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Companies are concerned about the well-being of workers in their supply chains, but conventional audits fail to uncover critical problems. Yet, if the happy worker – productive worker thesis is correct, it would benefit factories in fast-developing countries, particularly China which is key to many global supply chains, to ensure the well-being of their workers. The authors set out to better understand the relationship between well-being and performance in four Chinese factories.

Over 12-months the authors collected digital diaries from 466 workers in four factories, and monthly data about the performance of their factories. The authors used this data to gain insights into the well-being of workers in these factories; to design experimental interventions to improve this; and to consider any effects these had on factory performance.

The experiments showed that training interventions to improve workers' well-being through their work relationships and individual skills improved not just a factory's general worker well-being, but also some aspects of its performance and worker retention. Thus, it brought benefits not only for the workers but also for the factory owners and their client companies.

While there is a significant body of research investigating the happy worker – productive worker thesis, this was not conducted in Chinese factories. The authors’ work demonstrates that in this and similar environments, workers' eudaimonic well-being is more important than might be assumed, and that in this context there is a relationship between well-being and performance which can be practically addressed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the supply chains, and this brought researchers and practitioners to think about more on circular supply chains (CSC). The CSC concept has been discussed in the literature more than a decade. This study aims to find out the theoretical roots of CSC by analyzing scholarly articles in literature.

This paper uses document cocitation analysis for reaching this aim. After retrieving data from Web of Science database, this paper explores data set by considering used references of these publications and clusters them based on their title terms and visualizes them by using cosine similarity index.

This paper concludes that CSC is mainly discussed along with sustainability, sustainable supply chains and green supply chains, where the focus is integrating circular economy principles to supply chain management (SCM). On the other hand, although resiliency is an essential characteristic of SCM, contribution of CSC to supply chain resilience is neglected in the literature.

CSC will gain importance in near future to increase national/firm productivity, and findings of this paper will give researchers insights for furthering their studies.

To avoid supply chain and market collapse caused by natural disruptions, supply chain resilience is of paramount importance. According to the findings of this paper, the authors believe that business resilience in COVID-19-restricted environment may have exit point by using circular perspective.

The importance of CSC has increased due to the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this unique study was undertaken to investigate the evolution of this crucial topic with evidence from the literature through a cocitation analysis.

Antibiotics shortages have become an increasingly common problem in Europe because of several reasons, including the offshoring of the production of active pharmaceutical ingredients for many of these products to low production cost countries, such as China and India. The problem has deteriorated because of the Covid-19 crisis that has put most global value chains (GVCs) under great stress. This situation has boosted extensive discussions among academics, practitioners and policymakers on possible changes to the configuration of GVCs. This paper aims to focus specifically on antibiotics supply chains from the perspective of a small country (Sweden), and analyse the pros and cons of backshoring and nearshoring alternatives, as a means to reduce drug shortages.

This work adopts a systemic perspective to capture the implications of reshoring for the different stakeholders involved in the antibiotics field. The present meso-analysis, focusing at the industry level, is based on multiple sources of primary data collected between 2014 and 2021, including participation in policy-related projects and interviews with over 100 representatives of key stakeholders in the antibiotics field.

This paper shows how reshoring can address the problems of drug shortages and reduce availability risk in antibiotics’ GVCs. However, the authors show that no simple and best solution exists because both alternatives of reshoring, i.e. backshoring and nearshoring, entail pros and cons for different stakeholders. The authors conclude with implications for policymakers and managers.

The analysis of pros and cons of both backshoring and nearshoring for various stakeholders offers relevant implications for research on operations and supply management, international business and economics/political science.

This paper looks at reshoring as a policy-driven decision and provides an innovative systemic perspective to analyse the implications for different stakeholders of two reshoring options concerning the antibiotics supply chain.