ABSTRACT Supply chain management research predominantly examines sustainability from the perspective of buying firms, analyzing how procurement strategies, supplier governance, and compliance mechanisms can reduce negative environmental and social outcomes associated with their supply chains. While this approach has advanced our understanding of firm‐level practices, it suffers from a fundamental unit‐of‐analysis problem: Socio‐ecological footprints emerge from the interaction of multiple supply chains and other actors within specific localities, yet research often treats the supply chains of individual buying firms as independent units. Consequently, interventions that appear successful for individual firms may leave harm in place or merely displace it rather than resolve underlying causes. We introduce the footprint perspective as a complementary approach to sustainable supply chain management research. While the buying firm perspective usually traces supply chains from the buying firm to its suppliers, the footprint perspective begins its investigation in the localities where supply chain activities are entangled with socio‐ecological systems. This perspective treats localities as the unit of analysis, examining how interdependencies among supply chains, locality actors, and ecosystems jointly produce socio‐ecological footprints. We compare the assumptions of these two perspectives and outline an empirical playbook for putting this conceptual shift into practice.
The world is facing climate change-driven disruptions such as extreme weather events, which affect nature as well as firms and their supply chains. Nonetheless, little is known about how supply chain players shape their socioecological resilience, including from a power perspective. Grounded in political ecology, this interdisciplinary study investigates power dynamics in the waterway supply chain. We conduct a real-time case study involving various supply chain players in Amazonia and analyze data from interviews, observations, and secondary sources. From an actor-oriented power perspective, we identify actions taken to mitigate historical droughts affecting the Amazonia region and rivers. To explain the reactions to supply chain disruptions, our results, rather than revealing coercive power, map power shifts from multiple sources linked to specific mechanisms. For instance, expert power (e.g., Indigenous knowledge) led to epistemic shifts related to knowledge use and value. Dependence on nature to adapt to water variations reveals evidence of socioecological resilience. We contribute to the literature by first extending the use of power dynamics to explain supply chain resilience from a during-a-disruption analysis. We show that resilience is a power-laden construct and central for supply chain relationships. Second, we introduce the concept of the detachment effect, illustrating how socioecological capabilities are crucial for supply chain resilience. Our study appeals to scholars and practitioners because it stresses the relevance of firms being more sensitive to the local context and elaborates on how firms can build socioecological supply chain resilience to climate disruptions.
While firms may enjoy power advantages over their supply chain partners, how they use their power remains underexplored in the literature. Drawing upon resource dependence theory, the authors posit that both power asymmetry and mutual dependence influence supply chain power use. Specifically, power asymmetry defines the potential of a firm's power, while mutual dependence alters the extent to which a power-advantaged party exercises its power. Using a panel dataset of 4620 buyer-supplier dyad-year observations from Chinese listed firms during 2009-2023, this study empirically tests the hypothesized relationships in the trade credit setting. Regression analyses indicate that power-advantaged suppliers provide less trade credit, whereas greater mutual dependence is associated with more trade credit provision. Furthermore, the analyses reveal a double-edged effect of buyer ownership structure. Specifically, buyer state ownership and ownership concentration attenuate the negative association between supplier power advantage and trade credit, but weaken the positive association between mutual dependence and trade credit. This study extends the supply chain power literature and provides important implications for managers and policymakers.
Business organizations must (re-)evaluate their supply chain practices to foster responsible relationships while adopting strategies to achieve sustainability. Understanding the dynamic interactions among supply chain members is essential for advancing responsible supply chain practices. The authors define responsible supply chain practices as those that support ethical, fair, and socially beneficial outcomes within buyer-supplier relationships, particularly when power asymmetries affect less powerful actors. Building on power-dependence theory within the broader framework of social exchange theory, this research explores how power dynamics influence supply chain interactions and drive the adoption of responsible supply chain practices. Drawing on empirical data from 17 dyadic interactions involving 12 Chinese manufacturers and their 17 supply chain partners, three key findings emerge. First, extending power-dependence theorizing in a responsible supply chain context, responsible outcomes are shaped by the interplay between dependence, the performative exertion of mediated power, and resistance from less powerful partners. Second, the research introduces a power-dynamics matrix that provides a structured framework to analyze the interplay between power/dependence (i.e., power-as-a-position) and power use (i.e., power-as-action) in advancing responsible supply chain management. Third, power's influence is analyzed at both intra-organizational and inter-organizational levels, providing an integrated perspective on social, relational, and ethical dimensions of responsible supply chains. These findings provide a better understanding of power dynamics in supply chains and offer actionable insights for promoting responsible practices within complex supply chain networks.
This study explores how knowledge sharing among competing firms (co-opetition) influences risk management and enhances supply chain resilience. Grounded in organizational learning theory, the study examines how co-opetition enhances firms' visibility into the emerging challenges of tomorrow's world, enabling proactive risk management that can strengthen both organizational and supply chain resilience. Interviews were conducted with 33 trucking industry executives and other key participants to uncover insights into how these interactions affect their ability to maintain adequate, timely supply chain operations. These insights reveal three mechanism-driven processes: knowledge seeking, third-party bridging, and knowledge guarding. These linked behaviors support and enable distinct resilience capacities. The supply chain resilience literature is advanced by these findings that reveal how co-opetition enables firms to gain and use knowledge to improve risk management and organizational resilience. The findings also offer insights into how resilience-building and disruption-mitigation strategies become institutionalized across supply chain stakeholders. This research offers practical insights for managers on the importance of leveraging co-opetition to enhance performance while maintaining operational continuity.
Regionalization is reshaping global supply networks (SNs) as firms respond to geopolitical, economic, and institutional pressures. Yet extant research has not examined how patterns of structural adaptation associated with regionalization may influence innovation. In this paper, we develop a typology of three theoretically grounded archetypes: (1) replication, (2) substitution, and (3) reconfiguration, which are distinguished by continuity or change in firm membership and process structures. The archetypes offer a theoretical framework for characterizing how global SNs can transition toward regional configurations. We theorize how each archetype constrains or enhances the focal firm's innovation potential. Replication enables incremental innovation. Substitution facilitates moderate capability recombination. Reconfiguration creates conditions for architectural and radical innovation through emergent structural change. The typology reveals fundamental trade-offs between risk exposure, cost, and innovation potential. This work advances theory by linking dynamic structural adaptation to innovation outcomes and provides a foundation for future empirical research on SN regionalization.
Public procurement is central to policy delivery, yet it remains underdeveloped in strategic procurement research. Established portfolio frameworks (e.g., the Kraljic Matrix) do not reflect public-sector regulatory accountability, heterogeneous stakeholder mandates, or the primacy of societal value over profit. This article develops a prescriptive, typology-based portfolio model tailored to public procurement. The model organizes procurement contexts along two analytically distinct dimensions: (1) institutional-stakeholder complexity (i.e., the challenge of reconciling regulatory obligations, policy mandates, and diverse stakeholder interests) and (2) supply network risk (i.e., operational vulnerabilities that threaten continuity through disruptions, traceability failures, and catastrophic events). Crossing these dimensions yields four strategy archetypes-Cooperative Agreements, Patronized Competition, Monitored Partnerships, and Contingency Sourcing-with if-then design rules that prescribe governance, sourcing, oversight, and stakeholder coordination choices for each context. Developed through a synthesis of procurement portfolio management literature, an expert qualitative questionnaire with senior public procurement professionals, and conceptual integration, the framework links institutional-stakeholder dynamics with supply network risk, offering actionable guidance for aligning procurement strategy with societal objectives while advancing public procurement theory.
This study examines the vertical spillover effect of product recalls, defined as the losses supplier firms incur when buyer firms announce product recalls. Drawing on social network theory, this study theorizes that relationship ties between recalling firms and their suppliers serve as "pipes" and "prisms" that transmit a cash flow effect and impression effect, respectively, of product recalls from the recalling firms to their suppliers. In addition, such vertical spillover effects are shaped by the extended social network consisting of institutional intermediaries-common business ties, common institutional ownership, and common analyst coverage between suppliers and recalling firms. Hypotheses are tested using a comprehensive dataset collected from seven sources, comprising 154 media-reported major automobile recalls in the United States from 2010 to 2019, involving 752 buyer-supplier dyads. Confirming the vertical spillover effect, the findings indicate that a buyer's automobile recalls result in a significant loss of firm value for its suppliers. This effect is stronger when the supplier shares more common business ties with the recalling automakers but weaker when there is a high level of common institutional ownership and common analyst coverage. The findings extend understanding of the supply chain effects of product recalls and their contingencies.
Africa's growing role in global supply chains presents an important opportunity for more socially grounded and context-sensitive research in supply chain management (SCM). Despite its economic and demographic significance, African contexts remain underrepresented in mainstream SCM scholarship, which limits understanding of the continent's diversity, complexity, and social dimensions. This article examines governance in African supply chains through three persistent societal challenges: the erosion of local agency, labor exploitation, and marginalization. While dominant frameworks such as transaction cost economics, agency theory, and the relational view offer useful insights into coordination and control, they do not fully capture the relational, ethical, and social dimensions of supply chains in Africa. To address this gap, the article draws on Indigenous African philosophies: Ujamaa, Ubuntu, and Omol & uacute;& agrave;b & iacute; as analytical lenses. The study contributes to the literature through perspectival theorizing, by reinterpreting established SCM phenomena through African philosophical perspectives, and through propositional theorizing, by advancing theoretically informed and contextually grounded propositions and research questions. The article demonstrates how African insights can inform and extend existing SCM theories by promoting more socially impactful and ethically informed governance, and by positioning the supply chain as a potential source of conceptual innovation for globally relevant and socially meaningful theory.
Supply chain management has traditionally prioritized maximizing profits, creating persistent tensions with social-ecological systems (SES) despite sustainability efforts. Regeneration offers an alternative, ecocentric approach, yet it remains unclear how supply chains can operate within SES boundaries. This research examines how focal firms promote regenerative supply chains (RgSCs) through a multicase analysis of three Latin American agribusinesses. Findings show that these firms leverage their coordination roles to develop two distinctive capabilities: mobilizing deep ecological knowledge and reconfiguring market engagement. Through routines of acquiring, applying, codifying, and exchanging ecological knowledge, firms transform it into a strategic asset. In parallel, by reframing value, shaping biodiverse offerings, and calibrating supply and demand, firms reconfigure their engagement with consumers. The recursive alignment between these two capabilities enables firms to reconnect production and consumption with the dynamics of living systems through continuous adaptation. The study contributes to theory by empirically unpacking the shift from harm reduction to regeneration, developing a model of RgSC capability formation, and introducing the concept of recursive alignment. Building on this contribution, we also reinterpret the Triple-A framework of agility, adaptability, and alignment through a regenerative lens. In RgSCs, agility reflects synchronicity with ecological processes, rather than speed; adaptability emerges as a shared relational capability; and alignment becomes a recursive process integrating ecological and market feedback loops to sustain regeneration. For practitioners, advancing RgSCs requires redefining success beyond financial metrics to include ecosystem health and community wellbeing and shaping demand around ecological boundaries through new forms of collaboration, incentives, and education.
In view of escalating environmental degradation, regenerative business has been proposed to restore social-ecological systems. However, as regeneration fundamentally departs from mainstream approaches and lacks commonly accepted standards, it suffers from a liability of newness that hampers its broader legitimation and adoption. While prior research has studied legitimation strategies for individual organizations, less is known about how legitimacy is built in supply chains-a necessary condition given the systemic aspiration of regeneration. This paper explores the legitimation strategies used by pioneering regenerative producers to legitimize regeneration in supply chain fields. Drawing upon case studies of regenerative farmers in Spain, this study identifies six legitimation strategies, aiming at (i) consolidating the regenerative agrifood supply chain field or (ii) connecting it to wider agrifood supply chain fields. Contributing to the emergent literature on regenerative supply chains, the study explains how producers seek to legitimize regeneration in nested supply chain fields by unpacking their adaptive and systemic approaches targeted at different actors in the narrow regenerative agrifood supply chain field and the wider agrifood supply chain field.
The field of regenerative supply chains investigates how companies collaboratively preserve, restore and enhance the social and natural capital from which they procure. However, this field has still not addressed a fundamental question: How do supply chain managers organize the complex knowledge that underpins regeneration? The authors advance a prescriptive theory of knowledge polycentrism-the institutionalized process of integrating, sharing and using knowledge among members of a local ecosystem-for regenerative supply chains. The theory envisions how managers and their stakeholders should govern interdependent, fragmented and contested knowledge inherent in social-ecological regeneration. The illustrative example of regenerative agriculture shows how to structure polycentrism to deal with knowledge complexity. In regenerative agricultural supply chains, the theory prescribes knowledge polycentrism as the following four interconnected knowledge governance nodes: industry-wide, transdisciplinary, agroecological, and food policy. Despite the establishment of value distribution, incentive, monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, supply chain managers will probably face legal, socio-political, and organizational tensions when structuring knowledge polycentrism. This prescriptive theory offers interdisciplinary implications to advance the study and practice of building knowledge commons for local regeneration.
This research introduces the concept of relational resilience, which reflects the dynamic capacity of a buyer-supplier relationship to absorb external shocks and continue its core function of exchange. Guided by structural inertia theory (SIT), the research explores how relationship age, exchange volume, and multiplexity contribute to relational resilience across both stable periods and times of extreme disruption. Using a large-scale panel dataset of buyer-supplier relationships and the COVID-19 pandemic as an exogenous shock, the findings reveal that relational resilience is enhanced by all three mechanisms, but extreme disruptions lessen the protective value of relationship age and exchange volume while strengthening multiplexity's impact on relational resilience. These findings contribute to supply chain resilience theory by introducing a relational perspective of resilience and integrating SIT to identify structural qualities that promote or constrain adaptation. This study also extends SIT by emphasizing the velocity of environmental change as an important contextual factor that rebalances the competing influences of efficiency and structural inertia in supply chain relationships. These extensions offer valuable insights for managing relational dynamics and resilience in buyer-supplier relationships.
Firms currently operate in increasingly complex business environments, often facing increasingly diverse environmental requirements from their customers. This challenge is reflected in the concept of "customer base complexity," which encompasses three dimensions: horizontal complexity (i.e., number of customers), vertical complexity (i.e., depth of customer relationships), and spatial complexity (i.e., customers being located in diverse geographical locations). These complexities can negatively affect a firm's environmental performance because the number and diversity of customer-specific environmental requirements make it difficult to efficiently deploy resources to minimize environmental impacts. This study applied the absorptive capacity perspective to investigate how two environmental routines-environmental management system (EMS) and environmental innovation (EI)-can mitigate the adverse effects of customer base complexity on environmental performance. Secondary data from four databases (Thomson Reuters ESG, KLD, Bloomberg SPLC, and Compustat) were used to construct a panel dataset with 940 firm-year observations across 236 US-listed manufacturing firms. Fixed effects regression analyses reveal that three dimensions of customer base complexity are associated with poorer environmental performance, as indicated by increased energy use and/or CO2 emissions per unit of sales. Moreover, EMS and EI, as absorptive capacity routines, are found to be effective for mitigating the negative effects of different complexity dimensions. These findings suggest that firms can combine these two absorptive routines to mitigate the negative influences of customer base complexity in the context of environmental management.
Despite the recalls issued, millions of vehicles on the road have open recalls. Vehicles with open recalls pose a threat to drivers, passengers, and other motorists. While research suggests that fast recalls may not be in the best interests of the affected firms and their shareholders, the authors assess whether more prompt notification of recall remedies helps with recall effectiveness (recall completion ratio), which is beneficial to consumers. Additionally, this study examines whether dealership network size, which affects customer access to recalls and their execution, directly and jointly with the time to notify vehicle owners of recall remedies, impacts recall effectiveness. This study uses 1221 unique automotive recalls and a two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation approach to test the proposed hypotheses and conduct robustness checks to corroborate the study's findings. The authors observe that prompt notification of recall remedies enhances the recall completion ratio. Additionally, a larger dealership network contributes positively toward improving the recall completion ratio. However, the beneficial impact of a larger dealership network on the recall completion ratio diminishes when remedy notifications to vehicle owners are protracted.
Distributive fairness (how benefits are shared) and process fairness (how decisions are made) are key antecedents to trust formation in buyer-supplier relationships. However, existing research has given limited attention to when and how distributive and process fairness are associated with higher trust, especially considering the motivational components of trust. Drawing on a motivated cognition perspective, this study examines how supplier dependence-a key factor that shapes supplier motivation-moderates the relationship between buyer fairness and supplier trust. Survey data were first used to investigate the moderating effects, demonstrating distinct patterns of fairness effects across different levels of supplier dependence. A case study was then utilized to strengthen the research's applicability in real-life situations, particularly to illuminate the mechanism of motivated cognition. This study advances knowledge in two important ways. First, it provides a fuller specification of the fairness-trust connection in buyer-supplier relationships. Second, it generates novel insights into trust as a motivated phenomenon.
This study examines the differential effects of product manufacturer minority identity (MI) disclosures on consumer purchase intentions in an e-commerce setting. Prior research has concluded that when minority-owned businesses (MBs) make such disclosures on their own websites, it can adversely affect consumer evaluations and purchase intentions. Other work has found that MI disclosures on retailer websites can boost consumer purchase intentions. Hence, the evaluation of MI signals by consumers depends on the identity of the signal sender, the MB or the retailer, and invites an exploration of the underlying causal mechanisms. This study emphasizes consumers' differential electronic logistics service quality (e-LSQ) expectations of MBs versus retailers as a critical mediating factor. The empirical results provide evidence supporting the contention that MI disclosures on MBs' own websites are associated with lower e-LSQ expectations and, ultimately, purchase intentions as compared with MI disclosures on retailer websites. These effects are also found to be contingent on consumers' diversity beliefs. This study contributes to the consumer-centric supply chain and diversity-related literature and offers refinements to signaling theory. It also has implications for practice, highlighting the critical importance of retailer-MB partnerships in fostering equitable market opportunities and improving MBs' competitive positioning.
This article investigates how technology-mediated supply chains can foster ecological and social regeneration in the seafood sector. It focuses on Abalobi, a South African social enterprise that connects small-scale fishers with consumers through technological and relational innovations and counters dynamics of degeneration, such as socioeconomic inequalities and growing disproportionality, prevalent in traditional seafood supply chains. The findings reveal that although disintermediation (shortening supply chains through technology) is a necessary first step to dismantle exploitative structures, it is insufficient on its own to foster regeneration. Instead, Abalobi's success hinges on reintermediation: strategically introducing relational mechanisms and creating new markets that realign incentive structures. Specifically, these measures redirect demand from overfished species toward undervalued, abundant alternative species, promoting both ecological sustainability and equitable livelihoods. This article contributes to the literature by illustrating a novel two-step process model: (1) disintermediation to disrupt degenerative dynamics, followed by (2) reintermediation to initiate systemic regeneration. It advances supply chain management theory by explaining how disintermediation and reintermediation can create paths to restoring proportionality and shifting supply chains from degenerative to regenerative dynamics.
The ongoing debate about tariffs is characterized by a lack of understanding of the effect of tariffs on supply chains. The tariff impact is often described with contradicting effects. In this research, the authors examined the opposing perspectives arising between resource dependency and social-ecological resiliency views in the context of tariffs and inventory leanness, a well-established indicator of operational efficiency. Depending on the view, tariffs may induce a positive or negative effect on inventory efficiency-evidence of a tension ripe for examination. To investigate these opposing views, the authors created a novel database of firms operating in industries that imported 2018 tariff-affected products and compared tariff-affected versus non-tariff-affected firms using a difference-in-differences analysis. In doing so, the findings revealed that, perhaps surprisingly, firms that operated in tariff-affected industries became leaner and more efficient with regard to inventory. The authors then discuss the resulting theoretical, managerial, and societal implications and lay the foundation for future research, including on the 2025 tariff announcements and increases.
Higher education institutions (HEIs) play a crucial role in shaping the future by educating students, advancing research, and fostering innovation. Societies, including those in developing countries, face wicked problems such as climate change, social and economic inequality, and geopolitical tensions that require all stakeholders, including HEIs, to work together and pool resources to cocreate solutions. This research explores how governmental policies for coordinating higher education influence universities’ learning and responsiveness to societal needs. Under a service triad framework, higher education is conceptualized as a supply chain where the government acts as service buyer and funder, HEIs as service suppliers, and society as service end user. Through an abductive qualitative approach and multiyear data collection, this article shows that centralized regulation and standardized procedures—intended to coordinate the higher education sector and enhance HEIs' responsiveness—often lead to captive learning, where institutions remain constrained by rigid, policy-driven structures, restricting their responsiveness. Consortium learning emerges as an alternative mode that allows institutions to overcome institutional lock-in through collaboration and shared learning processes. This article contributes to the literature on supply chain learning, service triads, and path dependency in public service supply chains. By integrating path dependency theory into the study of higher education service triads, it provides new insights into how policy structures and institutional decision-making shape learning and responsiveness.
