Special issue on sustainability and resource scarcity

Special issue on sustainability and resource scarcity

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, Volume 43, Issue 5/6

As firms and their supply chains expand globally, logistics and supply chain managers are playing a greater role in the development and execution of corporate level strategies. Corporate executives are increasingly looking to logistics and supply chain managers to provide cost and/or service advantages that can serve as their firms’ source of market competitiveness. While today’s firms continue to face the traditional threats associated with competition, as described by Michael Porter over three decades ago, increasing pressure to incorporate the new realities of a changing world is creating a shift in focus. Decision makers are not only cognizant of threats stemming from competitive rivalry, but must also focus on new challenges, such as rapid population growth and migration, scarcity of critical resources, rising fuel costs and commodity prices, geopolitical unrest, and global economic instability, which together are leading to significant operational changes in the present and near-term future.

The issues described above led to a call for papers that supported this special issue on Logistics and Supply Chain Solutions for a Changing Competitive Landscape. In the call, we challenged academicians across many fields to construct, organize, theorize, or test models related to resource scarcity, sustainability, efficiency, and/or innovation, in support of practitioners’ growing need for a broader understanding of these progressive topics. The response was extraordinary, including 42 submissions from authors spanning six continents and over 20 nations. Clearly, scholars from around the globe are cognizant of the issues firms face, and are actively seeking to bound and define the critical concepts that will serve as initial stepping stones for logistics and supply chain researchers and managers as, together, we continue (or begin) to tackle these emergent problems.

Each submitted paper was subjected to a review process that first included an editorial review, which, in select cases, resulted in a second external review conducted by a panel of peer scholars. The purpose of the first editorial review was to assure that the papers sent out for external evaluation were consistent with the spirit of the call – such papers needed to be forward thinking, dealing with current (or future) pertinent supply chain management topic, and executed such that high rigor and relevance standards were met. The papers meeting these criteria were then subjected to leading experts’ wisdom and criticism, being vetted meticulously to ensure that true contribution to new thinking was made via new and better conceptualization, hypothesis testing, or both, and, in all cases, the accepted papers were expected to yield managerially-relevant implications.

The final six papers accepted for publication in the special issue meet the highest standards for scholarly leadership across the interconnected fields, and, furthermore, serve to stimulate new thinking and future research streams related to sustainability and resource scarcity issues. We are pleased to present these six papers as a holistic body of work that both advances current theory and displays enthusiasm for exploring future trends pertaining to sustainable, resource-conscious supply chain management and logistics.

The special issue leads off with a conceptual piece developed by John E. Bell, Diane A. Mollenkopf and Hannah J. Stolze, who make great strides by proposing a conceptual framework to examine the potential impact of natural resource scarcity on organizational performance. Based on resource advantage theory, the framework facilitates specific predictions about how the detrimental effects of scarcity can be mitigated via the development of closed-loop supply chain management capabilities, which, in turn, can provide organizations with comparative advantages. This paper serves as the meta-level theoretical centerpiece for the special issue while the other articles explore more specific facets of sustainability and resource scarcity.

The execution of sustainable or resource conscious supply chain management has been described by managers as being in need of a “business case”; companies are often willing to be green, sustainable, or efficient to the extent that key stakeholders value such activity, or there is economic benefit from such behaviors. However, few firms are willing to take such actions when the scenario fails to break-even, or out of true altruism (and perhaps rightly so). Accordingly, the findings of Anu Bask, Merja Halme, Markku Kallio and Markku Kuula provide welcome evidence supporting the relative importance of sustainability features using choice-based conjoint analysis to develop a typology of consumer end-users, including environmentalists. Set in the mobile phone context, the authors employ a multi-stage research design to identify the sustainability-related aspects that impact product choice, and employ latent class clustering to assess the value of sustainability to each of four different consumer clusters. In doing so, the authors are able to identify demographic and purchase characteristics of Finnish consumers who are most sensitive to sustainability concerns. This article offers an excellent starting point for understanding how customers may differentially value environmental/sustainability-oriented products, and paves the way for testing in other cultural/product settings.

Previous literature has suggested that managerial support for sustainability and resource-conscious decisions emanates from within the firm, rather than solely residing with stakeholders. The third paper, offered by David E. Cantor, Paula C. Morrow, James C. McElroy and Frank Montabon, explores the influence that an internal champion for environmental management practices has on a firm’s implementation of voluntary environmental initiatives. Using survey data from supply chain managers, the key finding – achieving high levels of organizational involvement in environmental practices depends not only on employee’s personal commitment to environmental practices, but also on employee’s perception of organizational support for such practices – bears noteworthy implications for managers seeking to programmatically advance supply chain environmentalism.

Given that environmentally friendly or sustainable business practices can have a significant impact (negative and/or positively) on logistical decisions through issues, such as fuel consumption, taxation and regulation to support infrastructure development, and carbon footprint concerns, two additional papers address unique logistical considerations surrounding sustainability and/or scarcity situations. In the transportation domain, firms are increasingly concerned with the significant resource waste generated by both nodes and links in the global supply chain. Of these, transportation hubs are often cited as particularly problematic from a resource conservation perspective, given their propensity to generate pollutants and noise. Using analytic hierarchy process analysis, Taih-cherng Lirn, Yen-Chun Jim Wu and Yenming J. Chen focus on the identification and quantification of actual green performance at three major container seaports in Asia. In doing so, the authors invoke a very useful technique to effectuate green performance improvement, offering a managerial decision support model that port authorities can use to evaluate their green performance.

Similarly, in the area of logistical network design, Xiaoyun Bing, Jim J. Groot, Jacqueline M. Bloemhof-Ruwaard and Jack J.G.A.J. van der Vorst study the returns management aspects of a plastic recycling system for the purpose of assessing whether adopting a multi-modal strategy within the recycling process leads to improved transportation costs, as well as costs associated with emissions (i.e., carbon taxes) and total network costs. The authors develop a scenario study to model two different reverse channel approaches (source separation and post-separation). Using mixed integer linear programming and an optimization tool, the authors conclude that the multimodal strategy can provide benefits, particularly for a post-separation channel. This study represents a potential launching point for subsequent analyses of reverse logistics networks concerned with network cost, resource recovery, and redistribution issues.

The final article in the special issue took a broader societal focus, addressing corporate social responsibility (CSR) within the fashion apparel supply chain. Whereas sustainability and resource scarcity tend to demonstrate direct and tangible impacts on operations in the medium to long-term, CSR includes additional social and economic factors that are more difficult to measure and assess. Patsy Perry and Neil Towers’ article employs a qualitative case study approach in the Sri Lankan textile industry to discover the inhibitors and drivers of CSR implementation in a third-world production context. The various options (and levels of CSR progress) facing retail supply chain managers come with differential barriers to CSR implementation success, and suggests that firms adopt more ethical approaches to (human) resource preservation in low-cost production settings than perhaps previously realized.

In conclusion, we were delighted with the response to the call for proposals, and are fortunate to present an innovative and enlightening selection of research to the logistics and supply chain academy. However, the papers included in this issue should be viewed as only the genesis of a burgeoning sub-field that crosses numerous disciplines. The true impact of this special issue will be measured by its ability to influence research extensions that result to explore these and other sustainability/resource scarcity issues. We hope that additional authors will consider the International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management as a key outlet for publishing subsequent studies.

Sincerely,

Chad W. Autry, Judith M. WhippleCo-Editors of the Special Issue