishable areas" (ROTH, 1998). The first of these emergent areas of research will center upon the optimization of relationships and strategies between a firm and its suppliers and customers -- versus a traditional focus on the study of intra-company functional interactions (MEREDITH and ROTH, 1998). A second research area will involve the growing use of electronic links to improve supply chain performance -- "e-commerce" and "B-2-B [Business-to-Business] technology solutions." (MEREDITH and ROTH, 1998). A third supply chain emphasis concerns total cost reduction initiatives and outsourcing strategies regarding support functions, such as information services, software development, process technology, distribution, and operations maintenance. "Research is needed on when and how companies should companies outsource, how to measure the cost benefits, and what is the impact on the operations organization?" (MEREDITH and ROTH, 1998). Supply chain management has emerged during the latter part of the 1990's as a subject unto itself, even if lacking in a universally-accepted definition (SPENCER, 1999; KAUFFMAN, 1999; KWON and CONBOY, 1999; MELNYK, 1999).

The reality of internationally dispersed operations, global supply chains, and business processes across national boundaries is redefining competitive advantage (MEREDITH and ROTH, 1998). Operations Management as a discipline has lagged behind other disciplines such as business strategy, finance, and marketing in generating streams or research on the internationalization of Operations Management. (ROTH, 1997). Roth has identified at last nine core areas of needed research in the arena of international Operations Management: (1) Manufacturing Operations; (2) Operations Strategy; (3) Global Supply Chains; (4) Location and Facilities; (5) Productivity; (6) Design of Human Resource Infrastructures; (7) Information Systems Support; (8) Product and Process Development and Technology Transfer and (9) Global Service Operations (ROTH, 1997). "Another continuing development is in the interdisciplinary integration into Operations Management of topics traditionally found in marketing, finance, organizational behavior, and information systems. Logistics and supply chain management, two subjects that have been largely under the marketing domain, have now entered Operations Management research journals and Operations Management curricula" (CHASE and ZHANG, 1998).

Service Operations Management is moving in two directions: toward theory development and testing with empirical databases and toward analytic models that emphasize performance improvement (MEREDITH and ROTH, 1998). Within the discipline of Operations Management the service movement was driven, in part:

In an entry survey of selected Executive M.B.A. students at Golden Gate University between 1995 and 1998, the following demographic profile of the student taking EMBA-370, Operations Management was derived (REEDS, 1999):

Specifically the survey further derived that sixty-four (64%) percent of the students surveyed viewed themselves as service sector employees with twenty-eight (28%) percent employed in the manufacturing sector, and the remaining eight (8%) percent employed in the public sector. The survey results also suggest that to secure a perspective which values the relevance of Operations Management relevance with our EMBA students -- both now and in the future -- we must seek to rapidly integrate service-sector related instruction and materials into the course. Otherwise we risk losing their attention and Operations Management be deemed "irrelevant" or "redundant."

Nine discernible research streams worthy of a Service Operations Management emphasis have been recently identified by Warwick Business School's Robert Johnston (JOHNSTON, 1999): (1) Linking operational performance to business drivers; (2) Performance measurement and operations improvement; (3) Guarantees, complaints, and service recovery -- tools for performance improvement; (4) People management; (5) Service design; (6) Service technology; (7) The design of internal networks; (8) The service encounter and (9) Managing service capacity.

Allowing that there is an obvious contemporaneous debate over the constituent elements of Operations Management, there is an equally compelling and indeed influential reexamination underway of the pedagogy of Operations Management course design and delivery. This issue goes well beyond the boundaries of the topical contents of Operations Management, and could be claimed to extend to all other courses offered in institutions of higher learning. It is not merely a matter of mechanics, not just a matter of teaching, but rather of learning -- how best to deliver and encourage that learning to the University's adult learners. Thus the course content and all of its embedded issues are inextricably intertwined with the delivery of that content, and the successful learning outcomes that are the stated objective of an executive M.B.A. program such as Golden Gate University's EMBA. The time when teaching faculty in higher education could simply follow the teaching methods that they experienced as students themselves is drawing to a close. (BOURNER and FLOWERS, 1997). As a result of internal forces within institutions of higher education (financial) and external imperatives of the marketplace (increased competition and the influence of information technologies), many schools are scrutinizing not only course content for its relevancy, but the effectiveness and orientation of learning.

Bourner and Flowers of the University of Brighton, in the United Kingdom, suggest a view of the learning aims of higher education, in a seminal article published in 1997, and available on the Internet: "Teaching and Learning Methods in Higher Education: A Glimpse of the Future." They argue that the learning aims of higher education should be to:

• Disseminate knowledge 
• Develop the capability to use ideas and information 
• Develop the student's ability to test ideas and evidence 
• Develop the student's ability to generate ideas and evidence
• Facilitate the personal development of students 
• Develop the capacity of students to plan and manage their own learning

Of course, these aims should apply not only to EMBA-370, Operations Management, but to all of the graduate courses in Golden Gate University's curriculum. In the case at hand, the evolution of the more effective and meaningful approaches to both teaching and learning of Operations Management should always be encouraged. Bourner and Flowers advocate a "spectrum" of pedagogical and andragogical methods which apply to each of the six "learning aims of higher education:" (BOURNER and FLOWERS, 1997):

One may conclude that different teaching methods are appropriate for different learning aims -- Indeed, there is overlap. There is an implied direction in the teaching methodologies identified by Bourner and Flowers, which imply a rough parallel with Bloom's Taxonomy. Figure 1 sets forth this comparison:

As a basis of comparison with Bourner and Flowers' six Learning Aims, Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (BLOOM et al., 1956) identifies six levels of cognitive learning and five levels of affective learning, with an emphasis on two streams of learning (STONE, 1996):

Cognitive learning is centered on knowledge such as facts, terminology, and the analysis of elements. Affective learning, on the other hand, centers on values and value systems: openness to or awareness of selected ideas, the valuation of ideas, integrating values into a total world philosophy.

According to Bloom et al, Cognitive levels of learning are characterized as: Knowledge: remembering something encountered; Comprehension: understanding material, without necessarily relating it to other material; Application: using abstractions in particular and concrete situations; Analysis: breaking down communication into parts so that the organization of ideas becomes clear; Synthesis: putting elements into a whole; and Evaluation: judging the value of material and methods for a given purpose.

Affective Learning is characterized by five learning levels: Receiving: being willing to attend to or receive certain stimuli; Responding: being actively involved, participating; Valuing: determining the worth of a thing, phenomenon, or behavior; Organization: determining the organization, interrelationship, and ordering of values and Characterization: integrating values into a total worldview or philosophy.

In considering both Bourner and Flowers' and Bloom et al.'s models of learning aims they both have the same imperative, as suggested in Figure 1. Above: That is, to increase the depth of learning for the student, one should attempt to enlist pedagogy and andragogy which employs teaching and learning methods from left-to-right along the spectrum. They advocate a direction away from the traditional reliance on lecture-based methods of delivery, and toward those activities and methods which promote higher levels of learning for the adult learner. Further, any deliberate movement toward a greater depth of learning in the classroom should be paired wherever possible with the introduction of technology-based tools to augment the learning experience:

Such newer forms of personal and social interaction were noted by John Naisbitt when he contended that: (NAISBITT, 1984)

Bourner and Flowers offer a "matrix of teaching and learning methodologies" [See Table 3 above] measured against their six Learning Aims (BOURNER and FLOWERS, 1997).

The learning methods employed, for example in Table 4 below, designed to encourage the dissemination of knowledge (fact transfer) in EMBA-370, Operations Management, should set this Learning Aim as its minimum goal. In a review of the syllabi of three Golden Gate University faculty members teaching EMBA-370 in 1999, the majority of the goals in The Dissemination of Knowledge were addressed. However, it is interesting to note that only one faculty member required and encouraged the use of the Internet in conjunction with the proficient use of library materials and resources. Tables 4 through 9 following set forth a comparison of Bourner and Flowers' Learning Aims against a rough-cut assessment of those aims which could be tangibly demonstrated in a course syllabus on the one hand, and those aims which could best be described as "marginal," or "deficient" on the other hand. The purpose of this tabular comparison is not to cast faculty performance in a negative light, but rather to suggest a way forward toward improvement in the teaching and learning methods employed by faculty in Golden Gate University's executive MBA Program.

Tables 4 through 9 reveal that the following list of teaching and learning methodologies could serve as an overall faculty goal for continuous improvement:

A Full analysis and discussion of each technique would go beyond the intent and scope of this curriculum guidance. However, such methodologies could well serve as the focus of future faculty development workshops and seminars at Golden Gate University. Further, the above list is not to suggest that some of the methodologies presented are not used to some degree by individual faculty members. Rather, its presence is meant to stimulate dialogue and the ultimate inclusion of such methodologies as appropriate in the delivery of our EMBA courses, not just EMBA-370 Operations Management.

To date, few empirical studies have been done which investigate specific effects of information technology on the delivery of Operations Management curricula (WHITE and JACOBS, 1998). It is anticipated that this condition will change however, with particular consideration to the widespread employment of IT in higher education. "The Internet is used most extensively by academics and students…Most colleges and universities currently have Internet access that is free to all faculty members and students… (WHITE and JACOBS, 1998). However, there have been a few pioneering studies which have examined at least some of the effects on the vehicles for teaching and learning the discipline of Operations Management (, 1997, and WHITE and JACOBS, 1998). Warwick Business School's David TWIGG suggests at least three ways in which the Internet can prove beneficial for the academic community (TWIGG, 1997):

• It may be used as a research tool for looking up information on a specific topic, searching online databases or dropping into the sites of known experts to develop an understanding of their current and previous work.

Examples of typical Operations Management websites on the Internet, which can serve as a foundation for research in the field are (REEDS, 1999):

These are only a few examples of Internet access for research by EMBA-370 students -- there are many more. The existence of such Internet access should dispel any student complaints about the lack of access to or the quality of research materials in pursuit of their own research in the course.

Through a review of the core Operations Management Text (Chase, Aquilano and Jacobs) in both its current Eighth and forthcoming Ninth editions, it is valuable to consider how the Internet can provide access to additional course materials and resources, designed to allow the study of Operations Management to no longer be bound by the physical confines of the textbook itself. Indeed, the Eighth and Ninth editions have a CD-ROM attached to the jacket of each book which allows both the instructor, as well as the student to access additional multimedia and Internet-based materials by the use of a Web browser.

Finally, there is the potential of using the capabilities of the Internet for Conferencing (WHITE and JACOBS, 1998; TWIGG, 1997). This is typically an advanced form of discussion group based around specific themes. The conferences are assigned for particular dates and times, and are often accompanied by a number of articles that provide the basis for debate (TWIGG, 1997). Once again, conferencing may have the focus of an intra-university mediated or class-centered conferencing schedule, or it may be mediated by a group -- academic or practitioner-oriented -- in the larger Internet community.

As important as Information Technology [IT} is in advancing teaching and learning in Operations Management EMBA-370, there is the suggestion of some barriers to the full appreciation of the broader use of technology to support teaching and learning goals, especially some of the more innovative methods proposed by Bourner and Flowers. During 1999, an informal survey was taken in four EMBA-370 cohorts taught by this instructor (REEDS, 1999). This rough-cut survey was administered to forty-seven (47) EMBA-370 students, in response to some perceived difficulties in some of the students' ability to use e-mail effectively to communicate with the professor and amongst each other, and to use the Internet and World-Wide Web as a research resource for their research projects in the course. The survey administered to selected EMBA-370 students followed the format of a similar entry-level survey of 147 graduate students at Duquesne University by Dr. Lawrence Tomei, Special Assistant to the Dean for Teaching and Technology. The results of the EMBA-370 survey is compared with the results of the Duquesne study in the areas of hardware access and availability, general computer expertise, and access to both E-mail and the Internet.

Table 10. examines the access the graduate students surveyed have to computing hardware. Dr. Tomei found that with graduate adult learners, "retain their years-old technology that has served them well as a word processor, spreadsheet analyzer and database manager (TOMEI, 1999). The data from the EMBA-370 students would suggest that a similar profile exists. The outcome of this data is an observation that approximately three-fourths of the students in both the Duquesne and Golden Gate University programs may not be able to tap the full potential of the more contemporary systems requirements of the Internet and graphics-intensive software. This is in spite of the fact that in the case of the Golden Gate University EMBA Program, all students were provided with a laptop (until the practice was discontinued with the Fall, 1999 intake). So the implication is that even the laptop computers given to Golden Gate EMBA students as a part of the Program were not fully system capable. It could not be determined from the survey whether this was due to software or access limitations, and thus requires more definitive inquiry. It is noteworthy that four Golden Gate University students claimed not to have any computer at all, despite their having been issued one for the program. It was later learned that their laptops were either broken or had some other serious performance flaws which precluded their effective use.

Table 11. offers a comparison of the levels of user sophistication. In contrasting the Duquesne and Golden gate graduate students, it would appear that the results are fairly uniform. Only a small percentage consider themselves "Masters" in the use of computers and systems. The majority see themselves as either experienced, or novices. Appro