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The purpose of this paper is to advance supply chain management by describing the current state of behavioral supply chain management (BSCM) research and paving the way for future contributions by developing a meta-theory for this important field.

The results are generated by applying the systematic literature review methodology and an iterative theory-building approach involving a panel of academics.

This review provides a comprehensive overview of the BSCM research landscape. Additionally, a meta-theory of BSCM is presented that encompasses all central elements of the research field and introduces the concept of emergence to the field of BSCM. Furthermore, five promising future research opportunities are formulated.

The critical discussions and the formulated research opportunities will help scholars in positioning their research to enhance its contribution.

Results from this research indicate that supply chain decisions benefit from explicit consideration for cognitive and social phenomena.

This review is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the field of BSCM research and facilitates BSCM in advancing further.

The COVID-19 crisis has created enormous strain in global supply chains. The disruption has caused severe shortages of critical items, including personal protective equipment (e.g. face masks), ventilators and diagnostics. The failure of the industry to meet the sudden demand for these necessary items has caused a severe humanitarian crisis. These situations, resulting from the COVID-19, crisis have led to the informal growth of frugal innovation in sustainable global supply chains. This paper aims to provide a detailed overview of drivers of frugal-oriented sustainable global supply chains, following lessons acquired from emerging countries’ attempts to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors used a focused group approach to identify the drivers and this paper further validated them using existing literature published in international peer-reviewed journals and reports. The authors adopted total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) to analyze the complex relationships among identified drivers.

The authors present a theoretical framework to explain how the drivers are interlinked. This paper has developed the framework through a synthesis of the TISM modeling and Matrice d’impacts croisés multiplication appliquée á un classment analysis. This paper observed that government financial support, policies and regulations, under the mediating effect of leadership and the moderating effect of national culture and international rules and regulations, has a significant effect on the adoption of emerging technology, volunteering initiatives and values and ethics. Further, emerging technology, volunteering initiative and values and ethics have a significant effect on supply chain talent and frugal engineering. These results provide some useful theoretical insights that may help in further investigating the role of frugal innovations in other contexts.

The authors find that outcomes of the methodical contributions and the resulting managerial insights can be categorized into four levels. Industry and researchers alike can use the study to develop the decision-support systems guiding frugal-oriented sustainable global supply chains amid the COVID-19 pandemic and in recovering them thereafter. Suggestions for future research directions are offered and discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential synergy between companies’ sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) activities and their supply chain resilience (SCRES). The authors propose hypotheses about the impact of buying companies SSCM activities on the inflicted damage by unexpected supply chain disruptions and the recovery time afterwards and test these empirically using data from companies during the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors investigate a sample of 231 of the largest publicly traded companies in the European Union with 4.158 firm-year observations. For the analysis, the authors generate variables capturing the companies’ intensity and years of experience of their SSCM activities targeted at the supply chain and run regression analyses on the inflicted damage due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the recovery time after the disruption.

Buying companies’ SSCM activities have a positive effect on their SCRES. The damage inflicted by unexpected supply chain disruptions is lower when companies have higher levels of SSCM and longer experience with it. The recovery time afterwards is significantly reduced by longer experience with SSCM efforts.

The authors suggest SCRES is reinforced by transparency, situational awareness, social capital and collaboration resulting from companies SSCM activities translate into increased SCRES.

The authors show that companies with superior SSCM are more resilient in a crisis and conclude that, therefore, companies should invest in SSCM to prevent future supply disruptions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study analyzing a data set of multi-industry companies, linking their SSCM activities to SCRES during the pandemic.

This study empirically examines a model that describes the direct path from perceived understanding of supply chain integration (PUSCI) to perceived understanding of supply chain responsiveness (PUSCR) to leverage supply chain manager's communication and teamwork competencies. This study also examines whether knowledge and task skill and proficiency mediate the relationship between PUSCI and PUSCR to improve the communication and teamwork competency of a supply chain manager.

The data were collected using a survey questionnaire that was mailed to the 413 supply chain managers of global manufacturing companies in Indonesia.

The result from model testing shows that PUSCR significantly and positively affected the communication and teamwork competency of supply chain manager and knowledge, task skill and proficiency as mediating variables improved communication and teamwork competency. The results found that PUSCI was related to supply chain manager's competency.

Supply chain managers are advised to focus on PUSCI and consistently improve effective communication and teamwork competency.

This study will extend the literature by utilizing the competency-based theory to investigate the perceived understanding and communication capabilities of supply chain managers.

The third-party logistics (3PL) provider has faced significant change since containerisation with the broadening scope of supply chains and technological developments. With these changes, the required supply chain skills discussions have covered mostly graduate skills or employees' skills with a limited discussion to what extent and whether senior management skills were changing. Hence, 3PL senior management skill requirements will be compiled based on existing studies and assessed to check whether these are still relevant and if so to what extent for today's 3PL senior managers.

A questionnaire has been devised based on 3PL senior management skills identified in the academic literature and sent out to senior managers via professional social networks of 3PL. Based on the previous literature, the senior managers selected had to fulfil the selection criteria of a minimum five years' managerial experience in a 3PL, and a minimum of ten years' experience in general, which limited the sample size to twenty-seven senior managers in the 3PL sector.

The findings indicated that 3PL senior managers’ skills highlighted an increasing dependence on and importance of relational and behavioural skills, particularly when compared with the more traditional functional and managerial skills. The study indicated that the 3PL senior managers highlighted an increasing dependence and importance upon relational and behavioural skills, particularly when compared with the more traditional functional skills.

The study has explored the senior management skills in 3PL in the UK, albeit the respondents possessing diverse backgrounds. Therefore, it would be beneficial to test whether these findings are exemplary across the wider 3PL sector, not only in the UK but also across Europe to see how corporate agenda for executive supply chain skills could be devised.

Corporate supply chain training and development staff can develop specific programs based on the 3PL senior management skill sets especially on relational and behavioural skills, which are needed for future managers as well as up-skill senior managers' skills which are deemed to be most important in the current 3PL market.

This paper contributes to the supply chain skills discussion and reports subject relevant challenges for today’s senior management in the 3PL industry. The findings have generated preliminary discussions on whether senior management skills are changing with the broadening scope of supply chains.

This paper aims to address procurement, logistics management, inventory control and distribution of perishable items, i.e. vegetables, fruits, flowers and fishes, during the social isolation period of the Covid-19 era to identify conflicting interests among the channel members; present inventory and information sharing scenario; and reveal organizational dispute and existence of redundant, nonessential and corrupted members in the supply chain.

This study uses an exploratory investigation to evaluate the relations among the members of the supply chain of perishable food items. In this context, it is designed to investigate the field, observe the members of the existing supply chain from rural and remote places and capture their interviews to accomplish the objectives.

This study identified that although the supply chain of perishable food items is controlled truly by private parties, from a realistic view, the private–public partnership is essential where the government should play the coordinating role. In this context, continuous interaction, coordination and information sharing among the members to establish an optimum and scalable network and remove any redundant nodal points is a key success factor for managing an efficient supply chain.

Theoretical and managerial implication of this research is enormous. The existence of functional and dysfunctional conflicts in the same supply network and how it can be detrimental to the performance of the members are exposed in this study, which can be an excellent source to be investigated. Practitioners and researchers can gain a greater understanding to identify the root causes of conflicts in the existing structural dynamics, shedding light on organizational interactions, power and group behavior during the Covid-19 era.

From the light of management and inter-organizational conflicts, this is a pioneer study that has detected the redundant channel members, their source of power and how their removal can present an optimum channel with group coherence and synergistic interest.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to investigate the role of big data and predictive analytics (BDPA) and social capital on the performance of humanitarian supply chains (HSCs); second, to explore the different performance measurement frameworks and develop a conceptual model for an HSC context that can be used by humanitarian organizations; and third, to provide insights for future research direction.

After a detailed review of relevant literature, grounded in resource-based view and social capital theory, the paper proposes a conceptual model that depicts the influence of BDPA and social capital on the performance of an HSC.

The study deliberates that BDPA as a capability improves the effectiveness of humanitarian missions to achieve its goals. It uncovers the fact that social capital binds people, organization or a country to form a network and has a critical role in the form of monetary or non-monetary support in disaster management. Further, it argues that social capital combined with BDPA capability can result in a better HSC performance.

The proposed model integrating BDPA and social capital for HSC performance is conceptual and it needs to be empirically validated.

Organizations and practitioners may use this framework by mobilizing social capital, BDPA to enhance their abilities to help victims of calamities.

Findings from study can help improve coordination among different stakeholders in HSC, effectiveness of humanitarian operations, which means lives saved and faster reconstruction process after disaster. Second, by implementing performance measurements framework recommended by study, donors and other stakeholders will get much desired transparency at each stage of HSCs.

The findings contribute to the missing link of social capital and BDPA to the existing performance of HSC literature, finally leading to a better HSC performance.

This study examines the effect of human and technological resource bundling on the financial and non-financial performance of third-party logistics (3PL) firms in India.

For achieving the research aim, 248 practitioners from India based 3PL firms were surveyed. The relationships between human and technology resources and firm performance were examined using structural equation modelling (SEM).

The results of empirical tests revealed that human and technological resources significantly enhance the performance of the 3PL firm. However, the firm's logistic capabilities related to track and trace, order management and final assembly do not mediate this relationship.

This study contributes by examining resource bundling in India's 3PL industry using empirical data and providing knowledge of the relationship between resources and business performance. It guides managers to consciously develop resource capabilities that influence firm performance.

The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how agency theory has been used to address the dynamics involved in supply chain management. It is also dedicated to suggesting an agenda for future research.

We performed an integrative literature review, based on the process detailed by Botelho et al. (2011), with search filters. The articles were obtained from the Scopus and Web of Science databases using the keywords “supply chain” and “agency theory”, with a subsequent analytical filter for “management”. The search initially identified 205 articles. After two screenings, 56 articles were selected for analysis.

Despite attempts to infer the importance of research on agency theory in supply chain management, its application to the discipline is scarce. Clearly, agency theory provides valuable insights into the relationships in the supply chain. In the studies analyzed, the dynamics of performance, risk, sustainability, dyadic and inter-firm relationships, and supplier management are predominant.

When considering unwanted behaviors throughout the supply chain, agency theory fills the explanatory gaps for these facts. It also proves to be a useful tool to answer mainly the dilemmas of underlying theories, such as transaction cost theory, resource-based view and network theory. Rare are the studies that examine the current state of the application of agency theory in the supply chain literature in the management field.

The purpose of this paper is to examine when and how organizations build big data analytics capability (BDAC) to improve supply chain agility (SCA) and gain competitive advantage.

The authors grounded the theoretical framework in two perspectives: the dynamic capabilities view and contingency theory. To test the research hypotheses, the authors gathered 173 usable responses using a pre-tested questionnaire.

The results suggest that BDAC has a positive and significant effect on SCA and competitive advantage. Further, the results support the hypothesis that organizational flexibility (OF) has a positive and significant moderation effect on the path joining BDAC and SCA. However, contrary to the belief, the authors found no support for the moderation effect of OF on the path joining BDAC and competitive advantage.

The study makes some useful contributions to the literature on BDAC, SCA, OF, and competitive advantage. Moreover, the results may further motivate future scholars to replicate the findings using longitudinal data.