New perspectives on supply chain resilience

Abstract

In both academic journals and the business press, supply chain resilience has garnered increasing attention. The Pettit et al. (2019) article on supply chain resilience has more than 8500 downloads—the most on the Journal of Business Logistics (JBL) Wiley library. This is no surprise given that the world is still recovering from a global pandemic that brought even the “best in class” supply chains to a grinding halt. In 2018, our colleagues Andreas Wieland and Christian Durach launched a call for papers for a special topic forum (STF) entitled, “Participating in the Wider Debate on Resilience.” At that time, no one could have imagined its significance. Even as some parts of the world are experiencing a strong recovery, there seems to be a fundamental acknowledgment that disruptions on a global scale are permanently on the horizon. Although there is a rich body of research on resilience in the supply chain management and logistics (SCML) discipline, this outlook brings a sense of urgency to further advance our understanding of the phenomenon. We want to thank Andreas and Christian for serving as editors-in-chief for the STF and for challenging the field to examine resilience from an interdisciplinary perspective. As a result, this issue of JBL includes four excellent articles from the STF, each one bringing a unique vantage point and offering a strong contribution to the body of SCML literature on resilience. Below, we briefly summarize them and consider new areas of inquiry that come as a result. Although there is a significant base of literature in SCML on resilience, there are several conceptualizations for what it means to be resilient. In some cases, it is understood as the ability of a firm to recover from disruptive events (Blackhurst et al., 2011), and within an acceptable period of time (Ralston & Blackhurst, 2020). One expanded view includes the ability to prepare, respond and recover from disruptions (Ponomarov & Holcomb, 2009). Another expanded view includes the ability to withstand and recover from disruptions (Park et al., 2021). In some studies, however, the ability to withstand disruptions is referred to as robustness, rather than resilience (Zhao et al., 2019; Brandon-Jones et al., 2014). There does seem to be growing consensus, however, that resilience reflects the ability for firms to both "bounce back" to normal operations (Sheffi & Rice, 2005) and sometimes to "bounce forward" to a more desirable state in light of a disruption (Hohenstein et al., 2015). More recent research also notes that responding and recovering from disruptions requires restructuring, adapting or reconfiguring the supply chain network (Zhao et al., 2019; Dolgui et al., 2018). The opening manuscript of this issue, “Two Perspectives on Supply Chain Resilience,” by Wieland and Durach (2021), builds on current conceptualizations of resilience and offers an interdisciplinary understanding. They contrast these two prominent perspectives views of resilience, the engineering and ecological perspectives (Holling, 1996), and they extend the ecological view to propose a social–ecological perspective to include the influence of social actors. They contend that the engineering assumptions of maintaining a steady-state equilbrium can oversimplify the complex reality of nonlinear, uncertain, and surprising behaviors in a complex social–ecological setting, which is more reflective of today's global supply chains. Using this perspective, they infer that disruptions can sometimes offer a window of opportunity to make transformational system changes. The social-ecological perspective of resilience appears to have some overlap with the recent article by Craighead et al. (2020), in which they describe transilience as the ability to simultaneoulsy restore some processes and radically transform others. A primary difference, however, is that the authors cast transilience within the context of pandemics, which they assert is distinctly different than typical supply chain disruptions. Similarly, however, Wieland and Durach (2021) note that transformational adaptations are often needed in light of political, economic, or cultural crises that arise outside of the supply chain but affect its ability to function. In teasing out these perspectives and conceptualizations of resilience, it could be insightful to put more emphasis on the salience and scope of disruptive events. Event system theory (Morgeson et al., 2015) was developed to emphasize how events influence organizations, and more specifically how an event (e.g., pandemic, terrorist attack, legislation) can initiate a larger chain of events that can sometimes compel organizations to adapt in profound ways. In “Whose Resilience Matters? Addressing Issues of Scale in Supply Chain Resilience,” Novak et al. (2021) also find an equilibrium-focused perspective of supply chain resilience limiting when understanding supply chains as complex adaptive systems (CAS). Through a CAS lens, supply chain resilience reflects the continuous response to dynamic feedback occurring between interconnected organizations and the maintenance of the system's critical functionality. They further note the importance of scale—the spatial and temporal dimensions that describe or measure outcomes—and underscore that mismatches in scale can occur when measuring resilience from only the firm's perspective. The scale issue emphasized by Novak et al. (2021) also relates to the unit of analysis in conceptualizing resilience. Even when referring to supply chain resilience as the ability of the firm to adapt or reconfigure the structure of the supply chain in light of a disruption (Ambulkar et al. 2015; Dolgui et al., 2018; Iyengar et al., 2021; Pettit et al., 2019; Wiedmer et al., 2021), resilience is a firm-level phenomenon. But if we take, for example, an automanufacturer producing ventilators during the pandemic (Wieland & Durach, 2021), how could this have impacted the resilience of the manufacturer's upstream suppliers and downstream customers (i.e., dealers)? More pointedly, in the decision to shift to ventilator production, to what extent did the automanufacturer consider the resilience of its suppliers and customers? Perhaps examining the resilience of connected firms in the supply chain could offer fresh new insights about the nature of relationships in complex adaptive systems. The Iyengar et al. (2021) paper in this issue also underscores the importance of understanding how disruptions impact the resilience of different entities in the supply chain. By providing a bottom of the pyramid (BOP) perspective in the examinination of entrepreneurial resilience in their paper titled, “On Entrepreneurial Resilience Among Micro-Entrepreneurs in the Face of Economic Disruptions… A Little Help from Friends,” they highlight how entrepreneurs in BOP markets experience disruptions at a much higher rate than major corporations and have fewer formal mechanisms in place for to recovery. The authors differentiate between disruptions that are personal to the entrepreneur and those that are external and affect larger communities. In this context, they reflect the social-ecological perspective of resilience by underscoring how it can be impossible for micro-entrepreneurs to “bounce back” in the traditional sense, so resilience often comes from their ability to “bounce forward” to a new venture. They also detail the buffering impact of different actors on disruptions, finding that financial inclusion appears to have limited influence on resilience in the face disruptions. Overall, the study points to the need for research that examines how disruptive events can impact the behaviors and features of BOP entities (Morgeson et al., 2015), and how other companies in the supply chain can assist micro-entrpreneurs in developing community networks to boost resilience. Finally, Wiedmer et al. (2021) provide a theoretically robust and normatively centered discussion of “The Dark and Bright Sides of Complexity: A Dual Perspective on Supply Network Resilience.” Investigating the automotive sector's shipments from Japan to the United States before, during, and after the devastating earthquake in the Tōhoku region in 2011, the study scrutinizes the impact of supply network complexity on a firm's ability to resist and recover from disruptions. Three dimensions of complexity—supply, logistics, and product—were examined, and the study highlights that they have differential effects on buyer resilience. In sum, they find that supply complexity intensifies the disruption's impact but improves recovery, logistics complexity improves recovery, and product complexity increases a disruption's impact. These findings open the door to three new streams of complexity research that we hope supply chain management and logistics (SCML) researchers will address. The findings also suggest that more research is needed to tease out the capabilites that enhance the ability to withstand disruptions and those that enhance the abiliity to respond and recover, as this study supports others that make a distinction between them (e.g., Zhao et al., 2019; Brandon-Jones et al., 2014). Another area of research related to this study is how resilience may reflect the ability to temporarily adapt or reconfigure its supply chain when faced with a disruption, but then "bounce back" when conditions allow. Wieland and Durach (2021) offered excellent examples of this when they highlighted how a juice producer manufactured hand sanitizer and a garment company shifted to mask production during the pandemic. Although some adaptations in these supply chains may have been permanent, it is certain that there was also a “bounce back” to pre-pandemic operations when those temporary market needs were met. Research that examines these kinds of temporary adaptations could also extend our understanding of resilience. Even before the pandemic, practitioners, researchers, and governments had all been calling for supply chains to become more resilient and responsive to disruptions (see Ali & Gölgeci, 2019; Kaufmann et al., 2018). Taken together, the four articles in this issue, and previous works in JBL (see Gabler et al., 2017; Goldsby et al., 2019) and related journals (Ali & Gölgeci, 2019; Chowdhury et al., 2019; Ivanov, 2021; Kaufmann et al., 2018) build on an extensive base of research in the area of SCML resiliency and complexity, as both are central to the development of effective SCML strategy. Although the contexts may differ, resilience is also widely researched in other disciplines, so we hope to see more interdisciplinary perspectives that will continue to advance the field's understanding of this phenomenon. Regardless, JBL recognizes the importance of resiliency research and will be open to all papers that expand our knowledge via implications for both theory and practice.