Journal of Business Logistics最新文献

Ensuring motor carriers comply with safety rules is critical to the efficient workings of supply chains and the safety of the motoring public. However, little is understood regarding how carriers respond to changes in the likelihood of inspection (a.k.a., “crackdowns”) undertaken by the Department of Transportation. Drawing on the regulatory compliance and criminology literature, we extend the rational cheater explanation that undergirds carrier safety research by incorporating principles from attention-based theory to devise new theoretical predictions regarding how carriers respond to announced versus unannounced inspection crackdowns. To test our theory, we rely on exogenous variation in the probability of inspection from the DOT's use of announced and unannounced inspection “blitzes.” We test predictions using a longitudinal dataset of nearly 10 million truck inspections from 2012 to 2016. We find firms with lower costs of compliance, and higher costs of avoiding inspections improve compliance prior to and during announced blitzes. Small firms with lower costs of avoidance tend to avoid announced blitzes. Unannounced blitzes result in no changes in compliance or avoidance, providing evidence that awareness is driving our results.

Retail firms have developed new product and service offerings to meet the changing needs of omnichannel customers. While, prior research has documented these offerings in detail, little is yet known about how retail firms can best adapt different aspects of their organizations to the new omnichannel environment. We specifically focus on the intra-firm changes that affected the role of the firm's supply chain organization and its interactions with other business entities within the retail enterprise. This paper provides an in-depth understanding of the new business processes, organizational structures, governance mechanisms and customer interactions; collectively described as the retail business model (BM). Drawing on the tenets of BM theory, we present findings from a qualitative study of 15 leading U.S. omnichannel retailers to identify key elements of the new retail BM, develop a conceptual framework of the BM innovation process, and highlight the pivotal role of the supply chain organization in helping firms adapt and implement the omnichannel strategy. We conclude by developing research propositions to articulate the connections among different elements of the BM innovation process and how firms can institutionalize this process to respond to the everchanging retail business environment.

This study exploits service modularity in front-end logistics services in e-fulfillment, from a customer-centric approach, particularly in order management, delivery, and return. Through an online survey of UK customers, the service priorities of 494 respondents via AHP (Analytic Hierarchical Process) were analyzed. Extracting customers' service priorities, ordering behavior, and demographic information as input data, the clustering algorithm KAMILA (KAy-means for MIxed LArge data sets) was further applied. The three identified customer clusters (multichannel shoppers, infrequent shoppers, and online fans) provide preliminary evidence on how commonality and variability aspects of service modularity in front-end logistics services can optimize the number of service options and their performance levels. Therefore, our study, building on value co-creation and modularity, proposes a systematic way of exploiting service modularity for the customer segmentation process that addresses heterogeneous customer preferences cost-efficiently and uncomplicatedly. Furthermore, we provide a framework for the governance of front-end logistics services, guiding outsourcing decisions. Accordingly, it reveals the implications of customer priorities and service decomposition logic choices on value creation. Finally, the propositions formulated aim to develop theoretical foundations for explaining how the heterogeneity in customer priorities for logistics services can be managed with modularity, creating value both for customers and retailers.

As products and supply chains (SCs) evolve, logisticians must revisit their understanding of postponement. The postponement boundary problem acknowledges that value-adding operations' timing and location in global SCs are critical decisions, impacted by taxes and government regulations in different jurisdictions. However, when combining hardware and software objects, software's increasing importance heightens the implications of when and where value is added. Until now, postponement scholars mostly have overlooked fiscal/legal implications, and current research tied to the postponement boundary decision-making phenomenon has not considered hardware and software combination. Moreover, we lack understanding about how to make cross-functional decisions when interrelatedness between the logistics and fiscal/legal domains increases. We used an abductive approach to elaborate and contextualize postponement decision making for global SCs of product offerings that combine hardware and software objects. A single-case study (with four subcases) was used to explore postponement decisions (and related fiscal and legal implications) and cross-functional integration (CFI) at a global high-tech enterprise. We also elaborated on the contextual drivers of increased postponement boundary complexity to illustrate changes in its decision making. We also emphasized formalized boundary objects' importance in enhancing CFI by developing formal steering documents, creating interdependent organizational structures, and aligning trade-offs and outcomes.

Blockchain technology has been suggested as a groundbreaking solution for disaster prevention and relief. However, there is a dearth of both practical applications and systematic academic research into how those existing blockchain solutions actually help to prevent disasters and/or alleviate their negative impacts. The purpose of this paper was to extend previous research by investigating existing blockchain solutions using a rigorous multiple case study approach. Based on stakeholder theory, a structured framework is developed that examines the roles of key stakeholders in disaster situations, illustrates organizations' motivations to deploy blockchain technology, identifies various use cases, lists the relevant blockchain properties, and highlights contingency factors for successful implementations. The findings demonstrate that blockchain applications can improve both disaster prevention as well as disaster relief efforts by streamlining information flows and augmenting the capabilities of core stakeholders. Furthermore, numerous propositions can be derived from the framework that can be used as starting points for further in-depth investigations. This study familiarizes practitioners with blockchain's potential for disaster management and provides academics with a theory-based foundation for future research.

With supply chains targeting increased efficiency, leadership behaviors are critical in influencing the employee experience, and thus the success of employees in organizations. Yet, behavioral work withdrawal, e.g., lateness and absenteeism, among frontline logistics employees is an acute challenge, estimated to contribute millions annually in related costs such as overtime or temporary workers. Our work seeks to capture potential causes for these withdrawal behaviors in the logistics supply chain. Extending prior work on regulatory focus theory, we propose that behavioral work withdrawal depends on fit or misfit between leadership behavior and the follower's regulatory focus. Leadership behaviors appealing to opportunities and growth (i.e., inspirational styles) are likely effective at reducing withdrawal for employees high in promotion focus, while behaviors appealing to accuracy and avoiding errors or failure (i.e., management-by-exception styles) are likely effective at reducing withdrawal for employees high in prevention focus. We combine survey and archival data to test our moderation hypotheses. Support is found for the fit perspective, confirming that no single leadership behavior is consistently better at reducing withdrawal, yet attentiveness to this perspective is critical as misfit increases withdrawal. These findings can help reduce overtime, employee burnout, and service delays and allow managers to reduce associated costs.

The need to improvise during supply chain disruptions to enhance operational resilience is ever more critical. Yet, managers appear to lack an understanding of how and when improvisation matters. We apply the conservation of resources theory to conceptualize how firms activate spontaneous and creative improvisation during supply chain disruptions and theorize how that relates to operational resilience in low and high supply chain disruption conditions. We test our arguments on primary data from a sample of 259 firms in Ghana. We find that creative improvisation has a positive relationship with operational resilience, and this relationship is stronger in high supply chain disruption conditions. Spontaneous improvisation, on the contrary, is unrelated to operational resilience in both low and high supply chain disruption conditions. These findings indicate that not all types of improvisation contribute to operational resilience, suggesting the need for a nuanced approach to theorizing and applying the improvisation concept in supply chains.

The rapid growth of Internet retail platforms (e.g., Shopify and Wix) and marketplaces (e.g., Amazon, eBay, and Etsy) has given rise to a new wave of entrepreneurship. These are platform entrepreneurs—individuals who establish micro-retail businesses on third-party platforms. While there are now millions of such entrepreneurs worldwide, there has been limited scholarly investigation regarding the role of Logistics and Supply Chain Management (LSCM) policies that they can adapt to benefit their small businesses. Because the success of such businesses is intricately driven by the reviews they receive, we deem it essential to investigate how such reviews may be related to their LSCM policies. We conduct an observational field study at one such small platform seller. By investigating items sold under varying merchandise return policies (MRPs), we seek to isolate the relationship between MRP, and the likelihood, positivity, and depth of the reviews left by shoppers. Based on the concept of contractuality, rooted in Sociometer Theory, our results reveal that a more lenient MRP may serve as a perk that may positively impact the customer's review writing. However, the relationship is not monotonic. Instead, there is evidence that the effect of extended MRP leniency on reviews tapers off beyond a certain point.

The food bank, a nonprofit, humanitarian organization, recovers charitable food donations from retail stores via collaborative relationships. We demonstrate that decentralized supply chains enable local partnerships and drive value creation via increased exchange of products and services that also better align with community needs. Our supply chain intervention resulted in a reduction in waste disposal costs for the retailer and a greater supply of food for the food bank. We study the private–public partnership (PPP) in retail food recovery in two successive phases. The first exploratory phase incorporates qualitative data from key informants at multiple Feeding America partners across the United States. The second phase was a researcher-led supply chain intervention involving multiple stakeholders and executed with our partner food bank. Our intervention, Pantry Direct, represents a transition in the PPP to a decentralized, community network. It shifts the pickup responsibility for retail food recovery to a purely volunteer workforce at the pantry. Retail store management noticed lower pickup service reliability; however, more frequent interactions between food pantry volunteers and retail store employees improved communication, which overshadowed the limitations of the volunteer workforce. Owing to several factors, the gain in PPP performance was not universal. Among the five retail stores that participated in the supply chain intervention, two increased food donations and two others decreased food waste. The Pantry Direct model is transformative in the fight against food insecurity, as increased volume (and quality) of retail food donations enabled downstream pantries to provide end clients with more adequate, consistent, or appropriate access to food.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in severe supply disruptions and revenue losses, especially for buyers highly dependent on foreign suppliers. Unsurprisingly, scholars and industry experts claim that high dependence on any exchange partner is detrimental to buyers. The literature, however, is ambivalent about whether supply base concentration—the number of sources in a firm's supply base and the degree of importance of each source—benefits or harms buyers. Our study addresses this ambivalence by investigating whether supply base concentration, conceptualized as supplier concentration, supplier country concentration, and carrier concentration, worsens or mitigates the impact of supply disruptions as they unfold over time. We use longitudinal data from ocean bills of lading to examine these relationships in the context of U.S. buyers importing apparel during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show that higher pre-disruption supplier concentration and supplier country concentration helped buyers mitigate the impact of supply disruptions related to COVID-19, with diminishing effects once supplier and supplier country concentration exceeded specific inflection points. Conversely, higher pre-disruption carrier diversification helped buyers mitigate the impact of supply disruptions related to COVID-19. Notably, these effects depend on the specific phase of the supply disruption. We discuss implications for research and practice.