Empirical Research in Operations Management: From Field Studies to Analyzing Digital Exhaust

摘要

The amount of empirical research in operations management that has been published in this journal and in Management Science has recently witnessed a significant increase. Beyond this increase in numbers, research questions and empirical methodologies have also changed substantially. Whereas empirical research in the 1990s was primarily carried out at the firm, plant, or project level, recent research focuses much more on microlevel phenomena. This shift in the unit of analysis has been made possible by advances in data generation and collection technologies. This trend is likely to continue as the digitization of modern work creates massive data trails, which archive the state of an operation at a very fine level of granularity. I will refer to such data, which result as a by-product of the digital planning and control of operations, as digital exhaust. As such microlevel data become available abundantly, new opportunities for research arise. However, such data also pose new challenges, including the need for careful theory development and a deep contextual understanding of the underlying data generation process.