Guest editorial

Citation

Glenn Richey Jr, R. (2007), "Guest editorial", International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, Vol. 37 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijpdlm.2007.00537faa.001

Guest editorial

About the Guest Editor R. Glenn Richey Jr is an Assistant Professor of Marketing and Supply Chain Management and the Young J. Boozer Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow at The University of Alabama. His research has appeared in numerous scholarly journals including Business Horizons, Industrial Marketing Management, International Journal of Logistics Management, International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Business Logistics, Journal of Business Research, Organizational Dynamics, Management Decision and others. His specialty areas include domestic and international supply chain management, inter-organizational marketing relationships, and resource management and strategy. Prior to entering academe, Dr Richey worked for ten years in purchasing/sourcing, operations, sales, and supply chain management with two US based fortune 100 business.

Welcome to the first annual special issue of International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management (IJPDLM) held in conjunction with the Supply Chain Management & Industrial Distribution Symposium (SCMID http://cba.ua.edu/scmid/) at the 2006 Society of Marketing Advances (SMA) annual conference. The SCMID provides an unparalleled opportunity for leading supply chain and marketing distribution scholars and senior executives from around the globe to interact and discuss current and emerging trends and challenges in a relaxed and open environment. The symposium's objective is to encourage evolutionary research and group interaction to foster better research and practice as well as to be a low cost/non-profit option to other supply chain events. The symposium features invited presentations by executives and scholars including competitive paper presentations by researchers in conjunction with the Supply Chain Management and Marketing Channels track of the Society of Marketing Advances Annual Conference.

To stimulate greater dialog between academic and industry leaders and among various academic streams of research related to distribution (e.g. business to business marketing, supply chain management, marketing channels, logistics operations, and industrial sales distribution), the symposium annually forwards three to five excellent peer-reviewed research papers for publication in IJPDLM. These manuscripts earn awards named after renowned researchers including Don Bowersox, Adel El Ansary, and Lou Stern. As the symposium grows, we hope to grow the research agendas of those who attend by adding additional paradigms, theories, concepts, and ultimately suggesting directions in the study of supply chain management and distribution.

This year's special issue includes four exploratory research manuscripts. The first two manuscripts look into the importance of international supply chain management. Mert Tokman, Banu Elmadag, Nimet Uray, and Glenn Richey present findings on “Exploring the development of supply chain international joint ventures.” Exploring the understudied arena of joint ventures in supply chains, we show that firms can be separated into two categories in terms of goals: those focused on learning (exploration) and those focused on strategic behavior (exploitation). The study shows that the firms favoring exploitation prefer a past working relationship with the potential partner. Next, Katrina Savitskie examines “Internal and external logistics information technologies: the performance impact in an international setting.” Ultimately, her research indicates that management may effectively target technological resources towards improvement of specific performance objectives. As exploratory studies, these works provide a solid platform for grounding future research in international supply chain strategy, strategic goal separation, and resource management.

The second two studies examine supply chain management in a domestic setting. First, Zachary Williams and Robert Moore examine the importance of growing information capabilities in “Supply chain relationships and information capabilities: the creation and use of information power.” For the first time ever, the authors uncover the importance of information in driving coercive and non-coercive power positions. This discovery may provide grounding for a return to the power literature of the 1980's that has since been somewhat overshadowed by the relationship marketing paradigm in recent Supply Chain literature. Finally, in “The storage constrained, inbound inventory routing problem,” Jennifer Stacey, Malini Natarajarathinam and Chuck Sox present an elegant look at a common inventory management problem from a managerial prospective. Examining the impact of storage space on transportation and logistics costs, the authors address specific practical managerial concerns for effective managerial benchmarking and analyzing potential solutions. These studies uncover new logic that can be applied both specifically to practice and to the development of new theoretical models and modeling.

As the conference organizers, Chad Autry, Bob Robicheaux, and I hope you enjoy these exploratory works and hope they stimulate some new research initiatives. Please join us annually at SCMID to participate in presenting works, competing for an award and a spot in this special issue of IJPDLM, visiting with invited industry experts, and/or just to socialize with experts in the field of supply chain management and industrial distribution.

R. Glenn Richey JrYoung J. Boozer Faculty Fellow,Department of Management and Marketing,Culverhouse College of Business Administration, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USAweb site: http://cba.ua.edu/personnel/GlennRichey.html