Journal of Supply Chain Management最新文献

Research on managing working conditions in the supply chain is currently conducted under the umbrella of “social” sustainability. In this introduction to the 2021 Emerging Discourse Incubator, “Managing Working Conditions in Supply Chains: Towards Decent Work,” we argue that the trajectory of this research may be insufficient for addressing decent work. This is due to four characteristics of the extant literature—buyer-centrism, product-centrism, techno-centrism, and social-centrism. As an alternative, we offer ways to ‘humanize’ research on working conditions in supply chains across four dimensions: actors, issues, contexts, and methods. Through humanization, supply chain research has the potential to make a significant scholarly impact as well as to contribute to the realization of decent work in supply chains. We use our proposed path forward as a lens to elaborate on the core contributions of the four invited papers in the Emerging Discourse Incubator.

Based on our experience of carrying out theoretically and practically sound interventions to improve working conditions in global supply chains, we show what makes interventions succeed or fail and what is required to ensure that an intervention’s results are sustainable in the future. Our suggestions are applicable to designing any intervention in supply chain research, but need tailoring to the local context. Our interventions were aimed at achieving decent working conditions in emerging-country suppliers, but our insights are applicable for all supply chain scholars. In the context of emerging-country suppliers, poor working conditions have been strongly criticized after the Rana Plaza accident and subsequently received more attention with the UN’s introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals (notably, SDG 8). Tensions between productivity-enhancing and decent work logics create challenges for the design of interventions with long-lasting performance improvements. This paper presents a way of overcoming the tensions by illustrating how interventions that integrate improvements in working conditions with productivity can be designed.

This article outlines a research agenda for Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining, two fundamental labor rights essential to the achievement of “Decent Work” for workers in global supply chains. The authors argue that SCM scholars are uniquely positioned to address how workers’ freedom of association and collective bargaining rights in global supply chains could be improved. This stems, in part, from the fact that SCM researchers and industry practitioners share a common “logic of efficiency” in the analysis of supply chains. The authors suggest three broad areas of research on freedom of association and collective bargaining, with their attendant methodological implications.

Supply chains are fundamental to whether decent work flourishes or not. Not only do supply chain dynamics shape employment practices and working conditions, but they also influence business models and capabilities which structure opportunities for decent work. As scholars and policymakers race to strengthen labor standards in supply chains and confront barriers to their effective implementation, management scholars can both benefit from and advance an understanding of the role of supply chains in giving rise to indecent work, especially the business practices commonly described as forced labor and modern slavery. To help realize this potential, this article draws from my research on the business of forced labor to emphasize three points. First, there are clear and discernible patterns with respect to the root causes of forced labor in supply chains. Second, forced labor in supply chains cannot be understood in isolation of broader dynamics of work and employment, since low-waged workers tend to move in and out of conditions of forced labor in relatively short periods of time. Third, on-the-ground studies of the effectiveness of buyer-centric governance programs reveal serious gaps between corporate social responsibility standards and business practices when it comes to indicators most relevant to forced labor. I conclude with a discussion of future directions in this research agenda and highlight the potential for business scholars to make a contribution.

In this paper, we explore how supply chain theorists can engage with metaphorical imagination to develop supply chain theory. Our main purpose was to provide additional useful guidance on how scholars can approach the method of metaphoric transfer. To do this, we build on previous work on the metaphoric transfer method and develop the Metaphoric Transfer Pathways framework. The framework offers two novel approaches to working with metaphors that will help theorists to best leverage the theorizing potential of metaphors in their work. We also develop a set of evaluation criteria which can help scholars to choose which approach to metaphoric transfer to adopt and to maximize the productivity of metaphors used within their theorizing efforts. Our paper synthesizes the existing literature on metaphorical imagination in a novel way to provide accessible guidance for those looking to work with metaphor and to maximize their contribution toward developing novel supply chain theory.

The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated the broad and diverse challenges that supply networks face in preparing for and adapting to significant supply and demand disruptions. While much has been written about resilience strategies, few consider resiliency from a network level perspective. In this essay, we explain a typology of resiliency strategies linked to different types of collaboration within and between supply networks. Existing literature focuses on two of these types, micro- and macro-level supply network resilience. Micro-level resilience occurs when buyers and suppliers coordinate directly on supply risk prevention and recovery. Macro-level resilience occurs when corporations, including competitors, collaborate with institutions such as government or trade associations to manage or regulate longer-term supply risks. This essay identifies a third type, meso-level resilience. Meso-level resilience emerges when multiple supply networks collaborate on short- to medium-term supply risks. These collaborations tend to be more opportunistic and ad hoc than micro- or macro-level collaborations, and we argue that they can be viewed as complex adaptive systems, exhibiting self-organization and dynamism. We identify a number of novel characteristics of meso-level resilience and discuss research implications.

Large companies were concerned about their supply chains with environmental and social sustainability and disruption from natural disasters, conflict, and trade disagreements even before the advent of COVID-19. The additional challenges presented by COVID-19 in 2020 are “extreme” in being distinct from supply chain risk in that not just particular companies, but also entire societies are affected. Therefore, it is appropriate to rethink supply chain management (SCM) for research and practice to cope with extreme conditions, now and in the future, whether due to pandemics, war, climate change, or biodiversity collapse. In this essay, we first present the widespread challenges, along with some of the responses. We then list research opportunities for supply chain management in extreme conditions. These opportunities pertain to retailers' survival in the face of highly successful e-commerce giants and the mixed use of robots and human workers. There are also opportunities to share supply chain capacity in distribution and coopetition regarding medically necessary items such as anti-virals or vaccines. The growing role of government in supporting business, including the creation of industry commons, also presents avenues for further research.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak affects not just populations but also global and local economies and supply chains. The outbreak itself has impacted on production lines and manufacturing capacities. In response to the outbreak, policies have been put in place that blocks the movement of people and materials, causing supply chain disruptions. Mainstream supply chain management has been at a loss in responding to these disruptions, mostly due to a dominant focus on minimizing costs for stable operations, while following lean, just-in-time, and zero-inventory approaches. On the other hand, pandemic response supply chains, and their related supply chain disruptions, share many characteristics with disaster response and thereby with humanitarian supply chains. Much can thus be learned from humanitarian supply chains for managing pandemic-related supply chain disruptions. What is more, facing, and managing, supply chain disruptions can be considered the new norm also in light of other disruptive forces such as climate change, or financial or political crises. This article therefore presents lessons learned from humanitarian supply chains that help mitigate and overcome supply chain disruptions. These lessons not only relate to preparedness and mobilization, but also relate to standardization, innovation, and collaboration. Together, they brace organizations, supply chains, and societies, to manage current and future disruptions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced supply chain management researchers and practitioners to question many of our firmly held assumptions about the discipline. Perhaps the most interesting question is, where does supply chain management go from here? This issue of the Journal of Supply Chain Management begins to answer that question via a combination of invited essays and a regular submission. We consider this issue as only a starting point, and we hope to see its impact on future research on mega-disruptions in supply chains.

The daunting effects of COVID-19 have motivated large firms to rethink supply chain designs and practices. As a potential contribution to such change, we introduce the concept of supply chain entrepreneurial embeddedness (SCEE), which we define as the degree to which a large firm integrates small entrepreneurial business capabilities (e.g., creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, rapid decision-making, and swift execution) within its supply chain. We theorize that SCEE can be realized via at least three mechanisms—acquiring (i.e., purchasing one or more small entrepreneurial firms), allying (i.e., building cooperative alliances with such firms), and assimilating (i.e., mimicking how such firms behave). We suggest that SCEE is valuable under normal conditions, but its value increases under duress. Grounded in the concepts of structural inertia, requisite variety, mutualism, and real options, our core premise is that SCEE enables large firms to better navigate multiple and multidirectional concurrent changes in supply and demand, which in turn enhances firm performance. We contextualize this core premise by theorizing that greater end-user proximity (wherein SCEE is located close to the final customer) and service centricity (wherein competition is primarily based on the service dimension of product–service bundles) enhance SCEE’s positive effects.