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However, and second, there is no one journal ideally suited for TOC or the TOC TP, although there are several obvious journals for production applications, projects, etc. As a result, published work as articles is spread across a range of journals, promoting widespread coverage but possibly reducing the impact that may come from there being a concentration, or home, in particular journals. Furthermore, as Kim et al. (2008) noted, the journals that published articles on TOC TP were generally those with lower impact factors, so targeting higher impact journals would be desirable.
Third, and unfortunately, while TOC would appear to share many characteristics with OR/MS, other systems methodologies, and soft OR, proponents of these methods do not generally consider TOC to be one of their kind, due to a lack of awareness, understanding, or through a more deliberate choice to exclude—an irony indeed, when one considers the history and plight of soft OR in seeking to gain acceptance in the more traditional OR/MS and journal mainstreams.
If the TP are to gain more recognition within academia, we must break into or join the journal mainstream, and despite the previous comments, the lowest barriers to entry may be through links with these comparator or peer disciplines. Indeed, Ronen (2005) has suggested that many TOC practices have their roots in well-accepted and well-established OR/MS concepts, which facilitates their multi-methodological use, for example, combining the 5FS and the mathematical programming approach in multi-methodological use. There have been several papers comparing TOC with LP, mostly showing congruence, but also showing advantages of using TOC. Indeed, there can be significant synergies in combining TOC with OR methods, as argued by Mabin and Gibson (1998), echoing criticism by Zeleny (1981) and Gass (1989) of naive usage of LP in relation to the management of constraints.
The reviews of the TOC and TOC TP literature reported here have been complemented by a useful series of retrospective/state-of-the-art reviews conducted for the 50th anniversary conference of the Operational Research Society, York, 2008, many of which are published in Brailsford et al. (2009). These included reviews on soft OR and PSMs (Rosenhead, 2009), Systems Thinking (Jackson, 2009), and healthcare (Royston, 2009).
What is noticeable and notable in these reviews is that TOC is absent, unrecognized, or excluded from descriptions of OR, soft OR, PSM, and systems methods as presented in such reviews. For example:
The notable successful work at Radcliffe and Horton Hospitals by the Goldratt Group has been reported in Umble and Umble (2006) as well as in The Oxford Story, by Dr. Eli Goldratt, available on various websites,6 but this work is not included in the “One hundred year review of OR in health,” despite it being published in a prominent OR journal.
TOC is not mentioned in the soft OR discussions of Mingers (2009a; b), despite being linked and compared in the Omega publication of Davies et al. (2005), and despite sharing many seeming commonalities in domains of application.
TOC is not generally referred to in OR texts, except sometimes for a small section on OPT, constraint management, or synchronous manufacturing aspects. Even in Operations Management textbooks, there is usually just one chapter on TOC, with a few notable exceptions such as Cox et al. (2003), which approaches the subject using TOC as the overarching framework.
Even though TOC work has been published in OR/MS and systems journals, it appears that TOC has yet to be considered mainstream or to provide a mainstream contribution to any of these disciplines. Nevertheless, the TOC community can do more than await recognition. However, before taking action appropriate to gaining that recognition, there would be benefit in conducting a self-audit. The following section offers some suggestions about matters that deserve consideration.
Suggested Topics for a Self-Audit of TOC
In the following subsections, we suggest much can be gained from