BUSINESS STRATEGY,MANUFACTURING FLEXIBILITY,AND ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE RELATIONSHIPS: A PATH ANALYSIS APPROACH

It has been argued in the literature that business strategy and manufacturing flexibility independently affect the performance of an organization. However, no empirical examination of the interrelationship among these three constructs has been performed. In this paper, based on a field study of 269 firms in the manufacturing industry, the identified constructs have been used to test a theoretical model using path analysis techniques. Our results indicate that business strategy contributes both directly and indirectly to organizational performance. The findings provide evidence of direct effects of (i) business strategy on manufacturing flexibility and (ii) manufacturing flexibility on organizational performance.     

REVISITING ALTERNATIVE THEORETICAL PARADIGMS IN MANUFACTURING STRATEGY

Testing and cross‐validation of theories and paradigms are necessary to advance the field of manufacturing strategy. When the findings of one study are also obtained in other studies, using entirely different databases, we become more confident in the results. Replication alleviates concerns about spurious results and is one motivation for this study. We examine aspects of the tradeoffs concept, production competence paradigm, and a manufacturing strategy taxonomy framework. In regard to the tradeoffs concept, we found evidence of tradeoffs between some, but certainly not all, manufacturing capabilities of quality, cost, delivery, and customization. The relationships get sharper when controlling for process choice. For example, the tradeoff between cost and customization is particularly strong between plants that have different process choices. We find that such tradeoffs can change, or even disappear, however, once the process choice is in place. With respect to the production competence paradigm, our analysis shows a statistically significant correlation between production competence and operations performance in batch shops, but not in plants with other process choices. Finally, using variables similar to those of Miller and Roth, our data produced three similar clusters even though their unit of analysis was much more macro than ours. Controlling for process choice is consistent with the current manufacturing strategy literature that emphasizes dynamic development of capabilities within the context of path dependencies. A major argument of this strand of research is that operations decisions not only affect current capabilities, but also set the framework for development of capabilities in the future. That being the case, controlling for process choice (or other factors such as industry or markets) should contribute to the understanding of capability‐development paths adopted by different manufacturing plants. In short, we found at least partial support for each of the theories examined here, even though the theories seem on the surface to be contradictory and mutually exclusive. Controlling for process choice or other measures of dependency goes a long way in uncovering consistency across different theories and empirical studies in operations management.     

Transnational familyhood and the liquid life paths of South Americans in the UK

In this article, we explore the nature of identity in the contemporary transnational family. To do this we extend lifecourse scholarship by considering Bauman's liquid modernity thesis and introducing the concept of a liquid life path. Original empirical examples drawn from our work among South American migrants and their families living in London and northern England illustrate diverse patterns of identification; everyday practices and social norms associated with maintaining split families, including parenting and remitting, coalesce around liquid life paths. We describe how these life paths turn on and reproduce a set of spatial and temporal imaginaries. We also reflect on the implications of these fluid imaginaries for our understanding of transnational familyhood.     

JOB RELEASE CONTROL USING A CYCLIC SCHEDULE*

In just‐in‐time inventory management in any manufacturing setting, the general idea has been to release jobs as late as possible (to reduce inventory costs) while still having them arrive at bottleneck machines in time to maintain the desired throughput (by not starving a bottleneck machine). When a cyclic schedule is employed, the throughput is determined by a cyclic sequence of operations known as the cyclic critical path. These operations are not, in general, all performed on a single bottleneck machine. We present an algorithm for releasing jobs that treats this cyclic critical path as the bottleneck. Although this algorithm has the somewhat complex task of not delaying any of these operations on the cyclic critical path, it is greatly simplified by being able to take advantage of the fixed sequence of the cyclic schedule. The result is that the algorithm is relatively simple to implement. Although it uses a simulation‐based analysis, this analysis can all be done and the necessary results stored in advance of its use. We test the algorithm in a job shop environment with stochastic operation times. This algorithm is shown to be effective at reducing inventory while avoiding decreases in throughput.