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jom-theory-development

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Use when building the theoretical argument and hypotheses for a Journal of Operations Management (JOM) empirical study — deriving operations/behavioral mechanisms a priori, borrowing and adapting reference theory to an OM phenomenon, and specifying mediation/moderation so they are testable against observed operations data.

Journal-of-Operations-Management-Skills/skills/jom-theory-development/SKILL.md

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# Theory Development for Empirical OM (jom-theory-development)

## When to trigger

- Your hypotheses describe what happens but not *why*, operationally
- You are importing a reference theory (TCE, RBV, agency, institutional, behavioral decision theory, contingency, queueing/coordination logic) and must adapt it to an operations setting
- A reviewer says "this is a correlation, not a mechanism" or "the theory could apply to any context"
- You need to specify mediators/moderators that operations data can actually identify

## JOM's theory bar

JOM is empirical, but empirical strength without theory reads as a technical report. The argument must give an **operations mechanism** — a causal logic rooted in how work, capacity, inventory, information, incentives, or human behavior in operations actually function — not a generic management story bolted onto an OM dataset. Because JOM explicitly excludes purely analytical/optimization work, your theory is *verbal and falsifiable*, developed to be tested against **observation**, not derived as an optimization proof.

## Build the mechanism a priori
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