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This paper aims to provide a starting point to discuss how social enterprises can drive systemic change in terms of social impact through operations and supply chain management.

This paper reviews existing literature and the four papers in this special issue and develops a conceptual framework of how social enterprises and their supply chains create social impact and further enable systematic change.

Our paper finds that social impact and systemic change can be shaped by social enterprises at three different levels of analysis (organization, supply chain and context) and through three enablers (cognitive shift, stakeholder collaboration and scalability). Such dimensions are used to position current literature and to highlight new research directions.

This paper proposes a novel understanding of operations and supply chain management in social enterprises intended as catalysts for systemic change. Based on this premise we distinguish different practices and stakeholders to be considered when studying social impact at different levels. The conceptual framework introduced in the paper provides a new pathway for future research and debate by scholars engaged at the intersection of social impact, sustainable operations and supply chain management.

This purpose of this paper is to understand the environmental impacts of stakeholder-driven sustainable purchasing policies in institutional settings.

The research is framed using stakeholder and life cycle assessment (LCA) theories. The study uses a multi-method approach. Starting with interviews to understand the breadth of sustainability issues and significant food purchases facing institutional purchasing managers, the authors subsequently perform LCA of these various policies using the most popular food item in different categories.

From the interview results, the authors found that food purchasers focus predominately on cost, thus, are committed to food and packaging reduction. They are driven to buy local foods based on their consumer stakeholders but share their commitment to buying local products if the cost is appropriate. In the LCA of popular food items in multiple scenarios, avoiding food waste of various forms had significantly higher carbon emissions savings than packaging reduction or transportation minimizing (buy local) strategies.

The sample relied solely on the perceptions of institutional purchasing managers in university dining services. Future research should involve collecting data from other stakeholder groups such as the customers themselves, institutional leaders, and in other types of institutional settings such as hospitals and government agencies.

The research provides managers with insights concerning the trade-offs between different sustainability objectives. In particular, findings show that reducing waste related animal protein has a bigger impact on environmental performance than many other popular sustainability objectives such as buying local or reducing packaging waste.

The paper focuses on the purchasing trade-offs of buying local vs national food products, different packaging solutions, and food waste generation. These decisions offer some social benefits (improve the economic situation for local farms vs consolidated food producers) as well as multiple environmental benefits.

The paper presents new findings on the sustainability purchasing priorities of stakeholders in institutional food settings and subsequent LCA of those policies to show which might have the most environmental impact.

This pathway paper offers research guidance for investigating illegal supply chains as they increasingly threaten societies, economies and ecosystems. There are implications for policy makers to consider incorporating supply chain expertise.

The authors’ work is informed by the team's previous and ongoing studies, research from fields such as criminology, investigative journalism and legal documents.

Illegality occurs in many supply chains and consists in multiple forms. Certain sectors, supply chain innovations, longer supply chains, and heterogeneous regulations and enforcement exacerbate illegal activities. But illegal activity may be necessary for humanitarian, religious or nationalistic reasons. These areas are under explored by supply chain researchers.

By encouraging supply chain academics to research in this area as well as form collaborative partnerships outside of the discipline, the authors hope to move the field forward in prevention as well as learning from illegal supply chains.

Practitioners seek to prevent issues like counterfeiting with their products as well as fraud for economic and reputational reasons.

Governments strive to minimise impacts on their economies and people, and both governments and NGOs attempt to minimise the negative social and environmental impacts. Policy makers need supply chain researchers to evaluate new laws to prevent enabling illegality in supply chains.

As an under-explored area, the authors suggest pathways such as partnering with other disciplines, exploring why these supply chains occur, considering other data sources and methodologies to interdict illegality and learning from illegal supply chains to improve legal supply chains.

The purpose of this paper is to present exciting and innovative research questions in service operations that are aligned with eight key themes and related topics determined by the Journal of Service Management (JOSM) Service Operations Expert Research Panel. By offering a good number of such research questions, this paper provides a broad range of ideas to spur conceptual and empirical research related to service operations and encourage the continued creation of deep knowledge within the field, as well as collaborative research across disciplines that develops and incorporates insights from service operations.

Based on a Delphi study, described in the companion article, “Service Operations: What Have We Learned?,” the panel identified eight key research themes in service operations where leading-edge research is being done or has yet to be done (Victorino et al., 2018). In this paper, three or four topics within each theme are selected and multiple questions for each topic are proposed to guide research efforts. The topics and questions, while wide-ranging, are only representative of the many ongoing research opportunities related to service operations.

The field of service operations has many interesting research topics and questions that are largely unexplored. Furthermore, these research areas are not only increasingly integrative across multiple themes within operations but often transcend functional disciplines. This creates opportunities for ever more impactful research with a greater reach throughout the service system and suggests that service researchers, regardless of functional affiliation, can contribute to the ongoing conversation on the role of service operations in value creation.

Leveraging the collective knowledge of the JOSM Service Operations Expert Research Panel to expand on the research themes generated from the Delphi study, novel questions for future study are put forward. Recognizing that the number of potential research questions is virtually unlimited, summary questions by theme and topic are also provided. These questions represent a synopsis of the individual questions and can serve as a quick reference guide for researchers interested in pursuing new directions in conceptual and empirical research in service operations. This summary also serves as a framework to facilitate the formulation of additional research topics and questions.

The purpose of this paper is to identify research themes in service operations that have great potential for exciting and innovative conceptual and empirical work. To frame these research themes, the paper provides a systematic literature review of operations articles published in the Journal of Service Management (JOSM). The thorough review of published work in JOSM and proposed research themes are presented in hopes that they will inspire impactful research on service operations. These themes are further developed in a companion paper, “Service operations: what’s next?” (Field et al., 2018).

The JOSM Service Operations Expert Research Panel conducted a Delphi study to generate research themes where leading-edge research on service operations is being done or has yet to be done. Nearly 700 articles published in JOSM from its inception through 2016 were reviewed and classified by discipline focus. The subset of service operations articles was then further categorized according to the eight identified research themes plus an additional category that primarily represented traditional manufacturing approaches applied in service settings.

From the Delphi study, the following key themes emerged: service supply networks, evaluating and measuring service operations performance, understanding customer and employee behavior in service operations, managing servitization, managing knowledge-based service contexts, managing participation roles and responsibilities in service operations, addressing society’s challenges through service operations, and the operational implications of the sharing economy. Based on the literature review, approximately 20 percent of the published work in JOSM is operations focused, with earlier articles predominantly applying traditional manufacturing approaches in service settings. However, the percentage of these traditional types of articles has been steadily decreasing, suggesting a trend toward dedicated research frameworks and themes that are unique to the design and management of services operations.

The paper presents key research themes for advancing conceptual and empirical research on service operations. Additionally, a review of the past and current landscape of operations articles published in JOSM offers an understanding of the scholarly conversation so far and sets a foundation from which to build future research.

This article aims to investigate collaborative procurement as a sourcing strategy amongst competing small enterprises in an effort to reduce their material supply costs through increased efficiencies, bargaining power and economies of scale.

A case study approach is applied to a network of breweries that are regionally clustered. Interview data from producers, suppliers and industry experts is inductively interpreted to understand the viability, organisational impact and benefits/limitations of joint procurement activities.

The craft brewing industry follows a market place strategy of differentiation to achieve competitive advantage. This has supply chain implications that promote raw material diversity, which is in conflict with standardisation – a necessary factor for collective buying. Competition impacts information sharing and governance mechanism, while the structural factors of size asymmetry along and across the supply chain influence returns. These issues impact the potential economic benefits of collaborative procurement.

The research propositions have been developed in a specific industry but are generalisable to other companies with a differentiation strategy, especially in the consumer packaged goods sector.

Enabling conditions and constraints are captured in a framework and capability matrix, which can be used by practitioners to assess industry and product feasibility for collaborative procurement.

Previous studies of collaborative procurement have been in the public sector amongst large organisations. This work focusses on coopetition in the context of small businesses to identify the viability and cost-benefit of this strategy.

This paper explores how hub-firms in a regional industrial cluster orchestrate resources to enhance the innovation capabilities of member firms and how this role changes as innovation projects develop. The work advances our understanding of how innovation-oriented clusters can drive the collaboration process, support the development of member capabilities and achieve desired outcomes.

The research utilises exploratory case studies within an innovation cluster, where a hub-firm brings together different players for specific innovation projects. Using resource orchestration theory, the paper analyses six project cases to reveal the shifting roles and activities related to structuring, bundling and leveraging different resources for innovation capabilities particularly associated with improved quality and reputation for the firms and region.

The study reveals the important role played by the cluster hub-firm in structuring, bundling and leveraging resources to create and fund project teams. After project formation, a team member takes the role of an orchestrator to bundle further and then leverage the resources to achieve desired outcomes for the team and the region.

This work focuses on a wine industry but has implications for the success orchestration of other regional industrial clusters. Also, the lack of hub-firm interaction during the project process provides an opportunity to consider mechanisms for better guidance of the project team.

There are implications for practitioners for participating in and further improving the collaborative innovative process.

Policymakers can benefit from the study as the required practices for stimulating innovation capabilities and economic development in a region are discussed.

This research enhances understanding of the hub-firm's role in a regional cluster not only in orchestrating resources to create collaborative innovation projects but how the role shifts over time.

This chapter examines the role of stakeholders, cocreation, and pro-environmental behaviors in Google’s efforts to reduce the environmental impact of their food waste. It describes several different strategies that the company undertook and the outcomes of those efforts. These efforts ranged from working with suppliers and employees to use food that was normally wasted to implementing a waste measuring and feedback system. The case highlights the challenges, current impact, and risks of the different strategies.

The chapter covers the theories and models of stakeholder influence on sustainability, new product development through cocreation, and pro-environmental behaviors; it applies these concepts to Google’s food waste program.

The results of the study contribute to the frameworks on cocreation and stakeholder management to include ideas for encouraging pro-environmental behavior through various social practices (measuring and monitoring waste, building supply chain partnerships, and cocreating new products with stakeholders).

The findings of this chapter will help other companies with ideas for successfully reducing food waste and its environmental impact by illustrating new ideas for engaging stakeholders in the supply chain.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the highlights of the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit, the Principles for Responsible Management Education Global Forum and the Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative General Assembly held in New York and Boston in June 2010. It discusses the potential of the connections and collaborations between these organisations and others to lead to change.

The paper draws out key themes of these concurrent events; connections and collaborations between these initiatives and others; and considers the potential of further collaborations to facilitate change.

There is an acceptance on the part of business of the need to be more socially and environmentally responsible, but a lack of technical know‐how and leadership capacity. Universities generally, and business schools in particular, need to do more to develop graduates for a changing business context with specific reference to the overarching challenge of the twenty‐first century to achieve global environmental sustainability and social justice.

Further collaboration between these organisations is important to drive change through, e.g. sustainability performance management at universities; accreditation processes; and, partnerships between business schools, business and civil society organisations.

The originality and value of this paper is in summarising the highlights of three key interconnected events, the collaborations that led to them, the connections that are strengthening between the organisations and potential of those connections to facilitate change.