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The conceptualization of flexibility in organizations historically emerged from three views which relate to economic, to organizational and to manufacturing perspectives. Despite the growing number of publications about supply chain flexibility in the area of supply chain management, there is a lack of consensus on how to define and to conceptualize supply chain flexibility from a management point of view. The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive overview of the literature on the supply chain flexibility perspective and contributes to our understanding of the current state of research and its future development.

The research methodology used is the systematic literature review. In total 92 articles were selected from databases of well-known journal publishers in the field of economics, business studies and management sciences as well as grey literature to cover the topic of supply chain flexibility.

A limited number of studies in the field of supply chain flexibility apply theories and define the term supply chain flexibility. Instead they focus on a particular part or dimension of the supply chain. Based on the analysis, a distinction is made between flexibility in the supply chain and supply chain flexibility. Based on the function and characteristics of the supply chain, the authors selected 30 flexibility dimensions that cover supply chain flexibility by concentrating on the different business areas involved.

The results support researchers and practitioners by identifying relevant trends and gaps in the field of supply chain flexibility.

The authors review the dimensions and aspects of supply chain flexibility that are currently taken into account in the literature. In this way, the authors provide an overarching perspective on the flexibility literature relating to supply chains.

The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to categorising explanations of non‐compliance of EU tendering directives and to report on a survey study to the impact of these reasons on compliance with the directives.

A literature review resulted in a conceptual model and related hypotheses, pointing at four potential reasons for (non‐)compliance: the purchaser's familiarity with the rules, the perceived inefficiency, organisational incentives to comply, and the expected resistance and readiness of suppliers to take action in case of non‐compliance. The paper uses data from a survey among 147 responding purchasing professionals of the Dutch Ministry of Defence.

The empirical findings indicate that both purchaser's familiarity with the rules and organisational incentives have a positive, statistically significant impact on compliance. Nor the alleged inefficiency of the directives, nor the expected supplier resistance seem to influence the compliance with the directives.

The study is limited in its setting: measuring perceptions of purchasing professionals within the Dutch Ministry of Defence. Future research could combine perceptual data and objective, measurable data on compliance. Future research might include other samples from other public agencies, questioning other respondents than purchasers, measuring factors from other fields and disciplines such as criminology (risk of detection and sanction risks), economy (costs and benefits), public choice theory (legitimacy), sociology (peer pressure), and social psychology (personal values).

A managerial implication of the findings of this study would be that educating and training public purchasers will be an effective tool for increasing the compliance with the directives. In addition, public agencies could try to establish incentives in order to stimulate compliance.

Although many studies have reported on the (limited) effectiveness of the EU tendering directives, little work has been undertaken on the compliance as such, while no empirical studies have been carried out to explain the (lack of) compliance with EU directives. This paper reports on a quantitative study, explaining the (non‐) compliance with the directives. The study could be of value to public policy makers, to public agencies, and to researchers in the academic world.