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Firms are accountable for upholding worker rights and well-being in their supply base. The authors unpack the evolution in lead firm thinking and practice about how to assure labor conditions at suppliers.

The authors conducted interviews with the social sustainability leaders at 22 global corporations (“lead firms”) and their sustainability consultants to understand how they think about, and enact efforts, to support labor in their supply base. The authors complement this with an analysis of stated practice in proprietary supplier codes of conduct for the manufacturing and extractive-related firms in the S&P 500 and FTSE 350.

The authors’ interviews suggest firms follow two distinct and cumulative approaches: a transactional-based approach leveraging collective buyer power to enforce supplier compliance and a relational-based approach focused on mutual capacity building between lead (buyer) firms and their suppliers. The authors also see the emergence, in a small subset of firms, of a bottom-up approach that recognizes supplier workers as rights-holders and empowers them to understand and claim their rights.

The authors identify systematic convergence in supplier codes of conduct. While the transactional and relational approaches are well documented in the supply chain social sustainability literature, the rights-holder approach is not. Its emergence presents an important complement to the other approaches and enables a broader recognition of human rights, and the duty of Western firms to assure those rights.

Responding in a timely manner to product recalls emanating from the supply chain presents tremendous challenges for most firms. The source might be a supplier from the same industry located next door, or one from a completely different sector of the economy situated thousands of miles away. Yet the speed of the firm’s response is crucial to mitigating the consequences of the recall both for the firm, and consumer health and well-being. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of geographic distance, industry relatedness and clustering on firm response time to a supplier-initiated product recall.

The authors test the theoretical framework via an examination of food recall announcements registered with the US Food and Drug Administration over a ten-year period. The authors develop a data set comprising 407 pairs of supplier and affected downstream manufacturing firms, and utilize cross-classified hierarchical linear modeling to understand the drivers of organizational responsiveness.

The results suggest that firm response time is lengthened by geographic distance but reduced when the supplier and affected firm operate in related industry sectors. The authors further find that as more firms in a given industry are affected by the same recall, response time deteriorates.

Product recalls in the agri-food industry are significant events initiated to protect consumer health and ensure the safety of the farm-to-fork food chain. The findings highlight how both geographic- and industry-related factors determine the speed of firm responsiveness to these events.

This study aims to provide insight on how work–life initiatives impact employees. Using corporate volunteer programs as an example, the authors examine the role of coworker social influence in shaping the reactions of both employee participants and non-participants of the program. The paper further identifies several factors that may moderate these relationships.

The authors surveyed employees before and after the implementation of a new corporate work–life initiative. 99 employees provided data pre and post. OLS regression and hierarchical linear modeling were used to test hypothesized relationships.

Even in the context of low participation, work–life initiatives engendered positive organization-related perceptions among employees. These positive outcomes were due in part to coworkers' sharing of their volunteer experiences and were most prominent for employees in positions that afforded flexibility, and employees who reported close ties with coworkers.

The study deepens our understanding of employee reactions to work–life programs and underlines the importance of these programs even when employee participation is low. The role of coworker influence as a determinant of employee reactions suggests there may be value in purposefully fostering participants' sharing of volunteer experiences in the workplace.

This study takes a unique approach to examining the role of coworker influence in shaping employee reactions to corporate initiatives.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the behavioral tendencies of supply managers when they are faced with uncertainty in making multi-tier sourcing decisions.

This paper uses the literature on multi-tier supply chains and behavioral decision making to develop a theoretical framework for examining factors influencing a supply manager’s decision to retain control over sourcing in the multi-tier context. An experimental vignette methodology is used to gather data from 259 supply managers.

Results suggest that supply managers choose to exert less multi-tier control when they have high levels of interpersonal trust in the tier-1 supplier’s sales representative. This effect is accentuated by a high level of familiarity with potential lower-tier suppliers. Under high levels of familiarity with potential lower-tier suppliers, supply managers will exert greater levels of multi-tier sourcing control as the behavioral uncertainty of the tier-1 supplier increases.

Buying firms can enhance their understanding of supply managers’ multi-tier sourcing decision making and the potential biases associated with it. Suggestions for a more effective use of multi-tier sourcing are provided in the Discussion section.

Multi-tier sourcing is an increasingly important area of research, and this paper is the first to examine individual supply managers’ behavioral decision making in the multi-tier context. This paper also contributes to the outsourcing literature by investigating behavioral factors influencing the outsourcing of sourcing activities.

Sustainable supply chain management has become an increasingly important driver of business performance. Understanding the contingent nature of how performance is improved in this context is therefore a critical task for management. The purpose of this paper is to explore the moderating effects of two practices unique to sustainable supply chain – ecocentricity and supply chain traceability – on a firm’s environmental and operating cost performance.

Survey data were collected from 248 UK manufacturing firms and analyzed using moderated hierarchical regression.

The results suggest that green supply chain management (GSCM) practices are associated with improvements in both environmental and cost-based performance. Further, higher levels of ecocentricity and supply chain traceability are associated with stronger relationships between GSCM practices and cost performance. Contrary to expectations, high levels of supply chain traceability were found to negatively moderate the relationship between GSCM practices and environmental performance.

The research design was survey-based and cross-sectional. Future studies would benefit from longitudinal research designs that capture the effects of GSCM practices on performance over an extended period. The survey data is also perceptual; using secondary data to capture environmental performance outcomes, for example, would be another opportunity for future research.

The authors provide additional support to findings that GSCM practices benefit both environmental and cost performance dimensions. In this context, the authors show that investments by firms in working with a broader set of eco-system partners (ecocentricity) and building supply chain traceability and leads to improved environmental sustainability outcomes. The authors encourage managers to carefully consider how they conceptualize and monitor their supply chains.

This paper offers several contributions to the research in this area. First, the authors develop and validate a measurement scale for ecocentricity and supply chain traceability. Second, the authors show how these two variables – unique to sustainable supply chains – can positively influence firm and environmental performance.

Project-based supply networks are an emerging form of organizing used to meet a buying organization's operational and innovation goals. Knowledge sharing among suppliers in the network plays a key role in successful project delivery but is challenging to achieve in practice. The authors draw on self-determination theory (SDT) to examine the interactive effect of incentive provisions (penalties and bonuses) and network governance (lead or shared) on knowledge sharing motivation by individual boundary-spanners within project-based supply networks.

A scenario-based behavioral experiment of 217 professionals within the UK using the online platform, Prolific, was conducted. A Hayes Macro PROCESS model was used to analyze the data. The authors pilot-tested the scenario with project management experts, senior managers, and directors.

The findings highlighted that the effectiveness of incentive provisions on knowledge sharing may be dependent on the mode of network governance. Where suppliers have shared responsibility for managing the network (shared governance), bonuses were more effective than penalties in motivating knowledge sharing through support of boundary-spanners’ autonomy needs. However, where the buying organization has transferred responsibility for managing the network to an external third-party organization (lead governance), the authors found no significant difference between the effectiveness of penalty versus bonus provisions in motivating knowledge sharing.

Prior research in operations and supply chain management (OSCM) has shown the positive effect of incentive provisions on knowledge sharing motivation, but largely overlooked the effectiveness of such incentives when nested within broader governance mechanisms used in projects and their networks. Moreover, while scholars have started to highlight the importance of governance mechanisms in knowledge sharing at the dyadic level, the authors know very little about the impact of network governance.

This study aims to examine publications of supply chain management (SCM) researchers from across the world and maps the leadership role of authors and institutions based on how prolific they are in publishing and on network measures of centrality while accounting for the quality of the outlets that they publish in. It aims to inform stakeholders on who the leading SCM scholars are, their primary areas of SCM research, their publication profiles and the nature of their networks. It also identifies and informs on the leading SCM research institutions of the world and where leadership in specific areas of SCM research is emerging from.

Based on SCM papers appearing in a set of seven leading journals over the 15-year period of 2001-2015, publication scores and social network analysis measures of total degree centrality and Bonacich power centrality are used to identify the highest ranked agents in SCM research overall, as well as in some specific areas of SCM research. Social network analysis is also used to examine the nature and scope of the networks of the ranked agents and where leadership in SCM research is emerging from.

Authors and institutions from the USA and UK are found to dominate much of the rankings in SCM research both by publication score and social network analysis measures of centrality. In examining the networks of the very top authors and institutions of the world, their networks are found to be more inward-looking (country-centric) than outward-looking (globally dispersed). Further, researchers in Europe and Asia alike are found to exhibit significant continental inclinations in their network formations with researchers in Europe displaying greater propensity to collaborate with their European-based counterparts and researchers in Asia with their Asian-based counterparts. Also, from among the journals, Supply Chain Management: An International Journal is found to exhibit a far more expansive global reach than any of the other journals.

The journal set used in this study, though representative of high-quality SCM research outlets, is not exhaustive of all potential outlets that publish SCM research. Further, the measure of quality that this study assigns to the various publications is based solely on a publication score that accounts for the quality of the journals, as rated by Association of Business Schools that the papers appear in and nothing else.

By informing the community of stakeholders of SCM research about the top-ranked SCM authors, institutions and countries of the world, the nature of their networks, as well as what the primary areas of SCM research of the leading authors in the world are, this research provides stakeholders, including managers, researchers and students, information that is helpful to them not only because of the insights it provides but also for the gauging of potential for embedding themselves in specific networks, engaging in collaborative research with the leading agents or pursuing educational opportunities with them.

This research is the first of its kind to identify and rank the top SCM authors and institutions from across the world using a representative set of seven leading SCM and primary OM journals based on publication scores and social network measures of centrality. The research is also the first of its kind to identify and rank the top authors and institutions within specific areas of SCM research and to identify future research opportunities relating to aspects of collaboration and networking in research endeavors.

To introduce the special issue focusing on the question: is supply chain management (SCM) an emerging academic discipline?

A brief discussion of the papers in the special issue.

Outlines how the papers stimulate debate on the nature and development of SCM and indicates that there is an intense research effort being conducted around the world in this field.

Provides a summary of the perspectives considered within the issue.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the different patterns of purchasing function configuration, and the relationship between such patterns and organisational performance.

Despite considerable attention, there is little evidence showing the current situation toward the development of purchasing functions within organisations. Through quantitative data collected from 151 UK purchasing executives, cluster analysis is used to uncover and characterize four purchasing function configurations.

Four configurations, termed strategic, capable, celebrity, and undeveloped, were identified according to the characteristics they possess. Significant differences in supplier‐ and organisational‐related performance outcomes were found across these four purchasing function configurations. Purchasing skills were also shown to be a precondition for purchasing to exert influence within the organisation.

A cross‐sectional survey provides limited longitudinal insight into the evolution of purchasing functions. Future research could examine how firms move between purchasing configurations. This study does, however, improve understanding of the different types of purchasing functions, their performance outcomes, and makes recommendations for potential strategies to be adopted for purchasing function improvement.

The findings are useful for practitioners seeking to improve the performance and standing of the purchasing function through identification of the characteristics and potential limitations faced at each phase.

This paper is one of few studies to provide an empirical test of purchasing function configuration, and the implications for organisational performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors which determine the degree of knowledge transfer in inter‐firm new product development (NPD) projects. The authors test a theoretical model exploring how inter‐firm knowledge transfer is enabled or hindered by a buyer's learning intent, the degree of supplier protectiveness, inter‐firm knowledge ambiguity, and absorptive capacity.

A sample of 153 R&D intensive manufacturing firms in the UK automotive, aerospace, pharmaceutical, electrical, chemical, and general manufacturing industries was used to test the framework. To analyse the data, two‐step structural equation modeling in AMOS 7.0 was used.

The results indicate that a buyer's learning intent increases inter‐firm knowledge transfer, but also acts as an incentive for suppliers to protect their knowledge. Such defensive measures increase the degree of inter‐firm knowledge ambiguity, encouraging buyer firms to invest in absorptive capacity as a means to interpret supplier knowledge, but also increase the degree of knowledge transfer.

The paper illustrates the effects of focusing on acquisition, rather than accessing supplier technological knowledge. The paper shows that an overt learning strategy can be detrimental to knowledge transfer between buyer‐supplier, as suppliers react by restricting the flow of information. Organisations are encouraged to consider this dynamic when engaging in multi‐organisational, NPD projects.

The paper examines the dynamics of knowledge transfer within inter‐firm NPD projects, showing how transfer is influenced by the buyer firm's learning intention, supplier's response, characteristics of the relationship and knowledge to be transferred.