Journal of Supply Chain Management最新文献

Navigating failure is a critical part of managing today's supply chains. This study focuses on one prominent type of supply chain failure: product recalls. Despite the negative implications for the firm, its supply chain, and society, some firms are slow to initiate recalls. Drawing on agency theory, the authors examine whether such delays might be mitigated, in part, by a group of stockholders who are increasingly vocal about supply chain failures: activist investors. While most stockholders avoid meddling in firms, activist investors work to bring about change. Research makes clear that firms respond when directly attacked by activist investors, but less is known about possible spillover effects—i.e., whether and to what extent non-targeted firms respond when activist investors attack other firms. Analyses of data on 5427 medical product recalls reveal that greater stock ownership by activist investors who have attacked other firms is associated with faster recalls, and the spillover effect is stronger for design-related defects and high-severity defects that can harm consumers. Overall, the study uncovers an important spillover effect wherein activist investor attacks influence other firms in which they own stock to recall defective products more quickly, thereby benefiting society.

Structural holes in global supply chains isolate suppliers in low- and middle-income economies from buyers and consumers in high-income economies, hindering the accomplishment of sustainability goals. Previous research has studied how for-profit organizations bridge these structural holes. This study examines how purpose-driven organizations, which place their purpose above profits to improve farmers' livelihoods in coffee supply chains, bridge the same structural holes. Knowledge on structural holes is elaborated by exploring the brokering activities of these purpose-driven organizations. This is accomplished by analyzing case data from 31 purpose-driven organizations: nine cases of sourcing intermediaries and exporters in Colombia and 22 cases of roasters and importers in the Netherlands (NL), United States (US), and United Kingdom (UK). The cases are grouped and compared according to their primary activities, with the average or typical case as the unit of analysis. The findings unpack an approach to brokerage motivated by the purpose-driven organizations' goal of improving the livelihoods of marginalized suppliers. Their approach to brokerage centers around aligning, empowering, educating, and mobilizing practices and the legitimation of novel practices in regulative, normative, and cognitive domains. This is achieved through either single-direction or multi-stakeholder brokerage. The study contributes to society by considering the implications for other entities and global supply chains of exemplar organizations' innovative approaches to sustainability issues.

According to the social-ecological systems view, a resilient supply chain possesses the ability to persist, adapt, and transform in the face of disruptions. Extant research has identified a range of antecedents that foster supply chain resilience but without distinguishing between those that are sufficient and those that are necessary. While altering sufficient antecedents might affect resilience, their absence does not preclude it because of the potential compensatory effects of other factors. Conversely, necessary antecedents are indispensable, as their absence prevents the realization of resilience, a scenario that cannot be rectified by modifying other antecedents. Grounded in dynamic capabilities theory, this research hypothesized that supply chain visibility, responsiveness, flexibility, and collaboration are necessary antecedents of supply chain resilience. To empirically test this, the research applied Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) to survey data from 479 manufacturing firms in Australia. The results indicate that only supply chain responsiveness and collaboration are necessary antecedents. A bottleneck analysis was also undertaken to determine how much supply chain collaboration and responsiveness is needed to achieve different levels of supply chain resilience. The research proposes a two-tiered maturity model—Tier 1 (necessary) capabilities versus Tier 2 (contributory) capabilities—for building supply chain resilience and extends dynamic capabilities theory by demonstrating that specific capabilities may be nonnegotiable for enhancing sensing, seizing, and resource-reconfiguration capacities. The research provides managerial guidance for determining how limited organizational resources can be most efficiently deployed to handle disruptions.

Environmental supply chain incidents caused by upstream suppliers are increasingly scrutinized by end-customers. Although prior research on chain liability suggests that greater incident severity leads to more negative customer reactions and more substantive recovery efforts mitigate these effects, important dynamics in these variables have not yet been fully examined. This study advances a dynamic perspective on attribution theory and introduces forgiveness as a key process variable in how companies might recover from environmental chain liability incidents. Using a vignette experiment, we examine how multiple types of incident severity (environmental impact, human health risk, and physical proximity) and recovery strategies (apology, restitution, and monitoring) interact to influence customer forgiveness and repurchase intentions. The results reveal that an incident's human health risk and physical proximity reduce repurchase intentions independently without compounding effects and that recovery through monitoring and restitution independently increases forgiveness and repurchase intentions but loses effectiveness when combined. These findings refine current knowledge of chain liability by challenging several current assumptions about incident severity and recovery and highlight the need for a more nuanced approach to managing environmental supply chain incidents.

In the first few months of 2025, the US government embarked on an unprecedented effort to upend decades of trade liberalization by undertaking the largest series of tariff increases since 1930. Subsequently, many of these tariffs were reduced by the executive branch or faced legal challenges, generating a tremendous degree of tariff uncertainty. These tariff hikes and the accompanying tariff uncertainty represent the greatest exogenous shock to global supply chains since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The profound impact of these developments makes it imperative for supply chain management (SCM) researchers to examine their wide-ranging consequences. In this societal impact article, the authors develop a theoretical framework to organize and guide SCM research on tariff impacts. This framework proposes that importer and exporter actions, both legal and illegal, are affected by firms experiencing heterogeneous adjustment costs, transaction costs, opportunity costs for responding early, and opportunity costs for responding late in response to tariffs. Various research directions are outlined, relevant data sources are discussed, and initial model-free evidence is provided.

Outsourcing promises economic benefits but creates corporate social responsibility (CSR) risks: as activities are placed beyond a firm's boundaries, the firm struggles to adequately measure the performance of its suppliers, particularly regarding their environmental and social compliance. This study investigates how a buying firm's sourcing strategy can reduce CSR-related agency risks in outsourcing. This research uses an agency theory framework to argue that a buying firm's actual manufacturing experience as part of plural sourcing (i.e., the simultaneous pursuit of distinct governance forms such as make and buy, make and ally, or make, buy, and ally) can help it build CSR-specific supplier evaluation capabilities and thereby overcome agency-related performance measurement difficulties. To test the hypotheses, the authors consolidate a panel data set of 9057 firm-year observations based on US publicly traded manufacturing firms. The results confirm that plural sourcing is indeed effective in mitigating the negative impact of outsourcing on a firm's CSR performance but is contingent on two boundary conditions: the specific business segment (primary vs. secondary) where plural sourcing takes place and the buying firm's presence (i.e., whether the firm owns facilities) in the sourcing countries. With this, the study challenges the consensus in the literature that outsourcing-related CSR risks can be addressed solely through the governance of external supplier relations. In fact, firm-internal practices and the sourcing strategy of the buying firm can help to mitigate CSR risks in outsourcing relationships as well.

World-renowned chefs achieve culinary excellence by mastering diverse cooking techniques and specialized tools. Similarly, supply chain management (SCM) faces complex and dynamic research phenomena that defy simple methods. This editorial argues that SCM researchers need to expand their methodological toolkit of quantitative data collection and analysis approaches. Although traditional quantitative data collection and analysis methods have advanced SCM theory, they impose limitations on capturing real-world complexities. Issues like retrospective bias, the cross-sectional nature of data, the inability to replicate managerial dynamics, and constraints in network-level analysis hinder theoretical development. Moreover, dominant data analysis techniques struggle to accommodate temporal dynamics, multilevel interactions, and causal inferences. To overcome these constraints, this editorial advocates the need for promising but underutilized research methods: field experiments, neuroscience methods, agent-based modeling, SIENA, dynamic SEM, multilevel models, QCA, and AI-based methods. By expanding the methodological “kitchen tools,” researchers can generate more powerful, convincing, and comprehensive theories about supply chain decision-making and performance.

Modern slavery is increasingly recognized as a supply chain risk to both workers and firms. Neither corporate efforts nor market-based regulation has adequately addressed the issue. This is largely because they fail to reconcile the conflicting priorities between efficiency and anti-slavery goals inherent in such efforts. Public sector purchasing—often conducted through meta-organizations—offers both the scale and scope needed to change supply chain behaviors. Yet meta-organizations and how they effect change remain underexplored and under-theorized. Through analysis of archival material and 44 interviews with public sector buyers and purchasing consortia managers, we construct two case studies of meta-organizations. These cases reveal rich insights into meta-organizations' capacity both to improve public sector knowledge and compliance around modern slavery and to compel suppliers to enhance their anti-slavery efforts. The findings show that, by adapting purchasing structures and developing expertise, and thereby hybridizing the logics of efficiency and anti-slavery, purchasing consortia can embed accountability within and beyond the bounds of their memberships. The study contributes to theories of meta-organizations and institutional logics in the context of supply chain management and to policy and practice on modern slavery in supply chains.

To maintain resilience, critical infrastructure (CI) organizations need to recover from frequent, daily disruptions in a timely and efficient manner, a task that becomes increasingly challenging as disruptions concur in time. Drawing from organizational information processing theory and supply chain research on internal integration, this study examines how inter- and intra-departmental communication intensity, as mechanisms of internal integration, influence resilience under varying levels of disruption concurrence. Analysis of 1978 disruption clusters in a public water supply organization reveals that while increased disruption concurrence impairs CI resilience, enhanced communication intensity mitigates these negative effects on recovery time. The study also provides insights into how communication effectiveness varies across different disruption time windows, demonstrating that timing significantly influences how internal integration enables CI resilience. The study advances resilience research by examining concurrent daily disruptions, moving beyond the traditional focus on rare events. It further extends internal integration literature by conceptualizing integration as a dynamic construct of inter- and intra-departmental communication, and organizational information processing theory by demonstrating how uncertainty from concurrent disruptions requires different communication strategies across time windows. Organizations might enhance resilience through monitoring systems that help employees recognize disruption concurrence levels and adjust communication intensity accordingly.