Journal of Business Logistics最新文献

Despite widespread investments in advanced vehicle safety technologies (VSTs), crashes in the trucking industry remain persistently high. This study reveals why technologies designed to make roads safer sometimes erode the very behaviors they aim to improve. Drawing on 40 narratives from 25 driver managers and follow-up study with 31 professional drivers, we use narrative inquiry approach grounded in theories of technology avoidance, technology dominance, and managerial feedback. The findings reveal that drivers often experience these technologies as intrusive and misaligned with real-world driving conditions, leading to behaviors such as avoidance. Over time, reliance on automated alerts can erode drivers’ judgment and skill. However, when managers use technology-generated data to provide empathetic and proactive feedback and feedforward explanations tied to personal safety, drivers are more likely to engage with the technology constructively. The findings show a critical paradox: VSTs can be hindering or enabling, depending on how human-VST and manager-driver relationships are managed. The study advances understanding of how frontline behavioral safety emerges not from VSTs itself but from the quality of human sensemaking around it.

Buyer–supplier relationships and their evolution have long been central to supply chain research. A critical element of the relationship lifecycle is dissolution. Understanding how and why buyer–supplier relationships dissolve offers valuable insights for managing these, particularly under stress. This paper presents a structured literature review of buyer–supplier relationship dissolution and related phenomena. The findings reveal a field largely focused on internal drivers—such as poor performance, dissatisfaction, and opportunism—while underemphasizing contextual and coping mechanisms that shape relationship trajectories toward dissolution. To organize these insights, we adopt family stress theory as a guiding framework, highlighting the interplay of stressors, relational resources, and response strategies in shaping dissolution pathways. Based on this synthesis, we identify conceptual gaps and propose a future research agenda centered on escalation dynamics, cumulative stress, multi-actor perspectives, and the role of relational and contextual moderators. In doing so, the study contributes to a more theory-informed understanding of relationship dissolution in the supply chain domain.

Contemporary logistics and supply chain management (L/SCM) face unprecedented disruption from emerging technologies, rising complexity, and escalating uncertainties, in which traditional approaches to value creation have limited reach. In this vein, this paper introduces a cross-disciplinary theoretical toolkit that draws on unconventional (or less commonly used) theories from sociology, ecology, neuroscience, and complex systems science to advance the L/SCM conversations. We introduce novel perspectives on power dynamics, resilience, flow optimization, and decision-making under uncertainty. These perspectives advance a clearer understanding of disruptive value creation, defined here as the generation of adaptive, inclusive, resilient, and ecologically integrated forms of value enabled by disruptive technologies and cross-disciplinary reconfiguration of logistics systems. To guide both research and practice, we outline future-oriented questions that provide a roadmap for pioneering strategies in L/SCM. The paper calls for a shift beyond efficiency-driven paradigms toward adaptive, inclusive, and disruptive value creation. Thus, this paper seeks to inspire academic conversations while supporting managers with frameworks to guide and transform fast-changing supply networks.

As online shopping is driving the last-mile operations landscape, the infrastructure and environmental impacts of last-mile deliveries have prompted some US states to implement a retail delivery fee. This study explores how such fees influence consumer behavior. Drawing from the Theory of Planned Behavior, the authors analyze national survey data to examine the determinants of consumers' behavioral intentions to continue shopping online when faced with a delivery fee. Results indicate that perceived fairness is the strongest driver of behavioral intention, while cost sensitivity discourages continued online shopping. Convenience shows a weaker positive effect, while environmental awareness has no effect on continuous engagement. Additionally, fairness emerges as a necessary condition for maintaining shopping behavior under delivery fee implementation. Grounded theory analysis of open-ended responses further contextualizes consumer attitudes toward the fee, revealing concerns about trust, potential inequities, externalities, and unintended consequences. Our findings offer empirical evidence to inform public policy and retailer strategies aimed at fostering sustainable e-commerce logistics while maintaining consumer satisfaction.

This study explores why and how retailers adopt plural governance structures to manage last-mile delivery (LMD). Although plural governance of LMD is increasingly central in omnichannel retail, there remains little research on how alternative structures of plural governance (e.g., combining in-house and outsourced models) emerge and evolve over time. Using a theory-building, temporal comparative case study approach and drawing on retrospective, cross-period qualitative data from eight retailers in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany, we develop a middle-range process theory of plural governance in LMD. We uncover a two-stage nested structure through which retailers strategically integrate supplementary governance structures into their existing plural sourcing mix, driven by four contextual mechanisms: knowledge-based hierarchical integration, value-oriented network expansion, adaptive governance flexibility, and relationally embedded resilience governance. These LMD-specific mechanisms explain how retailers strategically reconfigure their governance portfolios to balance control, coverage, flexibility, and resilience over time.

Two decades after Lee's (2004) Triple-A framework—agility, adaptability, and alignment—redefined supply chain excellence, the context that shaped it has undergone a significant transformation. Supply chains now function through digital platforms, extended ecosystems, and under growing social and environmental expectations. This Journal of Business Logistics Special Topic Forum (STF) revisits the Triple-A concept to explore how these capabilities evolve under today's conditions and the need for responsiveness. Drawing on the STF contributions, we introduce AAA+, an updated view of the Triple-A model that clarifies the conditions under which agility, adaptability, and alignment generate competitive advantage. The framework extends the original logic through three evolutions: digital super-agility, enabled by real-time data, analytics, and automation; strategic and sustainable adaptability, embedding resilience and environmental responsibility into network redesign; and ecosystem alignment, emphasizing coordination and shared governance across multi-tier and multi-stakeholder networks. Together, these dimensions shift Triple-A from a firm-level performance framework to a network-level capability system. The AAA+ perspective also outlines a forward agenda for research and practice. It calls for studies that examine how digitalization, sustainability, and ecosystem governance interact to shape capability development, and it offers managers a lens to assess whether their supply chains are prepared for an era defined by data speed, global risk, and public accountability. In revisiting Triple-A through this broader lens, the STF reaffirms Lee's enduring insight: the most successful supply chains are not simply efficient—they are those that learn, adapt, and align better across an increasingly connected world.

Logistics service quality reflects the gap between customers' expectations for logistics service and the actual service they receive, yet it is unclear whether academic research has kept pace with changes in logistics practice over the past 25 years. This article reviews 173 empirical studies on logistics service quality drawn from leading supply chain, logistics, and marketing journals. Using a process – oriented perspective, we develop a framework that categorizes prior work according to antecedents, mechanisms, and outcomes, and we map how different factors collectively shape logistics service quality in both business–to–business and business–to–consumer contexts. Our review shows that, while research has extensively examined firm capabilities, fulfillment performance, and customer attitudes, important gaps remain regarding logistics service quality in nontraditional settings (e.g., reverse and closed–loop supply chains, decentralized supply networks), consistency across channels and service settings, employee management and service failure prevention, interactions among logistics service quality dimensions, consumer participation and heterogeneity, and the social dimension of logistics service quality. We conclude by outlining a future research agenda to address these gaps.

Despite a generally positive discourse on blockchain technology in academic literature, firms have struggled to implement it in their supply chains. In this article, we are deconstructing the typically positive perception of blockchain in the literature through a provocative style of theorizing and critical discourse analysis. Based on our analysis of the discourse, we challenge the traditional view of power, which posits that it is concentrated in dominant actors and exercised over others. Instead, we consider power from a performative perspective and show how blockchain functions as a non-human actor that connects supply chain participants, translates their interactions, and fosters the emergence of new socio-technical networks. This perspective gives managers practical tools to move beyond firm-centered control, address power imbalances, and create more equitable, value-generating supply chains.