Special Issue of Production and Operations Management : Measuring the Impact of Sustainable Operations

Abstract

The OM community has embraced “sustainability” as a key area of activity in recent years, focusing so far mostly on the environmental dimension of sustainability. The calls for business to focus increased resources on sustainable operations have intensified and broadened in the last few years, now including major research efforts in closed‐loop supply chains, humanitarian logistics, carbon footprinting of supply chains, product and process innovations directed towards improving energy efficiency, sustainable transport, and many other areas that have strong intersections with the traditional purview of OM. Notwithstanding some progress in these areas, most work published in OM journals has not explicitly measured the impacts of the alternatives being studied.

The objective of this special issue is to bridge the gap between existing research on sustainable operations, including links to traditional measures of profit and risk, and approaches that exist for measuring environmental and social impacts from other disciplines. Examples of topics that would fit the objectives of this special issue include:

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rigorous life‐cycle assessments performed in a context that is of direct relevance to researchers in the OM community

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research on the social impact of OM‐related decisions in which this impact is measured in a rigorous and quantitative manner

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case studies or sectoral benchmarking studies on the measurement of supply chain carbon or energy footprints and their relationship to associated mitigation strategies

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survey research and analysis of sectoral or regional studies concerned with management strategies and priorities in support of sustainable operations

Analytical models, empirical studies, and case studies are all welcome, as long as they increase our insights on quantitative measurement of social and environmental impacts of operations management decision making.

All papers submitted to the special issue should meet the usual POMS guidelines of rigor and relevance and should follow the POMS formatting and language conventions (see http://www.poms.org/journal.html). However, specific to this special issue is the requirement that the research have additional boundary‐spanning attributes, allowing better quantification of environmental and/or social impact of POM solutions. The objective of the special issue is to help OM researchers ground their models better in measuring the impacts of strategies and initiatives directed toward improving the sustainability of operations.

Submitted articles will be reviewed by the guest editors and referees. Decisions regarding acceptance of articles will be made within two review cycles, where each review cycle will be within four months.

All submissions should include at least three suggestions for reviewers; authors using measurement methods that are novel to the OM community should suggest several reviewers from those disciplines in addition to reviewers from within the OM field.

All submissions should be submitted electronically, by June 1, 2009 to Charles Corbett (charles.corbett@anderson.ucla.edu).

Charles J. Corbett Professor of Operations Management and Environmental Management Joseph Jacobs Term Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies UCLA Anderson School of Management charles.corbett@anderson.ucla.edu

Paul R. Kleindorfer Distinguished Research Professor Technology and Operations Management INSEAD paul.kleindorfer@insead.edu

Luk N. Van Wassenhove Academic Director INSEAD Social Innovation Center The Henry Ford Chaired Professor of Manufacturing And Professor of Technology and Operations Management INSEAD luk.van‐wassenhove@insead.edu