Production/Operations Management: Research Process and Content during the 1980s

It has been argued that production/operations management (P/OM) emerged as a true functional field of management only during the 1980s. If this is the case then one can hypothesize that P/OM research must have changed considerably during the last decade. To test this hypothesis all the articles published in the first ten volumes of the International Journal of Operations & Production Management were categorized using a framework based on research process reported. Explains the development of this framework and presents the data generated from the categorization process. These clearly show that during the 1980s the content of P/OM research increasingly became of a macro and soft nature.