In the preceding review, it is readily apparent that
research and practice in both TQM and SCM have
experienced ever-expanding boundaries of analysis.
Both research streams started with small, well-defined
problems, gradually expanded to include a much
richer set of issues and interactions within and
between firms, and have begun to address environmental
issues. This review and synthesis of characteristic
research in TQM and SCM provides a basis from
which to speculate on how environmental research
will evolve within the field of OM and on why the
precise nature of the link between environmental perspectives
and OM has been so elusive. Starting with
the latter, recall that throughout we have presented
examples of how adopting an environmental perspective
led to improvements in OM theory and practice,
improvements that in principle could often have been
found without an environmental perspective but that,
for whatever reason, had not been uncovered otherwise.
We formalize this as follows: