Delvon Parker
Departments
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- Doctoral Candidate
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Curriculum vitae
Research interests & areas of expertise
My primary area of interest within the Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSM) domain concerns the interrelationships among the structures of manufactured products and their supporting production systems. My work in this area is heavily influenced by the writings of James Thompson, Wickham Skinner, Robert Hayes and Steven Wheelwright, who all explicitly recognize the importance of manufacturing choices to overall organization design, and highlight the influence of product structures on organizational structures. I feel that this area is ripe for reexamination within the emerging contexts of network manufacturing, supply chain management and modular structural forms.
The theoretical perspectives I have applied to inform my reexamination of the structural interdependencies of products and production systems are General Systems Theory, Contingency Theory and Agency Theory. Adopting a General Systems Theory perspective allows me to draw upon a rich heritage of scientific research to gain insight regarding system behavior in response to environmental changes. Additionally, it provides a grounded framework for holistic examination of an entire production system, inclusive of the manufacturing process, the firm that houses it, and its corresponding supply and distribution network - explicitly accounting for the interdependencies that exist among them. Contingency Theory supplements this view by recognizing that system response is context-specific, providing more or less favorable outcomes given specific sets of initial conditions, while Agency Theory informs the contract / governance choices that underlie the system's operation.
