Three new articles, published by two members of the Reimagining Supply Chains Initiative and one collaborator, reinterpret a supply chain as a social-ecological system.
The first one is entitled Dancing the Supply Chain: Toward Transformative Supply Chain Management (Journal of Supply Chain Management, 2021). Herein, I argue that “[i]t is time to replace the modernist tropes of designing, planning, and optimizing the supply chain with a new metaphor that accounts for the transformative power of management: that of dancing the supply chain“.
The article starts by challenging the conventional static and reductionist assumptions of the supply chain and reinterprets it as a social-ecological system. I then use the adaptive cycle from panarchy theory to describe the supply chain’s behavior: “An adaptive cycle sequentially accounts for growth and stability, as well as change and variety”. A panarchy is then presented as “a structure of adaptive cycles that are linked across different levels on scales of space, time, and meaning” (supply chain level, political-economic level, planetary level). I then analyze cross-level linkages within the panarchy, which reveals that these adaptive cycles interact. The article ends with a new research agenda “that will allow understanding the world’s empirical complexity differently and challenging the effectiveness and relevance of SCM research in a turbulent and uncertain environment”.
I wrote this article in a way that allows it to be integrated in course curricula (M.Sc. & Ph.D.). I hope you will enjoy reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it.
The second article, Two Perspectives on Supply Chain Resilience, (Andreas Wieland & Christian F. Durach, Journal of Business Logistics, 2021), builds on the first one. It provides a new definition of supply chain resilience: “Supply chain resilience is the capacity of a supply chain to persist, adapt, or transform in the face of change.”
Based on the authors’ observation that SCM scholars have often taken an engineer’s perspective to interpret supply chain resilience, it is argued that it needs to be complemented with a social–ecological perspective. The supply chain discipline is surprisingly isolated from the ongoing resilience debates in other fields, such as ecology and urban science. Supply chain resilience is not just about “bouncing back” and persistence, as the engineer’s view implies. Supply chain resilience promises to be about “bouncing forth”, adaptation, and transformation.
It is time, the article argues, to study the assumptions we make about the supply chain more explicitly. The supply chain is not only an engineered system that needs to be stabilized, as it may be the case with a subway system. It is a fluid system that contains social actors and is anchored in our complex world.
The third article is a book chapter, entitled Panarchy Theory (Amanda Bille & Andreas Wieland), and will appear in the Handbook of Theories for Purchasing, Supply Chain and Management Research next year.
Panarchy theory has also been used in the two previous articles. This chapter demonstrates that this theory offers new opportunities for researchers when it comes to interpreting and analyzing supply chains.
Originally intended for the analysis of ecological systems, panarchy theory has gained attention in other research fields such as management studies, as it enables the analysis of, for instance, supply chains in a wider context, where the supply chain is recognized as being interconnected with the society, the ecological environment and other systems.
In order to adopt panarchy theory in procurement, supply chain management or adjacent management disciplines, it is necessary to translate the original theory from ecology to a social context, requiring a reinterpretation of the unit of analysis. In this chapter, applications of panarchy theory are discussed in the realm of supply chain management, highlighting possible future research directions.
Bille, A., & Wieland, A. (2022). in: Tate, W., Ellram, L., & Bals, L., Handbook of Theories for Purchasing, Supply Chain and Management Research. forthcoming.
Wieland, A. (2021). Dancing the Supply Chain: Toward Transformative Supply Chain Management. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 57 (1), 58–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12248
Wieland, A., & Durach, C. F. (2021). Two Perspectives on Supply Chain Resilience. Journal of Business Logistics, 42 (3), 315–322. https://doi.org/10.1111/jbl.12271
Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash.
