Journal of Supply Chain Management最新文献

While negotiation within ongoing buyer–supplier relationships is a key element in supply chain management, the emphasis in the literature has been on one-time, isolated event negotiations. This research, through three scenario-based experiments with supply chain managers, considers how buyers’ perceptions of past negotiation strategies help to develop future negotiation strategy expectations of their suppliers. If the buyers’ strategy expectations are not met (violated) by the suppliers, these buyers will seek to understand why. Using the combination of expectancy violation theory and attribution theory, this research examines the relational impact of a negotiation strategy expectation violation and the role of extra-relational factors. The results suggest that relationship history does influence how buyers respond to negotiation strategy expectation violations and that the relational impact of a negative violation is tempered by the history as opposed to a single event reaction. While the findings support that extra-relational factors can also have a relational impact, buyers perceive differences based on the type of extra-relational factor (organizational or external) and the type of relational outcome (commitment and relationship value). The results of the interaction of the strategy expectation violation and extra-relational factor may stretch the boundary conditions of attribution theory. The findings suggest that suppliers should consider how their buying partners may perceive their negotiation behavior and determine the potential relational ramifications of behavior outside of the buyers’ expectations based on previous exchanges.

The COVID-19 crisis quickly drew attention to shortages of critical supplies in complex, global healthcare, and food supply chains, despite emergency and pandemic plans existing in many countries. Borders and factories closed through lockdowns and slowly reopened under different working arrangements, causing supply chains to struggle to respond to this global crisis, with severe impact on GDPs internationally. Ironically, despite global communications technologies, global political structures, and the immense capability of humans, the only true global actor in this crisis is a virus, one of the simplest, most dependent forms of life. Supply chain management research and practice contains threads of knowledge and understanding that are vital to mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery in global crises; we just have not woven them together yet. This essay proposes a more interconnected approach to supply chain management to tackle these current and future global crises, weaving together understanding of supply markets, public procurement, humanitarian aid supply chain management, network and systems thinking, and global stewardship, with the more traditional conceptualizations of firm-based supply chain management. Questions are posed to illustrate current discontinuous wefts of knowledge to explore how weaving a more interconnected, systems thinking-based approach to supply chain management might stimulate research to support coordination of future global supply preparedness.

The management of working conditions in global supply chains has become a pressing issue in supply chain research and practice. In the absence of effective public labor regulation, most of the focus to date has been on supplier auditing and compliance with codes of conduct. The question of how workers themselves can be part of the decent work governance architecture in a post-Fordist era has received far less attention. Grounded in industrial democracy, this article proposes the concept of worker-driven supply chain governance—the democratic participation of workers and their representatives in supply chain governance systems at both the transnational and workplace levels. It develops a sensitizing framework for understanding how buyer companies can foster decent work through enabling democratic participation of workers in their supply chains through trade unions and other representative structures. In doing so, this article demonstrates the potential of supply chain management scholarship to expand its reach through studying the role of worker representation in supply chain governance.

Most of the theories that have dominated supply chain management (SCM) take a reductionist and static view on the supply chain and its management, promoting a global hunt for cheap labor and resources. As a result, supply chains tend to be operated without much concern for their broader contextual environment. This perspective overlooks that supply chains have become both vulnerable and harmful systems. Recent and ongoing crises have emphasized that the structures and processes of supply chains are fluid and interwoven with political-economic and planetary phenomena. Building on panarchy theory, this article reinterprets the supply chain as a social–ecological system and leaves behind a modernist view of SCM, replacing it with a more contemporary vision of “dancing the supply chain.” A panarchy is a structure of adaptive cycles that are linked across different levels on scales of time, space, and meaning. It represents the world’s complexities more effectively than reductionist and static theories ever could, providing the basis for transformative SCM.

Social sustainability has emerged as a key determinant in supplier selection. However, firms may approach social sustainability in varying ways such as investments in employee welfare or philanthropy. Little is known about how supply chain managers consider these individual dimensions when making sourcing decisions. Therefore, this research decomposes social sustainability into dimensions of employee welfare and philanthropy to determine their effects on supplier selection. Vignette-based experiments in a transportation context test a priori hypotheses derived from signaling theory, and post hoc qualitative insights reveal deeper understanding. Results show buyers have significant preferences to select, trust, and collaborate with suppliers who have desirable levels of employee welfare, philanthropy, and pricing. However, these findings are tempered by differential effect sizes and suggest that the practical significance of hypothesized relationships vary. These findings help refine our understanding of social sustainability conceptualizations and evolving supplier selection criteria, as well as offer timely insights for suppliers, buyers, and policymakers amidst surging demand for social sustainability.

The literature has extensively discussed whether and how public organizations differ from private ones. Publicness theory argues that the degree of publicness is determined by ownership, funding, goal setting, and control structure of an organization. However, these theoretical ideas have not yet been extended to the interorganizational level. The need for further research is reflected in the sustained debate on the applicability of for-profit management approaches in public contexts and supply chains. Starting from the premise of the dimensional publicness theory, this study focuses on theory elaboration. We focus our empirical study on the criminal justice supply chain, which encompasses the process of bringing a criminal case to court. This chain provides an interesting public case to explore how specific dimensions of publicness affect or limit supply chain integration mechanisms. The results of our series of embedded cases focusing on Dutch criminal justice supply chains show that control structures, embodied in laws and regulations, define the governance of relationships between supply chain partners. In addition to these formalized ties, extensive known for-profit information and operational integration mechanisms can be observed, along with limited relational integration. Surprisingly, although similar integration mechanisms are used as in for-profit contexts, integration serves a different role in several of the relationships investigated: dealing with tensions stemming from the specific goal setting and stakeholders of criminal justice chains. Although our findings specifically relate to criminal justice supply chains, they have important implications for other supply chains using contracts and laws and those being selective in applying supply chain integration in cases of contrasting objectives. Moreover, we provide a stepping-stone for the extension of publicness theory to the interorganizational level.

While NGO–business relationships have much in common with buyer–supplier relationships, the literature specifically indicates several additional challenges in achieving effective and efficient NGO–business relationships. The present study seeks to understand how NGOs and businesses can overcome these additional challenges. From a practitioner’s viewpoint, we not only strive to acknowledge the complementarity of NGOs and businesses for implementing successful relationship practices but also seek to understand how these understudied cross-sector relationships can be successfully built. We use a multicase study design to investigate nine NGO–business relationships in a humanitarian context. This study contributes to the supply chain literature by demonstrating how social capital mitigates tensions within NGO–business relationships, that is, by indicating that social capital has not only a bonding, but also a bridging role when building cross-sectoral relationships. In summary, our analysis enabled us to present a more generic process framework for creating social capital within NGO–business relationships. It shows that trust within NGO–business relationships appears to develop more naturally compared to commercial relationships, but that these relationships require more effort in terms of structural and cognitive capital to ensure that partners communicate and share knowledge efficiently, as there are inherent differences in goals and communication languages between NGOs and businesses.

Reverse supply chain (RSC) operations have emerged as a critical component of overall supply chain management in manufacturing industries. Yet, relatively little is known about how companies define their approach to managing outsourced RSC operations and how outcomes vary across different approaches. This paper responds to numerous calls in the literature for research that delves deeply into the “how” and “when” (mechanisms and contexts) of RSC operations. Based on within- and cross-case analysis of four manufacturer–3PL dyads, this paper develops a framework and detailed middle-range theory that explains and predicts the way in which different approaches to managing outsourced RSC operations yield different results. By exploring the approach used in each dyad, this research offers managers a rich description of some of the ways that forward thinking on RSC operations can open the door to different potential benefits. The research also contributes to the development of a theory of outsourced RSC operations. Theoretical arguments combined with research propositions provide a wealth of opportunity for future researchers to engage in this topic area.

When faced with potential resource scarcities, purchasing managers have to make decisions regarding how to react to such scarcity threats. This can be challenging as there is often uncertainty surrounding the potential scarcity. Buyers’ mitigation decisions are impacted by their perceptions, which may lead to potentially ineffective mitigation responses. Resource dependence theory as well as supply chain literature emphasize the importance of collaborating with supply chain partners to secure access to scarce resources. However, behavioral research argues that the scarcity mindset causes individuals to behave more competitively, rather than collaboratively. This research examines the extent to which buyers’ perceptions of scarcity threats affect the decision to act altruistically towards the major supplier as well as to choose to collaborate with a major supplier in order to mitigate the scarcity. The research uses a scenario-based role-playing experiment with respondents serving as purchasing managers. The research demonstrates the complexity of resource scarcity management and illustrates that when faced with resource scarcity, buyers are actually less prone to collaborate with critical resource suppliers. This effect is robust, regardless of the level of relational capital present in the buyer–supplier relationship and regardless of individual factors, such as work experience and previous purchasing experience.