Mark Pagell

Purpose: This study explores collective resilience, where firms see the recovery of the wider social system as directly tied to their own recovery. Design/methodology/approach: We conducted multiple case studies of nine firms, with two rounds of data collection, to investigate how collective resilience networks emerge from widespread crises to allow firms to respond to disruptions and adapt after recovery. Findings: Our findings highlight that firms that were severely disrupted by a crisis adopted a collective view of resilience, making the recovery of the broader social system an integral part of the resilience process. Firms embedded in collective resilience networks also demonstrated an ability to transition from short-term recovery to long-term adaptation, aided by the social capital built during the initial disruption. Practical implications: This research helps managers move beyond traditional, firm-centric recovery mechanisms to treat social systems as an integral component of resilience processes. Social implications: Collective resilience considers the well-being of those in the broader social system in the resilience process. Originality/value: The collective view reorients how resilience is seen in operations and supply chain management, moving it from protecting firms' operations toward stabilizing the broader social system on which firms depend. Collective resilience arises from firms developing a shared fate with the wider social system, which changes how they interpret crises and their role within the wider social system.

Governments and regulatory agencies in emerging countries are increasingly enforcing labor and environmental protection laws. However, how this growing public governance interrelates with existing buyer‐driven governance to influence supplier sustainability development remains unclear. To address this gap, we conducted a longitudinal case study involving two rounds of extensive data collection at nine Chinese suppliers of COSMOS, a European multinational company in the consumer electronics industry. We identify three distinctive configurations of how public governance and buyer‐driven governance jointly influence supplier sustainability development. Identifying these configurations builds on prior research that distinguishes between competitive, complementary, and coexistent interactions between public and private governance. We extend this literature by uncovering the causal mechanisms through which each configuration gives rise to a unique sustainability development trajectory. Specifically, we unpack the different elements of each configuration and analyze their influence on suppliers' willingness and ability to pursue sustainability improvement. We conclude by delineating the boundary conditions that define the generalizability of our findings across contexts.

Structural holes in global supply chains isolate suppliers in low‐ and middle‐income economies from buyers and consumers in high‐income economies, hindering the accomplishment of sustainability goals. Previous research has studied how for‐profit organizations bridge these structural holes. This study examines how purpose‐driven organizations, which place their purpose above profits to improve farmers' livelihoods in coffee supply chains, bridge the same structural holes. Knowledge on structural holes is elaborated by exploring the brokering activities of these purpose‐driven organizations. This is accomplished by analyzing case data from 31 purpose‐driven organizations: nine cases of sourcing intermediaries and exporters in Colombia and 22 cases of roasters and importers in the Netherlands (NL), United States (US), and United Kingdom (UK). The cases are grouped and compared according to their primary activities, with the average or typical case as the unit of analysis. The findings unpack an approach to brokerage motivated by the purpose‐driven organizations' goal of improving the livelihoods of marginalized suppliers. Their approach to brokerage centers around aligning, empowering, educating, and mobilizing practices and the legitimation of novel practices in regulative, normative, and cognitive domains. This is achieved through either single‐direction or multi‐stakeholder brokerage. The study contributes to society by considering the implications for other entities and global supply chains of exemplar organizations' innovative approaches to sustainability issues.

Purpose: Operations management research and practice has started to embrace sustainability in all its forms, including worker safety. Worker safety is a pivotal component of social sustainability, with accidents occurring largely in a firm’s operations. Nevertheless, workplaces are still not safe. To further understand why, we explore how workplace accidents are affected by who manages occupational safety (i.e. owner/partner, managing director/site/branch manager, OHS officer or safety representative), and if this effect is dependent on the size of the establishment. Design/methodology/approach: Stakeholder-agency theory is utilized to develop a theoretical framework on the efficacy of having different job roles manage safety in establishments of different sizes. The derived hypotheses are tested using health and safety survey data from the EU-OSHA ESENER I (2014) and ESENER II (2019) surveys. Findings: We provide evidence that it is not beneficial to have owners manage safety in establishments. When owners manage safety in establishments, accidents increase, even when controlling for firm size. When exploring size more deeply, we find that in smaller establishments, it is more beneficial to have an employee representative manage safety, while in larger establishments, a dedicated safety officer should be in charge of managing safety. These findings are highly relevant for creating a path towards safer operations. Originality/value: This study contributes to our understanding of socially sustainable operations by exploring a path to making workplaces safer. It advances knowledge on how to effectively enhance operational safety. This perspective contributes to the expanding worker safety literature in operations management by introducing organizational job responsibilities as a relevant level of analysis, complementing existing explorations in our domain that have primarily focused on traits of the operations. The findings not only enhance scholarly and managerial knowledge but also offer clear guidance to policymakers for creating safer workplaces.

Purpose: This study explores how companies’ operations and supply networks can induce social impacts such as enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). The study focuses on social enterprises’ supply networks and examines the effects of supply network characteristics on the creation and resolution of social–commercial objectives tension. Design/methodology/approach: A supply network that is divided into five embedded cases, where each case is the supply network of a social enterprise, was studied. Forty-eight interviews at social enterprises, corporate customers, distributors, suppliers, non-governmental organizations and charities were conducted. Findings: The study highlights how social enterprises use their supply networks to help disadvantaged people gain employment, truly balance DEI and efficiency objectives and manage paradoxical tensions. The results reveal three types of social purpose supply networks, dichotomized, paired and blended, that hybrid and for-profit organizations can adopt to jointly pursue multiple, potentially competing, objectives and resolve the paradoxical tensions in their supply networks. The creation and resolution of tension are also clarified by considering dyadic, triadic and tetradic tie structures. Originality/value: The study contributes to the literature by extending the analysis of paradoxical tension between commercial and social welfare objectives such as DEI to the supply network level and revealing three social purpose supply network structures that depict social enterprises’ different ways to resolve paradoxical tensions. The study contributes to social network theory by describing the dynamic interaction between strong and weak ties in multi-tie structures.

The aim of this disciplined provocation is to challenge some of the fundamental assumptions in supply chain management research and practice—most notably the discipline’s current conceptualization of supply chain excellence that has proven to be destructive for social‐ecological systems. It is argued that to drive the transition to sustainable supply chains, it requires emphasizing the social component of sustainable supply chain management and considering how to conduct supply chain management research that includes people and communities from the beginning. Based on this vision of foregrounding people in supply chain management research, a people‐centric research agenda that outlines the changes that are needed in how research is conducted and the topics that should be studied is introduced. The authors outline the active role that supply chain management scholars can play in developing new models of supply chain excellence that are, at a minimum, sustainable and hopefully regenerative.

Supply chain management is grounded on the assumption that endless economic growth is compatible with environmental and social sustainability. Yet scholars from ecological economics question this assumption due to ever increasing evidence showing how hard it is to decouple growth from negative environmental and social externalities. In response, pressure from social movements is mounting, and the agendas of several countries already consider alternatives to growth. Therefore, this article presents a critical thought experiment for the supply chain management discipline: What are the implications of moving from the current endless growth paradigm to a post‐growth paradigm for businesses and their supply chains? Using the umbrella term “post‐growth,” this article identifies three key post‐growth principles—(i) socio‐ecological wellbeing, (ii) selective downscaling, and (iii) systems thinking—and then examines their implications for supply chain management research and practice.