Title: A postmodern turn to estimating performance frontiers

Authors: James E. Storbeck

Addresses: Policy and Management, University of Texas, Brownsville, 256 MRC South 80 Fort Brown, Brownsville, Texas 78520, USA

Abstract: Extremal approaches in Management Science (MS) to estimating efficient production functions owe their conceptual modelling origins to earlier, theoretical work in agricultural and production economics. The primary metaphor in this paradigm has been one of material production. This work departs from the main body of the DEA literature, in that it proposes a modelling framework that: acknowledges explicitly the social construction of many production functions; identifies the modernist conceptual traps of many implementations; explores some alternatives to the modelling of ephemeral social production that are framed in relation to postmodern sensibilities.

Keywords: data envelopment analysis; DEA; social construction; postmodernism; systems performance; management science; modelling framework; social production; social sciences.

DOI: 10.1504/IJADS.2008.017954

International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences, 2008 Vol.1 No.1, pp.107 - 124

Published online: 24 Apr 2008 *

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