Open systems possess a dilemma whereby they both depend upon-and are subject to disruptions arising from-their exogenous environments. Organisations display this dilemma through the need to both manage the inbound flow of supply from upstream nodes and outputs towards downstream customers, whilst also managing issues arising from interactions with these other systems. At the centre of this dilemma sits individual agents, whether they be managers of organisations, business-level functions or customer-facing roles. This paper explores how individuals perceive and react towards disruptions and the wider, systemic implications of their actions. This article uses interviews with individuals based on a theoretical framework incorporating general systems theory (GST) and a series of decision theories (namely Protection Motivation Theory) to highlight the commonalities across various actions and strategies that individuals can undertake to address disruptions.

Food supply chain is a rapidly growing integrated sector and covers all the aspects from farm to fork, including manufacturing, packaging, distribution, storing, as well as further processing or cooking for consumption. Along this chain, smart packaging could impact the quality, safety, and sustainability of food. Packaging systems have evolved to be smarter with integration of emerging electronics and wireless communication and cloud data solutions. Although there are many factors causing the loss and waste issues for foods throughout the whole supply chain of food and there have been several articles showing the recent advances and breakthroughs in developing smart packaging systems, this review integrates these conceptual frameworks and technological applications and focuses on how innovative smart packaging solutions are beneficial to the overall quality and safety of food supply by enhancing product traceability and reducing the amount of food loss and waste. We start by introducing the concept of the management for the integrated food supply chain, which is critical in tactical and operational components that can enhance product traceability within the entire chain. Then we highlight the impact of smart packaging in reducing food loss and waste. We summarize the basic information of the common printing techniques for smart packaging system (sensor and indicator). Then, we discuss the potential challenges in the manufacturing and deployment of smart packaging systems, as well as their cost-related drawbacks and further steps in food supply chain.

As disruptions and uncertainty have become emergent themes within the supply chain literature, attention has shifted towards the choices enacted to combat the negative effects of disruptions. Extant research highlights the importance of system states - namely robustness and resilience - towards mitigating the probability and magnitude of disruptions, however, there appears to be a lack of conceptual guidance surrounding two popular strategies - redundancy and flexibility - that have been proposed to mitigate the impact of disruptions. To address this issue, we review and investigate contextual factors from empirical research that may offer insight into conceptual strategies that can be utilised to improve post-disruption system performance utilising a methodology based upon an abductive approach to conceptual theory building. In this paper published research on resilience and robustness in supply chains is considered, alongside research in other areas such as risk, systems theory, and ecology. Inference drawn from empirical research is often highly contextualised, but collectively highlights unique generalisable factors. Our research proposes four broad conceptual strategies - insurance, expediting, strategic adaptive capability and reconfiguration - that each uniquely serve to reduce the probability and magnitude of supply chain disruptions. Our research concludes that the difference in utility between redundancy and flexibility as means to enhance resilience and robustness is influenced by interactions between the supply chain, the disruption characteristics (inclusive of speed of onset and time horizon) and the decision maker.

Online testing is a popular practice for tertiary educators, largely owing to efficiency in automation, scalability, and capability to add depth and breadth to subject offerings. As with all assessments, designs need to consider whether student cheating may be inadvertently made easier and more difficult to detect. Cheating can jeopardise the validity of inference drawn from the measurements produced by online tests, leading to inaccurate signals and misperceptions about what students know and can do. This paper extends theoretical understanding about cheating behaviours to link online test design choices and their influence on a student’s capability and willingness to cheat. This research reviews the literature on cheating theories and a typology construction methodology to relate common online test design choices to their cheating threat consequence. In doing so, the typology offers educators designing online tests general normative guidance aimed at reducing threats to assessment inference validity, and academic integrity in general, brought about by student cheating. While we admit that cheating cannot be completely eliminated in online testing, the guidance provided by the typology can assist educators to structure online tests to minimise cheating.

Open systems operating close to maximum capacity are prone to work accumulations when either resources become fatigued and unexpected demand surges occur. As such, decision makers are required to make strategic choices about adjustments to available resources to avoid drift towards entropy and failure. Such work accumulations can continually increase while resource utilisation is maximized, popular risk strategies be applied to assist resilience or robustness. Decision-makers often make choices to implement either flexibility or redundancy strategies, yet little guidance exists as to the relative utilities of each strategy. Adopting a system dynamics (SD) methodology, and a discrete event simulation, this paper evaluates the utility difference between two strategies within a queueing system subject to unexpected demand surges while operating at near maximum capacity. Utilising worker fatigue (as a function of utilisation) as a feedback mechanism influencing capacity, the resultant model suggests non-linearity caused by fatigue influences the utility of redundancy and strategy. The utility is further influenced by the degree of slack built into the system to cope with demand surges. The research offers unique interpretations of the redundancy-flexibility debate and demonstrates the value of a combined SD and discrete event simulation methodology towards determining differences in strategy utilities.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to construct a typology of a disaster that informs humanitarian-relief supply chain (HRSC) design across the stages of disaster relief.Design/methodology/approachIn addition to an interdisciplinary review of pertinent literature, this paper utilises a typology construction method to propose theoretically and methodologically sound dimensions of disasters.FindingsWhilst semantic arguments surrounding the concept of a “disaster” are ongoing, the authors propose three typologies based upon six dimensions that serve as interdependent variables informing resultant HRSC design considerations. These are speed of onset, time horizon, spatial considerations, affected population needs, perceived probability of occurrence and perceived magnitude of consequence. These combinational and independent relationships of the variables offer insight into key HRSC design-making considerations.Research limitations/implicationsThe study improves conceptual knowledge of disasters, distilling the concept to only the dimensions applicable to HRSC design, omitting other applications. The typologies provide empirical cell types based on extant literature, but do not apply the models towards new or future phenomena.Practical implicationsThis paper provides HRSC practitioners with normative guidance through a more targeted approach to disaster relief, with a focus on the impacted system and resulting interactions’ correspondence to HRSC design.Originality/valueThis paper provides three typological models of disasters uniquely constructed for HRSC design across the various stages of disaster relief.