Gomory Award Highlights the Impact of Industry Studies Research at JOM

Abstract

For two consecutive years, articles published in the Journal of Operations Management (JOM) have received the Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award, given annually by the Industry Studies Association (ISA). This achievement is unprecedented and a testimony to JOM's encouragement and support of industry studies research. It also speaks to the remarkable broad impact on firms and industries that the journal continues to provide. In the interest of encouraging future outstanding work of this kind, I here provide a short introduction to industry studies, the ISA, and the Gomory Award. The remaining discussion is devoted to accounts from the authors of the award-winning articles on the “backstory” of their research.

The “industry studies” idea—that much can be learned from close study of industrial activity—dates to the Industrial Revolution. In The Wealth of Nations (1976), Adam Smith famously chose to explain the advantages of a specialized division of labor for productivity by providing a detailed explication of the production process in a pin factory. Advocacy for industry studies as a method of scholarship began with Alfred Marshall and his attention to industrial districts in The Economics of Industry (1879). Competing firms locate near each other in such a district to gain the benefits of agglomeration—of skilled labor, production inputs, technological expertise, and customer demand.

Marshall was perhaps the first—but surely not the last—to advocate for direct observation as the best way “to get the direct feel of the economic world, more intimate than merely reading descriptions, enabling one to set things in their true scale of importance” (Pigou 1925, describing Marshall's work). Proponents of an industry studies approach see a path to better research questions and the generation of insights that equally inform theory and practice. Attention to industry context opens the door to more varied and valid data; good access allows researchers to “wallow in the data—to get down and dirty with the data” (Hamermesh 2008). Seeking to take advantage of such access can point the way towards the most appropriate (and often multiple) research methods. A phenomenon or empirical puzzle may initiate an industry studies inquiry while the insights may often be “pre-theory” contributions that stimulate further research rather than providing confirmatory testing of pre-determined hypotheses.

Gomory and Sloan staff saw MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) as a prototype. At the time, IMVP was completing a five-year research program that led to the best-selling book The Machine That Changed the World about the rise of lean production (aka Toyota Production System) as an alternate production paradigm that challenged traditional mass production. Susan Helper, the first Department Editor for JOM's Public Policy Department, and I were among the core IMVP researchers, an experience that shaped our entire careers.

After helping the National Bureau of Economic Research (led at the time by Martin Feldstein) develop a “pin factory” initiative that took leading economists on factory tours, Sue Helper wrote a valuable short article (its subtitle is an immortal Yogi Berra quote, “You Can Observe a Lot Just by Watching”) in American Economic Review (Helper 2000). She advocates for field work as a valuable input to impactful scholarship that strengthens pre-research identification of research questions, hypotheses, and relevant data while facilitating post-research sense-making that contributes to theory. Cognizant of criticism of the validity of data from field-based interviews vis-à-vis objectivity, replicability, and generalizability, she stands up a compelling counter-argument that is relevant to JOM's community of authors (past, present, future) to this day.

The ISA was established in 2009 to carry on the work of the Sloan initiative after Gomory's successor chose different funding priorities. ISA's members come from a wide variety of disciplines such as management, economics, engineering, industrial and labor relations, operations management, law, economic geography, and public policy. Industry studies scholars may focus on particular industries or occupations, or conduct cross-industry analysis. They are committed to learning about the context—market, firms, and institutions—in the industry or industries they study. This engagement, which includes close interaction with industry practitioners and often includes primary data collection, helps researchers achieve a broad and deep knowledge of this context. ISA's members, beyond their own research activity, contribute to national debates and policy decisions as well as affect the actions of global firms.

This award is named after Ralph Gomory for his foundational role in furthering the growth and influence of industry studies research. Editors from nine mainstream academic journals nominate up to three articles each year for consideration based on criteria provided by ISA ¹ .

When JOM invited me to become editor of the Department of Public Policy, I asked to expand that department's scope to include Industry Studies. Of course, public polices often affect many industries at once—and many of the best industry studies publications have little to do with public policy. Nonetheless, at a time when geopolitical tensions are rising, many are questioning the assumption that globalization is the only acceptable means of achieving economic growth, while long-dominant notions of global supply chains and global trade are being challenged. Industry studies—and industry strategy at the level of national and regional governments—are now front and center in today's debates over how to attain economic as well as social goals, such as good jobs, and how to be attentive to market failures that can weaken the capacity to pursue national interests in key technologies or social innovation.

Ralph Gomory asked ISA for only one condition to be attached to the award. The winning authors must, he insisted, have the opportunity to provide the “backstory” of their research for the readers of the journal in which their article appeared. He feels that academics trained to seek generalizability, inclined to treat industry as a control, and suspicious of context as imposing a constraint on theorizing need education in how industry studies scholarship was different.

In that spirit, JOM here offers the winning authors of the 2023 and 2024 Gomory Award the opportunity to tell the story of how their research project came to be, how the research question evolved over time, what types of data they gathered and what difficulties they faced in doing so, and how their communication of research findings has affected those involved in that industry.

The two most recent Gomory Award-winning articles are as follows:

2023 winner: Jordana George, Dwayne Whitten, Richard Metters, and James Abbey (2022).

“Emancipatory Technology and Developing-World Supply Chains: A Case Study of African Women Gemstone Miners.” JOM 68, no. 6–7: 619–648.

2024 winner: Danny Samson and Morgan Swink (2023)

“People, Performance and Transition: A Case Study of Psychological Contract and Stakeholder Orientation in the Toyota Australia Plant Closure.” JOM 69, no. 1: 67–101.

Initially, this work was sparked by a Wall Street Journal article about diamond mines using blockchain for provenance to attest they were not lab-created diamonds and were not mined by warlords seeking to overthrow governments. This concept was popularized in the movie “Blood Diamonds.” Our research began by speaking with numerous industry professionals to gain background. The intense contact with industry shifted our interest from diamonds to digital provenance in colored gemstones, an area where our research could provide a significant difference in the lives of miners and their families. The diamond industry is a sophisticated oligopoly comprised mostly of large firms, but the mining of colored stones is a wild and mostly unregulated arena.

These stones are primarily mined not by large corporations, but by people in extreme poverty typically referred to as “artisanal and small miners,” or ASMs. The world of colored stones is full of desperate miners, unscrupulous middlemen, and the romantic hope that anyone might find the “big one”—the stone that would change their life. We found their stories fascinating. We discovered through industry contact that ASMs were not only constrained in terms of process, tools, and education, but also socially and economically, especially women miners. Our focus narrowed to women miners as we discovered the additional hardships women miners face due to abusive supply chain practices.

Our research question was motivated by the opportunity provided by Toyota Motor Corporation of Australia who decided to commission an independent academic study to derive lessons learned and managerial insights from the first major plant closure in that company. After our initial literature review determined that this “plant closure best practices” phenomenon was under-researched, we expressed the research question in the article as “how can operations managers better address links between their decisions, operating values, and socioeconomic outcomes?”

Toyota wanted to learn as much as possible internally from this plant closure, specifically about how their “respect for people” core principle could be applied to this situation of some 2500 job losses. They also encouraged us to publish our analysis and article, consistent with their public- spirited philosophy.

The research design and method entailed ‘engaged research’ involving 150 in-depth, confidential interviews with Toyota employees from shop floor to executive ranks, supplemented by the open access we were given to datasets and reports within the company, for example, on employee engagement, satisfaction, and vehicle build quality. The company set up a steering committee for this project that was strongly supportive of our broad and deep data collection. We used qualitative data structure tables as a data reduction method, from which we deduced new moderators in creating our model of the relationship between a psychological contract breach and the outcomes of employee engagement, commitment, job satisfaction, and performance in the countdown period towards closure.

In terms of lucky breaks and obstacles, we were fortunate to have special interest and support from one senior and influential Toyota executive (PhD qualified) who ensured that a very high level of open access and communication was provided to us during the data collection processes. This access included participation in what would otherwise have been closed and confidential meetings and conferences associated with managing the plant closure. The Toyota executives and local managers described our role at these meetings as “fresh eyes”

Comments from the Gomory Award selection committee:

This approach aligns perfectly with JOM's vision for how theoretical contributions can advance both scholarly understanding and management practice(see Bendoly and Oliva, 2025).

As Department Editor for Public Policy and Industry Studies at JOM, I encourage submissions that embrace this approach. Whether examining public policy impacts or conducting deep industry analyses, research that combines rigorous methodology with rich contextual understanding has the power to advance both theory and practice in operations management.

The success of these Gomory Award winners demonstrates that industry studies research can meet the highest standards of academic rigor while maintaining deep relevance to practice. We look forward to publishing more work that continues this tradition of excellence.