Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a typology of supply-side resilience capabilities and empirically validates these capabilities and their constituent bundles of practices. Design/methodology/approach – The study is primarily qualitative, employing the critical incident technique to collect data across 22 firms and seeking to validate how and why practice bundles form and relate to operations performance. It contains a frequency of occurrence analysis for the purpose of triangulation, a minor statistical part to provide some additional evidence of bundle formation and correlation between adoption of bundles of practices and recovered operations performance after upstream supply chain disruptions. Findings – Four supply-side resilience capabilities are conceptualized along two dichotomous dimensions – “proactive/reactive” and “internal/external” – in a 2×2 matrix as proactive-internal, proactive-external, reactive-internal and reactive-external resilience capabilities. Empirical support for the conceptualized typology is found. Bundles of specific practices that can be associated with each capability are identified. Moreover, the study finds a relationship between these practice bundles and recovered operations performance. Research limitations/implications – The statistical part is used just to provide some additional evidence through factor and regression analyses that these capabilities exist and do benefit adopting firms. Practical implications – Specifies practices that lead to recovered operations performance in the event of supply disruptions. Originality/value – Advances current theory by operationalizing resilience as a set of dynamic capabilities in terms of practice bundles that aid in recovering operations performance upon supply disruptions.

Sustainable supply management as a purchasing capability:A power and dependence perspective Purpose Uses the relative power and total interdependence concepts as an intervening theoretical lens to explain why and how sustainable supply management initiatives by manufacturing firms differ across the Kraljic matrix according to purchasing capability. Design/methodology/approachTested hypotheses by subjecting survey data from 338 manufacturers on buyer-supplier relationships in Europe and North America to regression analysis. FindingsShows three situations where relative power and total interdependence determine the effectiveness of purchasing capabilities. First, sustainability programs impact supplier compliance in all Kraljic categories but bottleneck items. Second, there are significant tradeoffs between lower cost and higher social and environmental supplier compliance for noncritical components. Third, strategic alignment of sustainability objectives between corporate and supply function levels only leads to improved financial performance for strategic components. Research implicationsFurther research could take power and dependence into account to explain when and how purchasing capabilities focused on sustainability can be achieved. Practical implicationsShows how supply strategists could devise tailored approaches for different purchasing categories with respect to power and dependence when pursuing economic, social and environmental objectives in combination-the triple bottom line-along their supply chains. Originality/valueIllustrates and provides a theoretical explanation for why sustainable supply management is a purchasing capability that must vary across purchasing categories defined by different situations of power and dependence.Keywords: sustainability, supply strategy, procurement/purchasing/supply management processes, survey methods, IPS International Purchasing Survey, regression analysis.Article classification: Research paper 1 SUSTAINABLE SUPPLY MANAGEMENT AS A PURCHASING CAPABILITY:A POWER AND DEPENDENCE PERSPECTIVE INTRODUCTIONSustainable supply management (SSM) is increasingly becoming a major managerial problem for supply strategists. Cost-cutting efforts drive firms to relocate production to geographic regions around the world where labor costs are lower and working conditions and care for the environment are often neglected. At the same time, these firms claim that they intend to take responsibility and strive to improve working conditions and reduce their environmental impact. The situation becomes even more complicated as production is outsourced to a greater extent to specialized contract manufacturers. As brand owners, the buying firms are still accountable for the economic, social and environmental impact of their products and services, while losing control over how these are actually produced (see, e.g., Huq et al., 2014;Walker et al., 2014).The sustainable sourcing literature offers the advice to view SSM as a potential purchasing capability that can help a firm thrive (e.g., Pa...

This paper analyses how two different outsourcing manufacturing strategies relate to plant performance and innovation capability when taking into account the organizational integration of design and manufacturing as well as product complexity. The study discriminates between low-cost-oriented outsourcing and innovation-oriented outsourcing. The empirical data used is based on a survey of 267 engineering firms, of which half have outsourced manufacturing. We found that the two outsourcing strategies do have different effects, which illustrates that outsourcing represents a trade-off between improving innovation capability and lowering costs. The study furthermore shows that manufacturing and supplier integration in product design processes is mainly beneficial when applying innovation-oriented outsourcing, and in particular when products and manufacturing processes are complex.

PurposeAgainst the background of the often politicized debate on the advantages and disadvantages of production models based on sociotechnical systems (STS) theory and lean production (LP), this paper develops a notion of a hybrid model consisting of elements of both STS and LP and tests its validity by empirical examination.Design/methodology/approachA representative sample of manufacturing plants in Sweden was surveyed. The questionnaire measured the hybrid model in three specific constructs: STS in terms of an integrated work organizational design featuring multifunctional teams, decentralized responsibilities and integrated functions; LP in terms of adoption of lean practices such as just‐in‐time; and plant performance in terms of productivity, quality, delivery and speed. The obtained data were subjected to multiple regression analysis to test our convergence argument while controlling for plant size, order fulfilment practice and production process type.FindingsA relationship between the elements of STS and LP is found. Implementing elements of both production models together leads to better plant performance than implementing either one in isolation. Furthermore, plants having an integrated work organization are possibly more successful in adopting the principles of LP, which in turn leads to improved plant performance.Originality/valueIn contrast to earlier research, the paper argues based on empirical findings that there is no inherent conflict between STS and LP. Rather, these production models have evolved over time and converged into a hybrid. The strong relationship between work organization design and LP practices suggests a need for a broad and parallel change effort for high performance impact.

No abstract