Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [449]
TOC as a Profession
The TOC community is not alone in its experiences. There is a sense that much can be gained from looking inward and outward, and it can learn from the concerns and experiences of other professional groups. For example, OR in the United States has suffered from what Abbott (1988) termed “professional regression”—a process by which professions withdraw into themselves (Rosenhead, 2009, S13, quoting Corbett and van Wassenhove, 1993). Furthermore, status rankings, internal to the profession, based on the knowledge system that gives a profession its special claim, tend to be correlated with remoteness from practical concerns and implementation. Rosenhead asserts that the 1988 CONDOR report illustrated this tendency in OR.
At present, the TOC profession seems safe on this latter tendency, as TOC developments are strongly practice-based or practice-oriented (Inman et al., 2009). We suggest that the TOC profession should be aware of the risk of professional regression, but acknowledge that there is an inherent dilemma. On the one hand, if TOC wishes to gain credibility and recognition within and from other peer disciplines, it needs to conform to the academic rigor and norms of those peer disciplines. However, in order to do so, the TOC community must submit its body of knowledge to scrutiny using the same academic norms and protocols to which other academic peer groups are subject. If TOC fails to build support from other peer disciplines, it can run the risk of “professional regression.” However, if TOC seeks to gain such support by uncritically adopting the methods of other disciplines, it may jeopardize TOC’s focus on practical aspects that traditionally motivate TOC proponents and that fuel most of the developments within the TOC community.
Identity and the Strategic Role of Publication Outlet
The previous section has made implicit reference to the important issue of identity—both self-identity and the identity projected to others. In considering these matters further, we need to consider more broadly why TOC has not become accepted in the mainstream, and more specifically, why TOC is rarely mentioned in the academic and journal mainstream. One may suppose that TOC is not recognized as being OR or soft OR because of its very distinct parentage, and that many may still think of TOC as a scheduling or manufacturing method. We suggest that much may be gained from spreading the message appropriately, demonstrating that TOC is more than a set of tools for operations management. Constructive illustration of the TP in complementary or multi-methodology work, in other domains of application, may help build awareness and acceptance of the TP.
Even though TOC is not considered to be hard or soft OR, or a systems method by proponents of those disciplines, TOC TP contributions are already finding favor in the UK and in the European more practically oriented OR and systems journals such as the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS) or the international OR federation’s International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR). The journals Human Systems Management (HSM) and International Journal of Production Research (IJPR) have both published special issues on TOC. Maybe the time is right to explore similar outlets such as the Journal of Operations Management (JOM) following the success of Watson et al. (2007), European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR), Interfaces, and other INFORMS journals, especially given the currency of debate about soft OR; and especially so, if one may argue that TOC could be considered either as constituted in the same manner as other