Innovative legislation aspires for an extra-jurisdictional effect on modern slavery in supply chains through increased transparency. Evidence to date suggests that firms are not rising to this challenge, and, if anything, mandatory reporting practices are coalescing around superficial reports decoupled from policy objectives. To decide how the regulatory regime should best be adapted, it is important to understand not just the organizational-level response but also the underlying managerial attitudes and behavior on which substantive practical action depends. The study utilized a photo elicitation method with 47 managers drawn from eight large UK construction firms. Framing theory was utilized to reveal four distinct managerial mindsets, each with different implications for policy and practice. These variants suggest that a one-size-fits-all policy approach is suboptimal. Policy combining rewards and penalties, tailored to each framing group, is likely to be the most expedient in quickly improving managerial behavior. The existence of inconsistent framing within firms suggests that strategic policies are not being effectively embedded in managerial practice. In turn, this limits the impact that focal firms have in improving labor practices across multiple tiers of their supply chains. Reporting entities should not be treated as cohesive, unitary entities by stakeholders.
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.
Supply chains are increasingly suffering from widespread disruptions, leading to growing interest in supply chain resilience. Adaptation, a central concept of resilience, is conventionally assumed to effectively manage these disruptions. However, actions aimed at adaptation can have adverse consequences, a phenomenon known in the climate change literature as maladaptation. Supply chain studies discuss only a few instances of maladaptation, without providing an overarching logic that explains why and how such maladaptation emerges. This study brings the concept of maladaptation into supply chain research by developing a conceptual framework that combines maladaptation theory from climate change literature with resilience theory from social-ecological systems literature. This framework identifies the dynamic mechanisms of cross-level interaction, delayed feedback, path dependence, and governance, through which maladaptation emerges. The framework explains how specific supply chain characteristics, such as compressed timeframes, coordination, and competition, accelerate these mechanisms. Through the conceptualization of maladaptation in supply chain management, this study advances resilience theory by establishing a framework to analyze when and under what circumstances adaptive actions aimed at enhancing resilience become maladaptive.
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.
